Rocks of Ages (9 page)
Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
Interestingly, the sharpest opposition to such latitude within the developing magisterium of science, and the strongest argument for defining miracles as strictly outside the compass of scientific inquiry, arose from the most prominent professional cleric within Newton’s orbit of leading scientists, the same Reverend Thomas Burnet who graced our first chapter. This irony of a clergyman’s firmest support for NOMA, in direct opposition to Newton’s looser view, should convince us that the magisteria need not exist in conflict, and that a committed theologian can also operate as an excellent and equally devoted scientist.
Newton, who had just read his friend’s
Sacred Theory of the Earth
, wrote to Burnet in January of 1681, stating his praise but also raising a few critiques. In particular, Newton argued that the problem of fitting God’s initial creative work into a mere six days might be solved by supposing that the earth then rotated much more slowly, producing “days” of enormous length. Burnet wrote an impassioned letter in immediate response:
Your kindness hath brought upon you the trouble of this long letter, which I could not avoid seeing you have insisted upon … the necessity of adhering to Moses his Hexameron as a physical description … To show the contrary … hath swelled my letter too much. [A hexameron is a period of six days, and Burnet uses the charmingly archaic form of the genitive case, “Moses his Hexameron,” where we would now employ an apostrophe and write Moses’ Hexameron.]
Burnet himself did not find the days of Genesis troubling because he had long favored an allegorical interpretation of these passages and held, in any case, that the concept of a “day” could not be defined before the sun’s creation on the fourth day of the Genesis sequence. But he rejected Newton’s exegesis for a different reason: he feared that Newton would not be able to devise a natural explanation for the subsequent speeding up of the earth’s rotation to modern days of twenty-four hours—and that his friend would therefore want to invoke a supernatural explanation. Burnet wrote to Newton: “But if the revolutions of the earth were thus slow at first, how came they to be swifter? From natural causes or supernatural?” (Burnet also raised other objections to Newton’s reading: those long early days would stretch the lives of the patriarchs even beyond
the already problematical 969 of Methuselah; moreover, although animals would have enjoyed the long, sunny hours of daylight, the extended nights might have become unbearable: “If the day was thus long what a doleful night would there be.”)
Newton responded directly to Burnet’s methodological concerns, for he knew that his friend wished to avoid all arguments based on miracle in science—an issue far more important than the particular matter of early day lengths. He therefore wrote, confirming Burnet’s worst fear:
Where natural causes are at hand God uses them as instruments in his works, but I do not think them alone sufficient for the creation and therefore may be allowed to suppose that amongst other things God gave the earth its motion by such degrees and at such times as was most suitable to the creatures.
Newton also responded to Burnet’s worry about those long nights and their impact on early organisms: “And why might not birds and fishes endure one long night as well as those and other animals endure many in Greenland?”
Newton, one of the smartest of men in all our history, surely scored a point over Burnet in his retort
about life above the Arctic Circle. Mark one for the polar bears (and another for the little-known penguins at the other end). But I think that we must grant Burnet the superior argument for a methodological claim now regarded as crucial to the definition of science: the status of miracles as necessarily outside this magisterium. The cleric, not the primary icon of modern science, offered a more cogent defense for basic modes of procedure in achieving fruitful answers. Mark one for NOMA.
2
The rest of this section on papal views about evolution has been adapted from an essay previously published in
Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
(Crown, 1998).
3
Interestingly, the main thrust of these paragraphs does not address evolution in general, but lies in refuting a doctrine that Pius calls “polygenism,” or the notion of human ancestry from multiple parents—for he regards such an idea as incompatible with the doctrine of original sin, “which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.” In this one instance, Pius may be trangressing the NOMA principle—but I cannot judge, for I do not understand the details of Catholic theology and therefore do not know how symbolically such a statement may be read. If Pius is arguing that we cannot entertain a theory about derivation of all modern humans from an ancestral population rather than through an ancestral individual (a potential fact) because such an idea would question the doctrine of original sin (a theological construct), then I would declare him out of line for letting the magisterium of religion dictate a conclusion with the magisterium of science.
J
.
S. HALDANE (1860–1936)
,
A GREAT
Scottish physiologist and deeply religious man (also the father of J. B. S. Haldane, the even more famous evolutionary biologist who tended to radicalism in politics and atheism in theology), delivered the Gifford Lectures, a series dedicated to exploring the relationships between science and philosophy, at the University of Glasgow in 1927. Haldane devoted his lecture on “the sciences and religion” to the optimal solution of NOMA, and its central implications for religious thinkers on the subject of miracles and explanations of the natural world. Haldane began:
It is often supposed that the sciences … are essentially incompatible with religion. At present, this is a widespread popular belief for which
there seems at first sight to be a substantial basis; and certainly this belief is common among scientific men themselves, although they may say little about it, out of respect for those who do hold sincere religious beliefs and whose lives they admire.
