“When I started college,” said one honor student, “I thought I would add new talents, new capabilities, new accomplishments to my life. Instead, each course I’ve taken, each good book I’ve read, each idea I’ve seriously considered has taken something away from me. I feel like an onion that has had layer after layer peeled away until there is nothing, nothing there at all.”

What happened? Instead of finding life’s meaning, this student, tossed about by arguments and equally plausible counterarguments, lost his bearings. After losing faith in his original beliefs, he had nothing to replace them with and was on the verge of concluding that life is meaningless.

Today’s adults were raised on optimistic slogans like “Better living through chemistry.” Young people, on the other hand, have grown up with the darker side of science. “Everyone talks about new breakthroughs into the secrets of nature. But somehow I can’t swallow this,” wrote a college student to his professor recently. “Breakthroughs, breakthroughs​—where do they lead us? Atomic bombs, pollution, terrifying drugs: Are these what the frontiers of science are all about?”

“Please don’t answer me with clichés about the gap between ethics and scientific knowledge,” continued the student. “I have heard it all a hundred times. People believe our science is good, but our ethics are bad. This is exactly what I can’t swallow. Am I crazy? Are morality and knowledge really such separate things?”

This young student was making an important point. Knowledge without morality, as when knowledge of nuclear physics is used to build atomic bombs, may offer brilliant inventions, but does it offer hope? Does it give mankind a reason for living? Or does it merely increase the likelihood that men will wind up by destroying themselves?

“I think the further course of history will not be decided by further discoveries in science,” says Dr. Delbrück, “but by . . . questions about human values.” In other words, it is more important to know the difference between right and wrong than to know how to build a better bomb.

But the world today seems far more interested in bombs than in right and wrong. Young people sense this, and it can drive them to give up trying to do what is right. “I am 15 years old,” wrote one boy. “I don’t smoke pot or pop pills, even though I’ve wanted to lots of times. I try not to steal or vandalize or hurt other people . . . what I mean is, all my life I’ve tried to do the right thing. Then a few months ago I realized that it doesn’t make any difference. Whatever kind of life I lead, it’s not going to change the way things are. Now I don’t care whether I live or die. Older people don’t seem to understand why we want to ‘ruin our lives.’ The fact is, it just doesn’t matter anymore.”