Finally, how far apart do the magisteria of science and religion stand? Do their frames surround pictures at opposite ends of our mental gallery, with miles of minefields between? If so, why should we even talk about dialogue between such distantly non-overlapping magisteria, and of their necessary integration to infuse a fulfilled life with wisdom?
I hold that this non-overlapping runs to completion only in the important logical sense that standards for legitimate questions, and criteria for resolution, force the magisteria apart on the model of immiscibility—the oil and water of a common metaphorical image. But, like those layers of oil and water once again, the contact between magisteria could not be more intimate and pressing over every square micrometer (or upon every jot and tittle, to use an image from the other magisterium) of contact. Science and religion do not glower at each other from separate frames on opposite walls of the Museum of Mental Arts. Science and religion interdigitate in patterns of complex fingering, and at every fractal scale of self-similarity.
Still, the magisteria do not overlap—but then, neither do spouses fuse in the best of marriages. Any interesting problem, at any scale (hence the fractal claim above, meant more than metaphorically), must call upon the separate contributions of both magisteria for any adequate illumination. The logic of inquiry prevents true fusion, as stated above. The magisterium of science cannot proceed beyond the anthropology of morals—the documentation of what people believe, including such important information as the relative frequency of particular moral values among distinct cultures, the correlation of those values with ecological and economic conditions, and even (potentially) the adaptive value of certain beliefs in specified Darwinian situations—although my intense skepticism about speculative work in this last area has been well aired in other publications. But science can say nothing about the morality of morals. That is, the potential discovery by anthropologists that murder, infanticide, genocide, and xenophobia may have characterized many human societies, may have arisen preferentially in certain social situations, and may even be adaptively beneficial in certain contexts, offers no support whatever for the moral proposition that we ought to behave in such a manner.
Still, only the most fearful and parochial moral philosopher would regard such potential scientific information as useless or uninteresting. Such facts can never validate a moral position, but we surely want to understand the sociology of human behavior, if only to recognize the relative difficulty of instituting various consensuses reached within the magisterium of morals and meaning. To choose a silly example, we had better appreciate the facts of mammalian sexuality, if only to avoid despair if we decide to advocate uncompromising monogamy as the only moral path for human society, and then become confused when our arguments, so forcefully and elegantly crafted, fare so poorly in application.
Similarly, scientists would do well to appreciate the norms of moral discourse, if only to understand why a thoughtful person without expert knowledge about the genetics of heredity might justly challenge an assertion that some particular experiment in the controlled breeding of humans should be done because we now have the technology to proceed, and the results would be interesting within the internal logic of expanding information and explanation.
From Mutt and Jeff to yin and yang, all our cultures, in their full diversity of levels and traditions, include images of the absolutely inseparable but utterly different. Why not add the magisteria of science and religion to this venerable and distinguished list?
1 I apologize to colleagues in philosophy and related fields for such an apparently cavalier “brush by” of an old and difficult topic still subject to much discussion, and requiring considerable subtlety and nuancing to capture the ramifying complexities. I recognize that this claim for separation of the factual from the ethical has been controversial (and widely controverted) ever since David Hume drew an explicit distinction between “is” and “ought.” (I even once wrote an embarrassingly tendentious undergraduate paper on G. E. Moore’s later designation of this issue, in his Principia Etilica of 1903, as “the naturalistic fallacy.”) I acknowledge the cogency of some classical objections to strict separation—particularly the emptiness of asserting an “ought” for behaviors that have been proven physically impossible in the “is” of nature. I also acknowledge that I have no expertise in current details of academic discussion (although I have tried to keep abreast of general developments). Finally, I confess that if an academic outsider made a similarly curt pronouncement about a subtle and troubling issue in my field of evolution or paleontology, I’d be pissed off.
I would, nonetheless, defend my treatment not as a dumbing down, or as disrespect for the complexity of a key subject, but as a principled recognition that most issues of this scope require different treatments at various scales of inquiry. Broad generalizations always include exceptions and nuanced regions of “however” at their borders—without invalidating, or even injuring, the cogency of the major point. (In my business of natural history, we often refer to this phenomenon as the “mouse from Michigan” rule, to honor the expert on taxonomic details who always pipes up from the back of the room to challenge a speaker’s claim about a general evolutionary principle: “Yes, but there’s a mouse from Michigan that …”) Among experts, attention properly flows to the exceptions and howevers—for these are the interesting details that fuel scholarship at the highest levels. (For example, my colleagues in evolutionary theory are presently engaged in a healthy debate about whether a limited amount of Lamarckian evolution may be occurring for restricted phenomena in bacteria. Yet the fascination and intensity of this question does not change the well-documented conclusion that Darwinian processes dominate in the general run of evolutionary matters.) But the expert’s properly intense focus on wriggles at the border should not challenge or derail our equally valid broad-scale focus on central principles. The distinction of “is” from “ought” ranks as such a central principle, and this little volume has been written (for all intelligent readers, and without compromise or dumbing down) as a broad-scale treatment.
