Discussion Group Report

"Creationism does not pit science against religion, for no such conflict exists," declares Stephen Jay Gould in "Non-Overlapping Magisteria," in the Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 1999. In the same issue of this magazine, two other scientists, quoted below, give alternative viewpoints to Gould's on the relationship between science and religion.

Gould goes on: "Creationism does not raise any unsettled intellectual issues about the nature of biology or the history of life. Creationism is a local and parochial movement, powerful only in the United States among Western nations, and prevalent only among the few sectors of American Protestantism that choose to read the Bible as an inerrant document, literally true in every jot and tittle." Creationism based on biblical literalism makes little sense to either Catholics or Jews, he says, because neither religion maintains any extensive tradition for reading the Bible as literal truth. It is illuminating literature based partly on metaphor and allegory, and demanding interpretation for proper understanding. Most Protestant groups other than the fundamentalists take the same position.

Pope Pius XII in a 1950 encyclical, Humani Generis, said that Catholics could believe whatever science determined about the evolution of the human body as long as they accepted that at some time of his choosing God had infused the soul into such a creature. But Pius regarded evolution as only tentatively supported and potentially untrue. Yet Pope John Paul II, considering the growing data in support of evolution acquired in the past half-century, placed the factuality of it beyond reasonable doubt. Sincere Christians must now accept it as effectively proven fact.

"The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise--science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meanings of our lives," Gould continues. This principle he calls "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA), and he says Pius accepted it. "Science and religion are not in conflict, for their teachings occupy distinctively different domains...I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat."

Richard Dawkins firmly disagrees. In "You Can't have It Both Ways," he says, "There is something dishonestly self-serving, in the tactic of claiming that all religious beliefs are outside the domain of science. On the one hand miracle stories and the promise of life after death are used to impress simple people, win converts, and swell congregations. It is precisely their scientific power that gives these stories their popular appeal. But at the same time it is considered below the belt to subject the same stories to the ordinary rigors of scientific criticism: These are religious matters and therefore outside the domain of science. But you cannot have it both ways. At least, religious theorists and apologists should not be allowed to get away with having it both ways. Unfortunately all too many of us...are unaccountably ready to let them get away with it...Given a choice between honest-to goodness fundamentalism on the one hand, and the obscurantist, disingenuous doublethink of the Roman Catholic church on the other, I know which I prefer."

Ernst Mayr in "The Concerns of Science" demarks between science and religion as follows: Scientists do not invoke the supernatural to explain how the natural world works. Nor do they rely on divine revelation to understand it. Science shows an openness to new facts and hypotheses. Religions are characterized by their relative inviolability; in revealed religion a difference in the interpretation of even a single word in the revealed founding document may lead to the origin of a new religion. In contrast, in science one finds different versions of almost any theory. Scientists bring a set of "first principles" to the study of the natural world: 1) that there is a real world independent of human perceptions, 2) that this world is not chaotic but is structured in some way and that most, if not all, aspects of this structure will yield to the tools of scientific investigation, and 3) that there is historical and causal continuity among all phenomena in the material universe and included within the domain of legitimate scientific study is everything known to exist or to happen in this universe. But they do not go beyond the material world to a metaphysical or supernatural realm inhabited by souls, spirits, angels or gods, a heaven or nirvana which is often believed to be the future resting place of all believers after death. Such constructions are beyond the realm of science.