Other syncretists argue that it’s impossible for science to contradict religion because science, devoted to understanding how God’s creation works, must comport with religious belief. As Pope John Paul II put it in 1996, “truth cannot contradict truth.” The theologian Stephen J. Pope from Boston College explained further: “God is the source of both reason and revelation, and truth from one source cannot contradict truth from the other. Disagreements in science and religion are capable of reconciliation because these sources are two valid but distinct modes of apprehending what is true.”
But such claims look silly when the two areas provide “answers” that are irreconcilable—the “conflict of outcomes” described in the last chapter. Perhaps the best example of this forced harmony is “scientific creationism,” a movement that began in America in the 1960s and died out about twenty years later. After American courts rejected the teaching of biblical creationism in public school science classes on constitutional grounds (creationism was seen as a form of religion, violating our legal separation between church and state), creationists regrouped under the rubric of “scientific creationism,” claiming that the findings of science were perfectly reconcilable with the Bible. They could then argue that teaching biblical ideas wasn’t religious at all, but simply science.
That too failed, for the reconciliation is spurious. To harmonize the fossil record with the story of Noah’s flood, for instance, scientific creationism proposed the ludicrous theory of “hydrodynamic sorting,” arguing that a sudden worldwide flood would in fact yield precisely the fossil record we see. Marine invertebrates, living on the seafloor, would naturally be the first to be covered with sediment when the waters began to rise and roil. They would therefore show up at the bottom of the geological record, the part that scientists consider the oldest. The fishes would follow, settling atop the invertebrates, and then, in order, we’d see amphibians (who live close to water), reptiles, and then mammals, who, being smarter and more agile, would be able to flee the rising waters. And humans, the smartest and most resourceful of all creatures, could climb quite high before they were inundated, accounting for our appearance as fossils in the topmost geological layer.
As a young assistant professor, I taught a course called “Evolution vs. Scientific Creationism”—perhaps the most fun I’ve ever had as a teacher. On Mondays I’d lecture as an evolutionary biologist, and on Wednesdays as a creationist, refuting what I had said on Monday. (I was already quite familiar with the claims of creationists, and could easily talk like one.) The students, of course, became deeply confused. But on Fridays we’d have a discussion and sort out the competing claims. And it was when we came to the “hydrodynamic sorting” hypothesis that the students realized that biblical “truth” simply couldn’t be harmonized with scientific truth. Why weren’t some unlucky humans, perhaps confined to beds or wheelchairs, buried in sediments alongside fossil amphibians? Why didn’t some seagoing mammals, like whales, sleep with the fossil fishes, instead of appearing later alongside the mammals? And why did the flying pterodactyls get inundated so much earlier than modern birds, when both could fly to the mountaintops? Such is the debacle that results from claiming that “truth cannot contradict truth.” Eventually, scientific creationism went the way of its literalist ancestor, branded by the courts as simply fundamentalism tricked out as science.
But this strategy is still alive. As we’ll see in the next chapter, “natural theology,” the idea that some facts of science support the existence of God—and in fact can’t be explained except by God—is alive and well among even liberal theologians.
Muslim accommodationists, who, like most Muslims, take the Quran literally, have their own form of scientific creationism, asserting that the book is not only scientifically accurate on all issues, but actually anticipated every finding of modern science. The results are both pathetic and amusing. The Turkish physician Halûk Nurbaki, for instance, collected fifty verses from the Quran, striving mightily to show that they predicted the discovery of gravity, the atomic nucleus, the Big Bang, and quantum mechanics. He translated one such verse as “The fire you kindle arises from green trees.” Nurbaki sees this as a divine indication of the oxygen produced by plants and consumed by fire, adding, “It was impossible 14 centuries ago for unbelievers to understand the stupendous biological secret this verse contains, for the inside story of combustion was not known.” All this shows is how far some people can twist scripture to make their faith comport with science. (The one exception for Muslims is human evolution: while many have no problem with evolution itself, they nearly all agree with the Quran that our species is unique, created instantly by Allah from a lump of mud. And nearly all Muslim science classes exempt humans from the evolutionary process.)
Because accommodationism is largely a Western enterprise, it’s harder to find works in English that reconcile Eastern faiths with science. But one strain of Hindutva, the growing Hindu nationalist movement, apparently does for the Vedas what Nurbaki does for the Quran, forcing science into the Procrustean bed of scripture. As the Indian historian and philosopher Meera Nanda notes, this current of thought “simply grabs whatever theory of physics or biology may be popular with Western scientists at any given time, and claims that Hindu ideas are ‘like that,’ or ‘mean the same’ and ‘therefore’ are perfectly modern and rational.”