To cite an analogy: At the Arkansas creationism trial (discussed in detail in chapter 3), philosopher Michael Ruse presented the famous Popperian definition of falsifiability as a chief criterion for designating a topic as scientific (with unfalsifiable “creation science” banned by this standard). Judge Overton accepted Ruse’s analysis and used this criterion as his main definition of science in reaching his decision to strike down the Arkansas “equal time” law. But falsificationism (like the is-ought distinction, and like Darwinian domination versus a little bacterial Lamarckism) represents a good generality, subject to extensive debate and controversion for several borderland subthemes among professional scholars. Some academic philosophers attacked Ruse for “simplifying” the subtleties of their field, but I would strongly defend his testimony (as did, I believe, the great majority of professional philosophers) as a valid analysis for the appropriate general scale of broad definitions.
NOMA Illustrated
IN ADVOCATING THE NOMA ARGUMENT over many years, I have found that skeptical friends and colleagues do not challenge the logic of the argument—which almost everyone accepts as both intellectually sound and eminently practical in our world of diverse passions—but rather question my claim that most religious and scientific leaders actually do advocate the precepts of NOMA. We all recognize, of course, that many folks and movements hold narrow and aggressively partisan positions, usually linked to an active political agenda, and based on exalting one side while bashing the other. Obviously, extremists of the so-called Christian right, particularly the small segment dedicated to imposing creationism on the science curricula of American public schools, represent the most visible subgroup of these partisans. But I also include, among my own scientific colleagues, some militant atheists whose blinkered concept of religion grasps none of the subtlety or diversity, and equates this entire magisterium with the silly and superstitious beliefs of people who think they hav
e seen a divinely crafted image of the Virgin in the drying patterns of morning dew on the plate-glass windows of some auto showroom in New Jersey.
I believe that we must pursue a primarily political struggle, not an intellectual discourse, with these people. With some exceptions, of course, people who have dedicated the bulk of their energy, and even their life’s definition, to such aggressive advocacy at the extremes do not choose to engage in serious and respectful debate. Supporters of NOMA, and all people committed to the defense of honorable differences, will have to remain vigilant and prevail politically.
Even after we put the extremists aside, however, many people still suppose that major religious and scientific leaders must remain at odds (or at least must interact in considerable tension) because these two incompatible fields inevitably struggle for possession of the same ground. If I can therefore show that NOMA enjoys strong and fully explicit support, even from the primary cultural stereotypes of hard-line traditionalism, then the status of NOMA as a sound position of general consensus, established by long struggle among people of goodwill in both magisteria—and not as a funny little off-the-wall suggestion by a few misguided peacemakers on an inevitable battlefield—should emerge into the clearest possible light.
I will therefore discuss two maximally different but equally ringing defenses of NOMA—examples that could not exist if science and religion have been destined to fight for the same disputed territory: first, religion acknowledging the prerogatives of science for the most contentious of all subjects (attitudes of recent popes toward human evolution); and second, science, at the dawn of the modern age, as honorably practiced by professional clergymen (who, by conventional views, should have undermined rather than promulgated such an enterprise).
1. DARWIN AND THE PAPACY. For indefensible reasons of ignorance and stereotypy, people who do not grow up in Roman Catholic traditions tend to view the pope as an archetypal symbol for a dogmatic traditionalism that must, by definition, be hostile to science. Doctrines of infallibility, pronouncements ex cathedra, and so forth, combined with extensive trappings of costume and ritual (all formerly, and formally, conducted in incomprehensible Latin), tend to reinforce this stereotype among people who do not really understand their meaning and function.
(For my own appreciation of an institution that does not always strive to be explicit or revealing, I remain grateful to an English Jesuit who had abandoned a successful business career to undertake the rigors of a long training lasting nearly twenty years, and whom I met by the chance of adjacent seating one night at the Rome opera many years ago. We spent the next two days in intense discussion. He taught me that his church, at its frequent best and in his words, “is one gigantic debating society.” Papal pronouncements may debar further official and public disagreement, but the internal dialogue never abates. Consider only the legendary patience and stubbornness of Job [13:15]: “Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him; but I will maintain mine own ways before him.”)
Moreover, one defining historical incident—the trial and forced recantation of Galileo in 1633—continues to dominate our cultural landscape as a primary symbol, almost automatically triggered whenever anyone contemplates the relationship of science and Catholicism. The usual version stands so strongly against NOMA, and marks Pope Urban VIII as such a villain, with Galileo as such a martyred hero, that a model of inherent warfare between the magisteria seems inevitable.
