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Rendering unto Science and God: Is NOMA Enough?

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 7; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14746700903239510

1474-6719

Joshua M. Moritz,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

Abstract Abstract The proverbial "war between science and religion" has in many quarters reached the status of truism. Francisco J. Ayala seeks to negotiate a truce between the opposing sides through implementing the concept of the Non-overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) of science and theology. The NOMA understanding of the interaction between science and religion maintains that science and religion cannot contradict each other because each discipline has its own proper range of inquiry, namely questions of fact versus questions of value. This article explores the boundaries of these two different domains of knowledge and finds that in both theory and practice, the territorial claims overlap significantly. Furthermore, the author argues that such "territorial trespassing" is not owing to misunderstandings concerning the essence of science and of religion as such. Instead, the overlap of boundary lines—when viewed in light of the history and philosophy of science—is understood as integral to how progressive research normally advances in both science and theology. Key words: NOMAEvolutionary ethicsNaturalistic fallacyMetaphysical presuppositions of scienceAnimal morality Notes 1 Dan Brown, Angels and Demons (New York: Atria Books, 2000), 44 and 46. Similarly in The DaVinci Code, on the approach to Castelgandolfo and the Vatican Observatory one character reflects, "Unbiased science could not possibly be performed by a person who possessed faith in God." Dan Brown, The DaVinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 14. 2 "The Universe" Beyond the Big Bang (2007), History Channel Documentary. One should note that this documentary's historical account of the interaction of science and religion has little truth-value. For a general scholarly introduction to this history, see David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986). On the myth of those clerics who "refused to look through Galileo's telescope" because it was evil magic, see James Hannam, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (London: Icon Books, 2009). 3 Francisco J. Ayala, "Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion: Commentaries and Responses,"Theology and Science Vol. 6, No. 2 (May 2008): 189. 4 Francisco J. Ayala, Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2007), Preface. 5 Francisco J. Ayala, Darwin and Intelligent Design, X (emphasis mine) (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006); Darwin's Gift. In the same work Ayala states, "Scientific knowledge cannot contradict religious beliefs, because science has nothing definitive to say for or against religious inspiration, religious realities, or religious values" (174). 6 Ayala continues, "Scientific knowledge and religious belief need not be in contradiction. If they are correctly assessed, they cannot be in contradiction, because science and religion concern non-overlapping realms of knowledge. It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that evolutionary theory and religious belief appear to be antithetical." Ayala, Darwin's Gift, 161–162. 7 Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999), 6. 8 Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities (New York: Harmony, 2003), 87. Those who have expressed a position similar to NOMA include biologist Ernst Mayr, cosmologist Martin Rees, physical anthropologist Eugenie Scott, philosopher Michael Ruse, and science writer Michael Shermer. 9 Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1999), ix. The most recent edition says, "Science and religion are different ways of understanding the world. Needlessly placing them in opposition reduces the potential of each to contribute to a better future" (xiii). Francisco Ayala was the chair of the committee that put together both of these documents. 10 Galileo cites Cardinal Baronio as saying, "The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven and not how heaven goes." Quoted in Peter K. Machamer, The Cambridge Companion to Galileo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 372. This formula is paraphrased by Gould, Rocks of Ages, 6; Ayala, Darwin's Gift, 168; Ayala, Darwin and Intelligent Design, 96. 11 George Edward Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). 12 Artigas and Giberson point out that "most atheists, for example, would not consent to being shut out of ethical discourse. And religious people are generally quite attached to their beliefs, which include many things besides moral precepts." Mariano Artigas and Karl Giberson, Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 82. 13 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Books, 2006), 57. 14 Richard Dawkins, lecture on sustainability, http://www.environmentfoundation.net/richard-dawkins.htm. 15 Dawkins, God Delusion, 60–61. I usually do not cite Richard Dawkins as an authority on the relation between science and religion, but in this case his position is particularly significant because theologians such as Wolfhart Pannenberg agree. 