Haldane then locates the major barrier to NOMA in confusion of all forms of religious belief with the particular claim—which does mix the magisteria in contention and would therefore preclude NOMA—that much of material nature has been constructed by miracles inaccessible in principle to scientific study:
To those who believed that religion is dependent on a belief in supernatural intervention it seemed to be dying the death of other superstitions. Yet as a matter of fact religion continued to appeal to men as strongly as before, or perhaps more strongly.… I think that [I can] make clear the underlying explanation of this. If my reasoning has been correct, there is no real connection between religion and the belief in supernatural events of any sort or kind.
Finally, Haldane insists that this attitude toward miracles flows from his own deep and active commitment
to religion, and not from any protective attitude toward his own magisterium of science:
I can put my heart into this attempt [to formulate the proper relationship between science and religion] because no one can feel more strongly than I do that religion is the greatest thing in life, and that behind the recognized Churches there is an unrecognized Church to which all may belong, though supernatural events play no part in its creed.
Haldane’s argument underlines the toughness of NOMA and provides an apt transition to the second half of this book, where I ask why so many people continue to reject such a humane, sensible, and wonderfully workable solution to the great nonproblem of our times. NOMA is no wimpish, wallpapering, superficial device, acting as a mere diplomatic fiction and smoke screen to make life more convenient by compromise in a world of diverse and contradictory passions. NOMA is a proper and principled solution—based on sound philosophy—to an issue of great historical and emotional weight. NOMA is tough-minded. NOMA forces dialogue and respectful discourse about different primary commitments. NOMA does not say “I’m OK, you’re OK—so let’s just avoid any talk about science and religion.”
As such, NOMA imposes requirements that become very difficult for many people. In particular, NOMA does challenge certain particular (and popular) versions of religious belief, even while strongly upholding the general importance of religion. And NOMA does forbid scientific entry into fields where many arrogant scientists love to walk, and yearn to control. For example, if your particular form of religion demands a belief that the earth can only be about ten thousand years old (because you choose to read Genesis as a literal text, whatever such a claim might mean), then you stand in violation of NOMA—for you have tried to impose a dogmatic and idiosyncratic reading of a text upon a factual issue lying within the magisterium of science, and well resolved with a radically different finding of several billion years of antiquity.
The fallacies of such fundamentalist extremism can be easily identified, but what about a more subtle violation of NOMA commonly encountered among people whose concept of God demands a loving deity, personally concerned with the lives of all his creatures—and not just an invisible and imperious clockwinder? Such people often take a further step by insisting that their God mark his existence (and his care) by particular factual imprints upon nature that may run contrary to the findings of science. Now, science has no quarrel whatever with anyone’s need or belief in such a personalized
concept of divine power, but NOMA does preclude the additional claim that such a God must arrange the facts of nature in a certain set and predetermined way. For example, if you believe that an adequately loving God must show his hand by peppering nature with palpable miracles, or that such a God could only allow evolution to work in a manner contrary to facts of the fossil record (as a story of slow and steady linear progress toward
Homo sapiens
, for example), then a particular, partisan (and minority) view of religion has transgressed into the magisterium of science by dictating conclusions that must remain open to empirical test and potential rejection.
Similarly, to the scientist who thinks that he has gained the right to determine the benefits and uses of a new and socially transforming invention merely because he made the potentiating discovery and knows more than anyone else about the technical details—and who resents the moral concerns of well-informed citizens, especially their insistence upon some role in a dialogue about potential regulation—NOMA answers with equal force that facts of nature cannot determine the moral basis of utility, and that a scientist has no more right to seek such power than his fundamentalist neighbor can muster in trying to become dictator of the age of the earth.
Thus, NOMA works as a taskmaker, not an enabler—and
NOMA therefore cannot expect to sweep toward victorious consensus amid universal smiles, and shouts of hosanna from both sides. But NOMA’s success can only be liberating and expansive for all seekers of wisdom.
H
ISTORICAL
R
EASONS FOR
C
ONFLICT
A
NDREW DICKSON WHITE
(1832–1918),
THE
first president of Cornell University, also served as the American minister to Russia in the mid-1890s. Soon afterward, in 1896, he published a two-volume work that became one of the most influential books of the
fin de
(last)
siècle: A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom
. White began his account with a metaphor based on a Russian memory. In early April he looks out from his room above the Neva River in St. Petersburg at a crowd of peasants using their picks to break the ice barrier still damming the river as the spring thaw approaches. The peasants are cutting hundreds of small channels through the ice, so that the swollen river behind may flow gently through, and not burst the dam in a great flood initiated by sudden collapse of the entire barrier:
