Rocks of Ages (7 page)
Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
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.
I
N 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 have 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. D
ARWIN 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.