The subject deserves volumes rather than the few paragraphs available here, but we must reject the cardboard and anachronistic account that views Galileo as a modern scientist fighting the entrenched dogmatism of a church operating entirely outside its magisterium, and almost ludicrously wrong about the basic fact of cosmology. I would not urge an entirely revisionist reading. The basic facts cannot be gainsaid: Galileo was cruelly treated (forced to recant on his knees, and then placed under the equivalent of house arrest for the remainder of his life), and he was right; his conflict with the Pope did, to cite the best modern work on the subject (Galileo, Courtier, by Mario Biagioli, University of Chicago Press, 1993), represent “the clash between two incompatible worldviews,” and Urban did defend the traditional geocentric universe as established dogma. But when we begin to appreciate even the tip of the complex iceberg represented by seventeenth-century life at the court of Rome—a world so profoundly different from our own that modern categories and definitions can only plunge us into incomprehension—then we may understand why our current definitions of science and religion map so poorly upon Galileo’s ordeal.
As Biagioli shows, Galileo fell victim to a rather conventional form of drama in the princely courts of Europe. Maffeo Barberini had been Galileo’s personal friend and a general patron of the arts and sciences. When Barberini became Pope Urban VIII in 1623, Galileo, now nearing sixty years of age, felt that his moment of “now or never” had arrived. The Church had banned the teachings of Copernicus’s heliocentric universe as a fact of nature, but had left a conventional door open in permitting the discussion of heterodox cosmologies as purely mathematical hypotheses.
But Galileo moved too fast and too far in an unnecessarily provocative manner. He had lived his life in necessary pursuit of courtly patronage, but now he fell from grace and into a common role of his time and place. In Biagioli’s words: “Galileo’s career was propelled and then undone by … patronage dynamics … The dynamics that led to Galileo’s troubles were typical of a princely court: they resemble what was known as ‘the fall of the favorite.’ ”
As a prod for questioning our misleading modern categories, ask yourself why a spiritual leader could compel Galileo at all. Why did the great physicist even consent to argue his case before a Church tribunal in Rome? Then remember that no country called Italy existed in the 1630s, and that the Pope held full secular authority over Rome and much surrounding territory. Galileo had to appear before the Inquisition because this body represented “the law of the land,” with full power to convict and execute. Moreover, the papal court may have been uniquely volatile among the princely institutions that held sway over segments of Europe: times were particularly tough (as the Roman Church faced the expanding might of the Reformation, right in the midst of the devastating Thirty Years’ War); the pope held unusual power as both the secular ruler of specific lands and at least the titular spiritual authority over much greater areas; the papal court, almost uniquely, gained no stability from rules of dynastic succession, for new occupants prevailed by election, and could even be recruited from nonaristocratic backgrounds; finally, most popes attained their roles late in life, so “turnover rates” were unusually high and few incumbents reigned long enough to consolidate adequate power.
Now add to this mix a brilliant hothead who had caused trouble before, and who now mocked prior papal directives (or had, at least, been purposely, even outrageously, provocative) by composing his new book as a supposed dialogue between equally matched advocates, and then putting the arguments for a central earth, the official Church position, into the mouth of a character whose cogency fully matched his name—Simplicio. Urban VIII made a really bad move by the proper judgment of later history, but I have no trouble understanding why he felt miffed, if not betrayed—and such feelings did engender predictable consequences in this earlier age of far different sensibilities and accepted procedures.
The power of Galileo’s story continues to haunt any issue involving science and the papacy, today as much as ever. I don’t know how else to understand the enormous surprise of scientific commentators, and the banner headlines in newspapers throughout the Western world, when Pope John Paul II recently issued a statement that struck me as entirely unremarkable and fully consistent with long-standing Roman Catholic support for NOMA in general, and for the legitimate claims of human evolution as a subject for study in particular. After all, I knew that the highly conservative Pope Pius XII had defended evolution as a proper inquiry in the encyclical Humani Generis, published in 1950, and that he had done so by central and exp
licit invocation of NOMA—that is, by identifying the study of physical evolution as outside his magisterium, while further distinguishing such Darwinian concepts from a subject often confused with scientific claims but properly lying within the magisterium of religion: namely the origin and constitution of the human soul.
But, on more careful reading and study, I realized that Pope John Paul’s statement of 1996 had added an important dimension to Pius’s earlier document issued nearly half a century before. The details of this contrast provide my favorite example of NOMA as used and developed by a religious leader not generally viewed as representing a vanguard of conciliation within his magisterium. If NOMA defines the current view of Urban VIII’s direct descendant, then we may rejoice in a pervasive and welcome consensus.2
Pius XII’s Humani Generis (1950), a highly traditionalist document written by a deeply conservative man, faces all the “isms” and cynicisms that rode the wake of World War II and informed the struggle to rebuild human decency from the ashes of the Holocaust. The encyclical bears the subtitle “concerning some false opinions which threaten to undermine the foundations of Catholic doctrine,” and begins with a statement of embattlement:
Disagreement and error among men on moral and religious matters have always been a cause of profound sorrow to all good men, but above all to the true and loyal sons of the Church, especially today, when we see the principles of Christian culture being attacked on all sides.
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