What about Buddhists? That “faith,” of course, comprises many sects, some more philosophical than religious, but the most famous statement on Buddhist accommodationism comes from Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama. Fascinated by science from his youth, Gyatso wrote an entire book trying to harmonize science and Buddhism, The Universe in a Single Atom. It contains a statement often quoted to show the primacy of fact over faith in Buddhist teaching: “If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.” Yet Gyatso nevertheless accepts at least two supernatural claims, reincarnation and the “law of karma,” and criticizes the theory of evolution along creationist lines, arguing that mutations aren’t random and that the notion of “survival of the fittest” is a tautology (it isn’t). Buddhism is considered one of the “nonliteralist” faiths, but, like all faiths, its literalism about some beliefs makes it incompatible with science.
The NOMA Gambit
The most famous attempt to reconcile science and religion, at least in recent years, was made by the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. In his 1999 book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, Gould argued that the compatibility of science and religion rests on understanding that their aims are completely separate. Science, he said, is the endeavor to find out about the natural world, while religion deals solely with issues of meaning, purpose, and morals. The two disciplines thus constitute “non-overlapping magisteria,” for which Gould coined the acronym NOMA. To Gould, this disjunction creates a kind of harmony: dealing with the human condition, he argued, requires both physical and metaphysical inquiry. The NOMA argument has been co-opted by many scientific organizations eager to show that they don’t step on religion’s toes.
Gould wasn’t the first to float this idea: both theologians and philosophers previously made similar claims. The mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, for instance, anticipated Gould in 1925:
Remember the widely different aspects of events which are dealt with in science and in religion respectively. Science is concerned with the general conditions which are observed to regulate physical phenomena; whereas religion is wholly wrapped up in the contemplation of moral and aesthetic values. On the one side there is the law of gravitation, and on the other the contemplation of the beauty of holiness. What one side sees, the other misses; and vice versa.
Gould’s contribution was not only to formalize this argument in an entire book, but also to promote it as a principle of sound intellectual behavior. Its popularity—for the idea is neither new nor profound—undo
ubtedly reflects Gould’s compelling prose, the “let’s all get along” tone of the book, and the fact that an argument “that grants dignity and distinction to each subject” was being made by a famous and popular scientist who was also an outspoken atheist.
Unfortunately, Gould’s attempt fails on two counts: it requires the homeopathic dilution of religion into a humanistic philosophy devoid of supernatural claims, and it gives to religion sole authority over moral and philosophical issues that have nevertheless had a long secular history. Because NOMA is perhaps the most common argument for the compatibility of science and faith, it bears some examination.
Gould began his argument by observing that both science and religion have sometimes transgressed their proper boundaries, with religion in effect making scientifically testable statements about nature, and scientists inferring ethical or social principles from nature. The most obvious example of the former is American creationism; of the latter are early attempts to justify racism and capitalism by appealing to the theory of evolution. Using examples drawn from the work of Darwin, Galileo, Cardinal Newman, and other scientists and theologians, Gould showed that these territorial violations have occurred throughout history. NOMA, he argued, will prevent them from recurring if we simply stick to the following principles:
Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve.
Gould thus granted these magisteria “equal importance,” calling for thoughtful dialogue between religion and science—not to unite them, but to encourage greater harmony and mutual understanding.
The problem is that while NOMA appeals as a utopian vision, Gould saw it as more than just a pleasing platitude, for he urged that we must realize his vision by structuring science and religion in a way that would allow their peaceful coexistence. He thus saw NOMA as “the potential harmony through difference of science and religion, both properly conceived and limited.”
The word “properly” is the red flag here. Imagining “proper” science is easy—the vast majority of scientists are happy to pursue their calling as an entirely naturalistic enterprise. But what is “proper” religion? It was, to Gould, religion that does not overlap with science.
And that’s the rub, for real religion is frequently and stubbornly improper. As we’ve seen, many people’s religions, by making factual claims about the world, bring them into Gould’s territory of science. As always, evolution is the most prominent example. It’s not only fundamentalists who subscribe to unscientific creationist narratives, but also many mainstream Protestants and Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Orthodox Jews, Native Americans, Scientologists, Muslims, and Hindus. But ideas about the origin of humans and other species aren’t the only religious violations of NOMA. Christian Scientists entertain a spiritual theory of disease, and some Hindus believe that disability is a sign of past spiritual transgression. Most Abrahamic religions accept the existence of souls that distinguish humans from other species. It’s simply undeniable that religions worldwide often stray into scientific territory, sometimes with tragic results. How many have died, even in the last few decades, because an infection is regarded as simply spiritual malaise?
