definitions.
NOMA Illustrated
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 amongpeople 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 thatdoes 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
NOMA Illustrated
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 amongpeople 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 thatdoes 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
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