Rocks of Ages (16 page)

Bryan advocated the wrong solution, but he had correctly identified a serious problem!

Science is a discipline, and disciplines are exacting. All disciplines maintain rules of conduct and self-policing. All gain strength, respect, and acceptance by working honorably within their bounds and knowing when transgression upon other realms counts as hubris or folly. Science, as a discipline, tries to understand the factual state of nature and to explain and coordinate these data into general theories. Science teaches us many wonderful and disturbing things—facts that need weighing when we try to develop standards of conduct, and when we ponder the great questions of morals and aesthetics. But science cannot answer these questions alone and science cannot dictate social policy.

Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power to further a personal prejudice or social goal: Why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics? But we cannot, lest we lose the respect that tempted us in the first place. NOMA cuts both ways.

We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have distinctive ways of knowing, valid in their proper domains. No single way can hold
all the answers in our wondrously complex world. Besides, highfalutin morality aside, if we continue to overextend the boundaries of science, folks like Bryan will nail us properly for their own insidious purposes.

We should give the last word to Vernon Kellogg, a great teacher who understood the principle of strength in limits, and who listened with horror to the ugliest misuses of Darwinism. Kellogg properly taught in his textbook (with David Starr Jordan) that Darwinism cannot provide moral answers:

To which, let all people of goodwill; all who hold science, or religion, or both, dear; all who recognize NOMA as the logically sound, humanely sensible, and properly civil way to live in a world of honorable diversity—let them say, Amen.

4
P
SYCHOLOGICAL
R
EASONS FOR
C
ONFLICT

F
OR TRADITIONALISTS OF THE OLD
order, 1859 was not the best of years. The principal mark and symbol must lie, inevitably and permanently (at least so long as our culture endures), with the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of Species
. But Darwin’s vision of a morally neutral world, not constructed for human delectation (and not evidently cognizant either of our presence or our preferences for comfort), received an unusual boost from the literary sensation of the same year—the first edition of Edward Fitzgerald’s very free translation of the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
, the eleventh-century Persian mathematician and freethinker. Each of Omar’s quatrains embodies a philosophical gem of resignation to a world without intrinsic sense or desired form.
(Rubaiyat
is the plural of
ruba’i
, a distinctive four-line form of verse with rhymes on the first, second, and fourth lines.)

Instead of presenting the conventional quotes from Darwin, some lines from Omar may give us even more insight into the angst of mid-Victorian times, as traditional moral certainties eroded before a juggernaut of technological transformation and colonial expansion, all fueled by the progress of science. Consider this thought on the cosmic confusion of it all:

Or this on the earth’s mean estate (a shabby hotel for camel caravans!) and the meandering nature of our lives:

Or this on our inability to make nature conform to our hopes and dreams:

Why should we not, in such a world, “take the cash, and let the credit go,” to cite Omar’s most enduring line (usually misattributed to Adam Smith, J. M. Keynes, Donald Trump, or some other figure from a more immediate Western world).

This book rests on a basic, uncomplicated premise that sets my table of contents and order of procedure, and that requires restatement at several points in the logic of my argument: NOMA is a simple, humane, rational, and altogether conventional argument for mutual respect, based on non-overlapping subject matter, between two components of wisdom in a full human life: our drive to understand the factual character of nature (the magisterium of science), and our need to define meaning in our lives and a moral basis for our actions (the magisterium of religion).

I sketch this argument, with examples of support from leaders on both sides, in the first two chapters. The second half of the book then examines the central paradox of why such an eminently sensible solution to the nonproblem of supposed conflict between science and religion—a resolution supported by nearly all major thinkers in both magisteria—has been poorly comprehended and frequently resisted. The two major reasons,
defining the last two chapters of this book, can also be simply stated and understood—even if the actual history of discussion, based on a chronicle of confusion, has been downright byzantine. I treated the first, or
historical
, reason in
chapter 3
: the reluctance of many religious devotees to withdraw from turf once legitimately occupied under previous views of life and nature, but now properly deeded to the newer magisterium of science (combined with the symmetrical imperialism of many scientists who stage similar invalid forays into the magisterium of moral argument).

I now devote this final chapter to the second, or
psychological
, reason—an issue whose stark simplicity should also stand forth, even in the historical morass of actual struggle: we live in a vale of tears (or at least on a field of confusion), and we therefore clutch at any proffered comfort of an encompassing sort, however dubious the logic, and however contrary the evidence.

I opened this chapter with classic doubts, from an eleventh-century Persian poet, about nature’s beneficence. We may consult an equally classic Western source for the complement to this fear about nature—our anxiety about our own status and our ability to make sense of our surroundings. Consider these famous lines (heroic couplets rather than quatrains this time) from Alexander Pope’s
Essay on Man
(1733–34):

Such compounded anxiety about nature and human understanding must generate “rescue fantasies,” to cite a catchphrase of contemporary therapy. We long to situate ourselves on a benevolent, warm, furry, encompassing planet, created to provide our material needs, and constructed for our domination and delectation. Unfortunately, this pipe dream of succor from the realm of meaning (and therefore under the magisterium of religion) imposes definite and unrealistic demands upon the factual construction of nature (under the magisterium of science). But nature, who is as she is, and who existed in earthly form for 4.5 billion years before we arrived to impose our interpretations upon her, greets us with sublime indifference and no preference for accommodating our yearnings. We are therefore left with no alternative. We must undertake the hardest of all journeys by ourselves: the search for meaning in a place both maximally impenetrable and closest to home—within our own frail being.

We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA’s tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and meanings, and stop looking for definite answers in nature’s construction. But many people cannot bear to surrender nature as a “transitional object”—a baby’s warm blanket for our adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted mirror of our needs, but as our most fascinating companion. Only then can we unite the patches built by our separate magisteria into a beautiful and coherent quilt called wisdom.

The misguided search for intrinsic meaning within nature—the ultimate (and also the oldest) violation of NOMA—has taken two principal forms in Western traditions. I call the first approach the “Psalm Eight,” or “all things under his feet,” solution, to commemorate both the honest and accurate posing of the question: How, in the light of our cosmic smallness, can we even contemplate any favorable intrinsic meaning?