"The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty)."- Stephen J. Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life
On my actual and ideal bookshelves, a good proportion of the
biology and science section is taken up by the works of Stephen J. Gould.
Primarily a palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, he was also something
of a renaissance man of science and reason-based letters – a historian of
science and a popular essayist,
a constructive gadfly of overzealous evolutionism
and remorseless critic of ill-informed anti-evolutionism. A wielder of facts to
defeat politicized science,
and a relentless pointer-outer of great big elephants in our collective cultural rooms.
As you may have guessed, I’m something of a fan. Paradoxically,
that’s why I’m sort of avoiding another of his books that would be perfect
fodder for this blog – see the quote at the start of the post. Not having read
it, I’m not about to write some kind of pre-emptive review – and when I do read it I’m
sure you’ll hear about it here. It’s not about disagreeing with him – I don’t agree
with everything I’ve read of his previously and my enjoyment of his work is as
much about how he says things as about what he says. As with C.S. Lewis, a worthy disagreement can be more satisfying than an easy consensus. It’s
more that I came across this quote while researching a different post, and it
seems to me to represent a conversational trope – as lazy as it common as it is
oft-repeated - that might actually make me think less of one of my intellectual
heroes if it is the argument he’s making.
Science, we are told, deals in the how. Religion, on the other hand, trades in the great and wonderful
why. I don’t plan to stamp my feet
and demand that science be let into the circle of arbiters of ultimate meaning.
Rather, I want to challenge the idea that faith has unique – or any – access to
the domain of transcendent meaningfulness. Indeed, on one level I doubt that it
has any greater access than any other form of ‘how’.
Science and religion, on one level, are stories – whatever else
they may be on other levels. For the supernatural there’s the range from fairy
tale to the future history of the End of Days. For science you have the (actually
incorrect but usefully didactic) atom-as-solar-system-model, and you have the
standard model or quantum electrodynamics . Both are models
for events, causal stories where this
causes this by way of that. At this level, both kinds of
stories are of the ‘how’ variety, but the claim is that one kind – religious stories
– can level-up to the ‘why’ by virtue of their claims about transcendent
realities and/or entities. But if these things are truly transcendent, aren’t they
by necessity beyond the ken of people like you and me? Isn’t this precisely
what we mean when we talk about the ‘mysterious ways’ in which god allegedly
moves. Or, if you prefer, akin to the buddha’s unanswered questions.
Both kinds of stories make claims about reality beyond the
subjective. But even if science and/or religion have a claim on objective truth
and ultimate meanings, the only way you and I get to experience that is though
our own limited window on the world. It’s like the blind men in a room with an elephant, each being able to touch and know a small part of the Whole. The
total creature, the ultimate Why, may exist or it may not. All we know - for sure – is that there many
small creators of small, personal stories of what’s happening and what that may
mean. Tiny beautiful proximate hows
and infinitesimal, idiosyncratic whys.
The meaning, and the arbiters moral value, are you and me, and our worldviews
conform to that. To argue that a subset of views are special because there’s a
special set of rules that applies only to them is delusional and/or disingenuous.
You're reading my account of how I think different views fare under the same
criteria. What you make of that, necessarily, is down to you.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Your point about our inability to comprehend transcendental realities reminds me of something that happened when I was about 12.
ReplyDeleteI had recently lost my faith - though in truth, I had never really had it, and had only gone through the motions of prayer because that's what Mummy did. And then I did what all parents dread will happen to their children if they get into the wrong crowd - I started dabbling in philosophy. It all began with the weak, relatively harmless stuff: Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. But we all know that's a gateway to harder stuff, and that it inevitably leads to Kant and Heidegger.
Anyway, I remember reading a theory which blew my little 12-year-old mind. It argued that humans can only imagine what we have experienced, or combinations thereof. So we can imagine a blue, 3-headed monster because we have experienced blueness, heads and so on. But we can't conceive of a completely new colour. So, since we can conceive of an infinite God with the all the omnis that come with it, we must have experienced him in some form, even if we are not aware of it, and so he must exist.
That convinced me for a little while, and I really thought that the existence of God had actually been proven by logic. Until, of course, I realised that we CAN'T conceive infinity, not really - we can only take our idea of time and imagine it as being really, really long. Still, that made for an interesting week where I believed I had achieved enlightenment, and my parents wished I had just smoked weed or something.
But I do agree and am always amazed by what science and religion have in common: the inability to conceive much of what is important. I adore planetariums, and have been to various lectures about space but I simply cannot get my head around it. I know how to locate the nearest galaxy to ours, which is just visible to the naked eye on a clear night, but I really cannot comprehend how far away it is. If I'm honest, I can't really comprehend how far away New York is, and that's only a few thousand miles away. So in a way, religion is not the only one getting credit it doesn't deserve, as the source of the ultimate why. Science focuses on its rationality, its empiricalism, that everything has proof and can be experienced and tested - but really, how much can we really understand?
I love this comment, and I think it may have inspired the next post...
ReplyDeleteMy own teenage mind-blowing fix of choice is Popper - the idea science doesn't progress by 'proving' a given proposition so that its evident and a given for all time, but rather is a system of relative progress where one theory's empirical consequences are a better match for empirical data than another. The highest status a theory ever has is a provisional 'best answer so far'. Nothing is ever 'proven'. How this practically differs in the day-to-day minutiae of science from the popular 'definitive experiment' idea of science we are sold is largely academic. One thing in its favor though is falsifiability - that the hallmark of any theory worthy of the name is that it can specify the conditions under which it would be proven wrong. That's why the creationist trope that evolution is 'only' or 'still' a theory can always be met with the rejoiner that creationism isn't 'even' one. Hence, despite the fact that I'm also interested in drawing attention to little noticed parallels between the worldviews, I think there is an argument that science is better at a certain kind of 'how'. The religious 'how' might detail the way in which the world should be valued in human terms - and I'm happy for that to be its own kind of 'Truth'. But I do think science gets that better of the 'hows' when it comes to describing the universe on a non- trans- or even inter-human basis.