To deal with this difficulty, Gould apparently construed “religion” as the pronouncements of liberal Western theologians, many of them agnostics in all but name. But of course there is far more to religion than the opinions of scholars. Religion encompasses beliefs that help people make sense of personal reality, even when those beliefs overlap with science. By casting himself as the arbiter of “proper” religion, Gould simply redefined terms to satisfy his utopian vision. Thus NOMA underwent a second metamorphosis from an achievable utopia to an actual description of reality. That is, to Gould the distressing clashes between faith and science by definition did not involve “real” religion. This turned NOMA into an exercise in tautology, allowing him to simply dismiss religions that make claims about reality:
Religion just can’t be equated with Genesis literalism, the miracle of the liquefying blood of Saint Januarius . . . or the Bible codes of kabbalah and modern media hype. If these colleagues wish to fight superstition, irrationalism, philistinism, ignorance, dogma, and a host of other insults to the human intellect (often politically converted into dangerous tools of murder and oppression as well), then God bless them—but don’t call this enemy “religion.”
But what else can we call it? Many religious people would be affronted to learn that NOMA requires them to abandon essential parts of their faith. Nevertheless, that was apparently Gould’s prescription. He denied to religion, for instance, a reliance on miracles, arguing that the first commandment for NOMA is “Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science.” But of course this rejects the central claim of Christianity—the Resurrection—as well as the Catholic and literalist beliefs in a historical Adam and Eve.
And what about the most obvious violation of NOMA: the many forms of religion that accept creationism? To save his argument, Gould contended that creationism is neither proper religion nor even an outgrowth of religion:
In other words, our struggle with creationism is political and specific, not religious at all, and not even intellectual in any genuine sense. . . . Creationists do not represent the magisterium of religion. They zealously promote a particular theological doctrine—an intellectually marginal and demographically minority view of religion that they long to impose on the entire world.
Sadly, this argument is nonsense. Anyone who has battled creationism or its city cousin “intelligent design” realizes that these are purely religious phenomena, born of the conflict between evolutionary biology and scripture. Scratch a creationist and at least 99 percent of the time you’ll find a religionist.
And it’s not just biblical literalists who decry evolution. Many adherents to more moderate faiths, including Catholicism, reject evolution because of its unsavory implications for human morality and uniqueness. Recall that 42 percent of Americans are creationists with respect to humans, but biblical fundamentalists are far fewer, and 82 percent of Americans think that some form of creationism should be taught in public schools, either by itself or alongside conventional evolutionary theory. Nor is creationism a “demographically minority view of religion,” at least in America, for, as we’ve seen, 73 percent of all Americans violate NOMA by seeing at least some acts of God as responsible for living species—hardly a demographic minority.
Finally, Gould’s designation of religion as the preserve of morals, meaning, and purpose is both disingenuous and historically inaccurate. For one thing, it ignores a centuries-long debate about the source of ethical belief. Does religion directly create moral views, or does it only codify and reinforce morality that flows from secular springs?
Gould sensed this difficulty but again finessed it by redefinition: all ethics, he claimed, is really religion in disguise. Trying to distinguish the two is, he said, to simply “quibble about the labels,” and so he chose to “construe as fundamentally religious (literally, binding us together) all moral discourse on principles that might activate the ideal of universal fellowship of people.” But serious scholarly discussion of ethics really began as a secular endeavor in ancient Greece, continued in a nonreligious vein through philosophers like Kant and Mill, and in our day persists among atheist philosophers like Peter Singer and Anthony Grayling. The majority of modern ethical philosophers are in fact atheists. By eliminating the empirical claims of religion but stretching it to cover ethics and “meaning,” Gould simultaneously shrank and expanded religion.
But what about the other side�
��the NOMA violations of scientists? Yes, we’ve had them; biology textbooks of the early twentieth century, for instance, contain chapters on eugenics that repel us today. But these days it’s quite rare to find scientists drawing moral lessons from their own work, much less trying to impose them on society. Most scientists have become quite cautious about overstepping their magisterium, and the crimes that Gould imputes to such boundary violations, including lynchings, the horrors of both world wars, and the bombing of Hiroshima, have little to do with science itself and more with the appropriation of technology by people lacking foresight or morals. (As I’ll argue later, this contrasts with religion, whose malfeasance is a direct by-product of the moral codes inherent in most faiths.) And most of science’s “violations” were history by the time Gould wrote his book, in contrast to the many empirical claims still made by religion.
By and large, scientists now avoid the “naturalistic fallacy”—the error of drawing moral lessons from observations of nature. They’ve therefore adopted the NOMA principle far more readily than have philosophers or theologians. Ethical philosophers, particularly the nonbelievers, are rightly peeved to learn that their labors now fall under the rubric of “religion.” But believers are even more upset. Out of the thousands of religious sects on this planet, only a handful lack adherents or dogmas that make empirical claims about the cosmos. A religion whose god does not interact with the world—that is, a religion considered “proper” by Gould’s lights—is a religion whose god is absent. Honest believers admit this. One of them is Ian Hutchinson, a Christian physicist:
Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) Page 15