16 This argument is not unique to skeptics like Pigliucci, or Evolutionary psychologists, but rather there is much current debate surrounding whether the naturalistic fallacy is a genuine logical fallacy. For a discussion of the current philosophical status of the Naturalist Fallacy, see Thomas Baldwin, "Moore" in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, 2nd ed., eds. Nicholas Bunnin and Eric Tsui-James (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 805–806. 17 Massimo Pigliucci, "Personal Gods, Deism, and the Limits of Skepticism,"Skeptic, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2000): 41–42. 18 Ayala, Darwin and Intelligent Design, 100. 19 Francisco J. Ayala and Camilo J. Cela-Conde, "Evolution of Morality," in Handbook of Evolution, Vol. 1: The Evolution of Human Societies and Cultures, eds. Franz M. Wuketits and Christoph Antweile, 171. See also Francisco J. Ayala and Camilo Cela Conde, Human Evolution: Trails From the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 361. 20 Ayala, "Evolution of Morality," 179. 21 "The human inclination to judge some actions as either right or wrong, and thus the behaviors by which we pass such judgments, are biologically conditioned… however, that the moral rules according to which we decide which actions are right and which ones are wrong, are products of cultural evolution, and are not biologically predetermined." Ayala, "Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion: Commentaries and Responses," 186. 22 Ayala, "Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion: Commentaries and Responses," 190. 23 Ayala, "Evolution of Morality," 178. 24 "It is easier to distinguish the concepts of genetic altruism and moral altruism than to delineate the frontier between them when referring to human behavior." Ayala, "Evolution of Morality," 176 25 Ayala, "Evolution of Morality," 177. 26 Francisco J. Ayala, Human Evolution: Trails From the Past, 361; "Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion,"Theology and Science, Vol. 6, No. 2 (May 2008): 187. 27 Ayala, "Evolution of Morality," 171. 28 Russell Church, "Emotional Reactions of Rats to the Pain of Others,"Journal of Comparative & Physiological Psychology, Vol. 52, No. 2 (April 1959): 132–134. 29 Marc Hauser, "Are Animals Moral Agents? Evolutionary Building Blocks of Morality," in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, eds. Paul Waldau and Kimberley C. Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 511. 30 George E. Rice and Priscilla Gainer, "Altruism in the Albino Rat,"Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, Vol. 55, No. 1 (1962): 123–125. 31 Hauser, "Are Animals Moral Agents?", 512. Experiments with other species have likewise shown that individuals "will cease eating when doing so causes shocks to a conspecific in an adjoining cage (Masserman et al., 1964). Masserman reports that one rhesus monkey almost starved himself to death to avoid shocking another." Kristin Andrews, "Animal Cognition," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognition-animal/. 32 "This alternative mechanism, called generalized reciprocity, requires no specific knowledge about the partner and may promote the evolution of cooperation among unfamiliar non-relatives." Claudia Rutte and Michael Taborsky, "Generalized Reciprocity in Rats,"PLoS Biology, Vol. 5, No. 7 (July 2007): 196. 33 Dale J. Langford, et al. "Social Modulation of Pain as Evidence for Empathy in Mice,"Science, Vol. 312, No. 30 (June 2006): 1967. 34 Numerous other studies of a similar nature were done with other animals. For a general discussion, see Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For primates, see S.M. O'Connell, "Empathy in Chimpanzees: Evidence for Theory of Mind?"Primates, Vol. 36, No. 3 (1995): 397, 408, 410; F. Warnecken and M. Tomasello, "Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees,"Science 311 (March 2006): 1301; R.S. Fouts and D.H. Fouts, "Chimpanzees' Use of Sign Language," in The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity, ed. P. Cavalieri and P. Singer (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 28–41. 35 Vincent Hok et al., "Goal-Related Activity in Hippocampal Place Cells,"The Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 27, No. 3 (January 2007): 472. 36 T. Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 37 J. 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Pellis, "Keeping in Touch: Play Fighting and Social Knowledge," in The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, eds Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen and Gordon Burghardt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 421. 41 Eric Saidel, "Animal Minds, Human Minds," in The Cognitive Animal, eds Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen and Gordon Burghardt, 56. 42 Jaak Panksepp and Jeffrey Burgdorf, "Laughing Rats? Playful Tickling Arouses High-Frequency Ultrasonic Chirping in Young Rodents," in Toward a Science of Consciousness III, eds. Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak, and David J. Chalmers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 243. 43 C.M. Greene, and R.G. Cook, "Landmark Geometry and Identity Controls Spatial Navigation in Rats,"Animal Learning and Behavior 25 (1997): 312–323. 44 A.C. DoValle, et al. "Amplitude and Frequency Modulation of Theta Waves During Dreaming in Rats,"Journal of Sleep Research, Vol. 7, Suppl. 2 (1998a): 69. 45 Ayala, Darwin's Gift, 4. 46 Ibid., 159. 47 Ibid., 5. 48 Alan G. Padgett, "Science and Theology," in The Encyclopedia of Christianity, Vol. 4, eds. Erwin Fahlbusch et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans/Brill, 2005), 873. 49 John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 18–33, and Edward B. Davis, "Christianity and Early Modern Science: The Foster Thesis Reconsidered," In Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective, eds. David N. Livingstone, Darryl G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll (Oxford University Press, 1999), 77. 50 Peter E. Hodgson, Theology and Modern Physics (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 16. 51 Hodgson, Theology and Modern Physics, 20. Lending support to this last presupposition, see Meredith Wadman, "One in Three Scientists Confesses to Having Sinned,"Nature 7043 (June 2005), 718–719. Here, Wadman says that such "misconduct ranges from faking results outright to dropping suspect data points", 718. 52 Ian G. Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science (London: SCM Press, 1990); Mariano Artigas, The Mind of the Universe: Understanding Science and Religion (Philadelphia, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2000), 22. 53 Nicholas Rescher, Scientific Realism (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987), 126. 54 Artigas, Mind of the Universe, 25. 55 Jean-Pierre Luminet, "The Rise of Big Bang Models, from Myth to Theory and Observations," in Antropogenesi, Dall' Energia al Fenomeno Umano, eds. A. Pavan and E. Magno, Il Mulino (2008), 5. "In his paper of 1922, Friedmann discussed finite-age models originating from a space–time singularity and wrote about 'the creation of the world.'" Helge Kragh, "Cosmologies and Cosmogonies of Space and Time," in Cambridge History of Science, Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences, ed. M.J Nye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 528. 56 Studies in the History of General Relativity: Based on the Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on the History of General Relativity, eds Jean Eisenstaedt and Anne J. Kox (Luminy, France: Birkhäuser, 1988), 442. 57 Helge Kragh, "Cosmologies and Cosmogonies," 527. 58 Edward Davis, "Is the Big Bang Theory Irreligious?"Harrisburg Patriot-News, July 25, 2002, A-13. 59 Michael West, quoted in Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Cell Biologist Traded Religious Fervor for Scientific Zeal,"The New York Times, August 13, 2001, Section A, 11. 60 Larry Rasmussen, "Where the Moral Hazards Are in the Stem Cell Debate,"Dialog: A Journal of Theology, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Winter 2001): 297. 61 Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science, 89. Barbour continues, "If science and religion were totally independent, the possibility of conflict would be avoided, but the possibility of constructive dialogue and mutual enrichment would also be ruled out. We do not experience life as neatly divided into separate compartments." 62 John Polkinghorne, "The Continuing Interaction of Science and Religion,"Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, Vol. 40, No. 1 (March 2005): 44. 63 Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 137–161. 64 Ian G. Barbour, "Taking Science Seriously Without Scientism: A Response to Taede Smedes,"Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, Vol. 43, No. 1 (March 2008): 260. 65 Barbour, "Taking Science Seriously," 260. See also Ian G. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 66 Robert J. Russell, "Ian Barbour's Methodological Breakthrough: Creating the 'Bridge' between Science and Theology," in Fifty Years in Science and Religion: Ian G. Barbour and His Legacy, ed. Robert J. Russell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 4. 67 Nancey Murphy, Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 68 Robert J. Russell, Cosmology—From Alpha to Omega: The Creative Mutual Interaction of Theology and Science (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008), 21–23. 69 Francisco J. Ayala, "Intelligent Design: The Original Version,"Theology and Science, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2003): 30. 70 Robert A. Campbell, Yvonne Petry, Gary Diver, and William A. Stahl, eds. Webs of Reality: Social Perspectives on Science and Religion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 9. 71 Artigas and Giberson, Oracles of Science. 72 Christian Berg, "Leaving Behind the God-of-the-Gaps: Towards a Theological Response to Scientific Limit Questions," in Expanding Humanity's Vision of God New Thoughts on Science, ed. Robert Herrmann (Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2001), ch. 6; Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science.