IT'S BEEN ESTIMATED that the world's knowledge in all fields doubles at an incredible rate now—about every two years. It took 100 years for knowledge to double between 1800 and 1900; by 1940, it was doubling every 20 years. According to some predictions, by 2020 human knowledge will double every few months.

The sciences are generating this new knowledge by the hour. But the immediate challenge for the practicing scientist isn't how to find meaning in all this knowledge. Rather, it's to figure out which parts of it are important. With so much new knowledge inundating scientists and engineers, what do you do with it? Which parts are important, and what applies to the particular problem you're working on?

I've found, quite honestly, that the only thing that helps me sort through everything—to find the things I should care about and to let go of what I don't need to be concerned about—is prayer. Turning to God, using the spiritual abilities that He gives, helps sort it all out.

Many thinkers associate science with knowledge, and religion with meaning. But I find it more helpful to relate science to a divine Principle and its laws. For me, the strongest connection between my religion, Christian Science, and the sciences lies in the realm of mathematics. They both have principles, or one Principle, and unchanging laws. The natural sciences rely on human observations of the physical world, and as we go deeper into the atom, the old views and theories don't hold up; they don't rest on an unvarying law. With math, on the other hand, you may discover new fields of math or new ways of using existing concepts, but new discoveries don't invalidate math's oldest principles.

The idea that religion gives meaning to life is valid, but I think it does more than that. The practice of religion brings ethics to the practice of science. It adds caring about people, and encourages honesty. The sciences can be like business: If you're just going after money, you can be irresponsible and uncaring; but if you have an ethical basis—a basis of operation that's under divine Principle—then you don't do things that hurt your company, that harm people, or that pollute the planet.

Similarly, it wouldn't be very loving to disobey the laws of physics when building a bridge, because it would fall down. Many engineers love their jobs because they feel they're doing things that help the world, that make a difference. And an engineer who is motivated by love doesn't cut corners or compromise his or her principles. When you build structures that are stable, lasting, and do their job well—and the new structure could be a software application just as well as a bridge—they can be expressions of divine Love in action.

Practicing your religion actually leavens your practice of science and engineering. It gives you light and guidance. Some call this kind of insight "intuition," but I just call it receiving God's guidance. I mentioned earlier how prayer helps me sort through all the knowledge and data available, to find what's important and useful. Let me give an example of how prayer works in this way.

When I was involved in the field of telecommunications standards, I led my company's JPEG standard team. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. In the late 1980s, this committee developed the standard for transmitting photographs over phone lines; and I still serve as the editor of the original JPEG standard.

Developing and editing standards can be a very competitive and contentious business, with companies vying for the "winning" standard. This has been the case more recently with videotape recording and high-definition TV standards. During the JPEG negotiations, I knew there would be all these options to decide on, including those my team had developed. You have to vote and make decisions all along the way.

I found that prayer kept me on an even keel, kept me from being selfish. One thought I often prayed with is from the poem "Christ My Refuge" by Mary Baker Eddy:

I would go to each JPEG standard meeting with that thought in mind, and doing so allowed me to read all the proposals with an open mind. The final standard we'd adopt would need to be a merging of the best ideas, not just one company's contribution. In 1987, three proposals were selected for consideration. We formed teams around the proposals—each team representing different companies, countries, cultures, and engineering techniques—and I led one of the teams. I was also chair of the US committee, which would decide how my country should vote on the standard.

On several occasions my team received recommendations to modify our proposal, and I felt it was important to welcome them. It was a lot of fun to watch the process develop. That idea of not cutting off ideas, regardless of where they came from, was, I felt, a God-given thought. I knew it couldn't be a one-person or onecompany project. And the work of sorting through all the details, all the knowledge and information and technical specifications, kept me praying with an open heart to see what would and would not work— what was based on the higher Principle. When an idea is based on divine Principle, it has qualities like elegance, simplicity, and ease of implementation. These are spiritual, not material, qualities.

In a teamwork situation I find it easier to love others if I love God first. Then you're not thinking that you have to love the negative in someone; you're bringing out and loving the good that God gives them and you. Taking a stand for good—for the presence and expression of God—can lead to solutions where everyone wins. I think prayer gives more solutions where everyone wins than does any other approach to problem-solving. And often the solution comes as what I call "the third answer," which isn't a compromise between two contending options, but a third way that benefits everyone. In our work on the teams, I knew I didn't have to be the one to find that third answer. But prayer helped me recognize it when someone offered it. I was praying to see the one Mind in operation, to see the qualities of God present and governing. And inevitably someone would come up with the solution we needed. That happened repeatedly throughout the JPEG standards development process.

I would tell my closest colleague, "Have faith! There will be a good answer and one that everyone can recognize as good." And it was a joyous thing to see that happen over and over. Instead of fighting and disagreeing—and the general meetings might involve people from as many as 11 countries, up to 75 people in all—we consistently went for—and gained—100 percent consensus.

When you solve problems in a Christian and scientific way, there's no room for greediness or dishonesty. When I see those thoughts or motives being expressed, my prayer is that there's no room for error in truth-seeking—and so no room for greed, or possessiveness, or domineering aims. My job is to keep my thought about everyone involved spiritually pure—to let them be who they truly are to God.

When you understand that God is governing the work—and to me, there's no question on that point—the answer has to be good. You'll see the good that is always present where it didn't appear to be. And I call that healing. css