Science vs. Faith: Is It Really a Phony War?

It’s a treat to read good prose--and an increasingly rare one these days. In the currently booming idea mill industry, language is no more than a piece of the machinery, no matter how well tooled. What a pleasure, then, when an author engages us with evident delight in the subtle dance of language and ideas.

This alone would be reason enough to recommend Stephen Jay Gould’s little book, “Rocks of Ages,” which actually has the feel and heft of a long essay. Reading it, we find ourselves in the great tradition of Montaigne and his successors, gentleman scholars, scientists, social observers and theologians whose consuming passion for thought subjects ideas to the test of a rigorous mind. Gould’s subject--those two contenders for the seat of human wisdom, science and religion, and their sometimes problematic coexistence--is not new. Indeed, it has become a hot topic in our deeply materialistic, technology-dependent culture obsessed with the search for spiritual values as we rush headlong toward the conclusion of one millennium and the start of another.

Gould assigns the acronym NOMA to his central principle of “non-overlapping magisteria,” an attempt at peacefully resolving the clash between science and religion. “Magisteria”--a word Gould relishes as much for its etymological roots in ancient Latin as for its appropriately sonorous dignity--are areas of teaching authority, each worthy of honor and respect, but each distinct and autonomous. For him, science must retain full authority in “what the universe is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory),” but it has no standing in addressing questions of morality and religion. Religion, by the same token, may speak ex cathedra in its own magisterium of “ultimate meaning and moral value,” but lacks appropriate authority when it brings its principles to bear on science.

Although some persist in seeing this ground as a field of perpetual conflict, Gould insists that the war is a phony one: “All apparent struggles between science and religion,” he writes, “really arise from violations of NOMA, when a small group allied to one magisterium tries to impose its irrelevant and illegitimate will upon the other’s domain.” He sets out to explore and, where necessary, to explode the myths created by one side to discredit the other, from Columbus and the flat-Earth fallacy wrongfully attributed to the dogma of the Catholic Church, to the misguided “creationism” embraced by fundamentalists in response to the teaching of evolution in the schools.

Meticulous and evenhanded, Gould explores in turn the history and the psychology of conflict illuminating his text with a rich tapestry of fact and anecdote, and with respectful and compassionate portraits of the players, heroes and villains--from Charles Darwin and T.H. Huxley to Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Loving them for their greatness as well as for their human frailties, Gould brings his interlocutors to life with humor and compassion and cites generously from their works.

Although Gould argues persuasively for a clean separation of powers, I am left with a host of vexing, real-world questions that result from what seems to me an inevitable, often untidy, de facto overlap between the two. Where does the responsibility of the scientist end, for example, in research leading to the production of weapons potentially lethal to mankind? In genetic engineering? In the field of medicine, where the promise of stunning progress in our ability to treat disease and slow the aging process brings with it enormous ethical conundrums: How much of this high-priced treatment can we afford, and who should get it? In the technological world, given an incalculable new capacity to collect, store and retrieve information, just where is the line that protects our privacy? Is it science’s job just to forge ahead and hand out ever more goodies? And religion’s to provide the moral context for their application or consumption?

Or given that we humans stand in need of religion and science, in areas in which we actually experience them as “overlapping,” is there a still to be discovered geography where science and religion find common ground, where they can work together? Gould is surely right, as he does in closing, to dismiss the easy, popular solutions of avoidance or denial--the warm and fuzzy but essentially meaningless New Age embrace. But no matter how clean or clear, his map provides us only with an ideal resolution, in a very uncomfortable real place where we still stand in pressing need.

Peter Clothier is the author of “While I Am Not Afraid: Secrets of a Man’s Heart” (High Mountain Press) and “David Hockney” (Abbeville).