Joel Avni
ROCKS OF AGES: SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN THE FULLNESS OF LIFE by Stephen Jay Gould (Jonathan Cape)
THE PLEASURE OF FINDING THINGS OUT by Richard PFeynman (Penguin)
Religion and science seem to have dominated intellectual discourse for centuries. Ironic, isn’t it, that two of humanity’s main intellectual systems come up with such contradictory results?
Stephen Jay Gould is an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who over the past 20 years has become one of the foremost popularisers of natural science in general and Darwinian evolution in particular. In Rocks of Ages Gould sets out to resolve the spat between religion and science by assigning each discipline its own turf and contriving a modus vivendi that ensures they remain good neighbours.
Dipping into Roman Catholic theology, he borrows the term “magisterium” and elaborates a principle of mutually exclusive authority for science and religion. He calls this principle “Noma”, an acronym for non-overlapping magisteria. “A magisterium … is a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution,” he writes.
“Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion … 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. Similarly, while scientists must operate with ethical principles … the validity of these principle can never be inferred from the factual discoveries of science.
“Science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven.”
Gould, an agnostic, believes both disciplines are necessary for the “fullness of life” and that if they stick to the areas of competence, “I also do not understand why the two enterprises should experience any conflict.” Unfortunately, the devil is in the detail.
“The first commandment for … Noma might be summarised by stating: ‘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.'”
Whoops. This might satisfy the scientists, but what about the religious? Organised religions are much more than a search for ultimate meaning. Adherents would not recognise their faiths if they were stripped of their cosmology. Judaism stripped of Moses receiving the 10 commandments directly from God on Mount Sinai is not Judaism, and Islam without Mohamed receiving the Qur’an from God would be unrecognisable to any Muslim. Similarly, the primary article of the Christian’s faith is the resurrection of Jesus.
Richard Feynman was one of the foremost US physicists of the past 50 years. He received a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics, but burst on to the public consciousness after the space shuttle Challenger blew up in front of a television audience of millions in 1986. Feynman was the only scientist appointed to the commission that investigated the disaster.
His one-man minority report was almost suppressed, but when the commission held a televised press conference he conducted a simple experiment that won over the public. Feynman simply dipped an O-ring seal made of the same material as the gaskets on the Challenger’s booster rockets into a glass of iced water. It cracked when he pulled it out, demonstrating that the icy conditions before the shuttle’s launch had precipitated the catastrophic failure.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a collection of short works by Feynman published after he died, captures his mischievous irreverence and his genius. It too refers to many of the topics that come up in Gould’s work. And like Gould, the conventional modern scientific belief that religion and science are compatible as long they stick to their own domains, runs like a thread through his works.
The final chapter of his book ends with these words: “How can we draw inspiration to support these two pillars of Western civilisation so that they may stand together in full vigour, mutually unafraid? Is this not the central problem of our time?”
Maybe so, but neither of these venerable scientists begins to resolve the contradictions. And we should not expect them to, for they both agree that the stuff of religion is outside their domain.
Both books are easy reads and can be completed in an evening. Though Gould is way more accomplished as an essayist and this is not one of his best books, both are highly recommended.