A failed diktat

Stephen Jay Gould's book "Rocks of Ages" is an attempt to solve the science-religion conflict by claiming that both are equally valid modes of investigation, but within separate domains. Gould calls this NOMA or Non-Overlapping Magisteria. In his opinion, the magisterium of science deals with facts about the natural world, while the magisterium of religion deals with values, ethics and meaning. Just as religion can't decree geocentrism or oppose the theory of evolution, science cannot decree human values or ethics. Those who break these ground rules are "in violation of NOMA". The most obvious example of a religious group breaking the rules are the creationists. The sociobiologists could be seen as a scientific group violating NOMA. Gould vehemently opposed both creationists and sociobiologists, so it's hardly a co-incidence that he mentions these particular factions.

Gould claims that virtually all sensible people, including most scientists and main line religious leaders, have already accepted NOMA. However, since he spends most of the book delineating and defending the concept, Gould was clearly afraid that *somebody* out there might not consider his idea to be eminently sensible. Gould's fears were well founded. I don't agree with him either, and I'm neither a creationist nor a sociobiologist!

As several other reviewers have already pointed out, Gould tends to reduce religion to ethics or perhaps metaphysics. This may or may not be the "sensible" position, but it *does* mean that Gould, as a scientist, dictates to religious believers which parts of their faith is acceptable...even within the magisterium of religion. Thus, Gould is himself "in violation of NOMA" already from the start. Further, science itself needs a metaphysical foundation. Gould's interpretations of various scientific facts, which he presents as neutral, are really metaphysical: for instance, his claim that there are no miracles, no teleology, that evolution is contingent, and that - because of all the above - morality and meaning can only be found within ourselves. These are not brute facts of science, but interpretations based on "methodological naturalism" and (arguably) a covert ontological naturalism. They also sound vaguely Existentialist. Once again, Gould is in violation of NOMA himself!

I suspect Gould proposed NOMA because, in his opinion, *science* suggests that this must be the correct position, in effect making the two magisteria unequal, the controlling magisterium being the scientific one. But since the very idea of NOMA is in itself metaphysical, something verboten to scientists in the Gouldean scenario, Gould breaks NOMA again, by his own standards.

Frankly, "Rocks of Ages" gets annoying after a while...

Gould also has pretty strange ideas about who or what is breaking his beloved NOMA. Thus, he pays tribute to John Paul II for accepting the Darwinian theory of evolution, apparently in the belief that the pope considered the immortal soul to be a non-scientific question in the NOMA-ist sense. This, however, seems to be a somewhat idiosyncratic reading of Catholic theology. While it's true that the existence of the soul isn't a "scientific" question in the strict sense, it is nevertheless a kind of empirical question: Catholics claim to know about the immortal soul through divine revelation, and this revelation is seen as an objective event. God and his angelic messangers are also seen as objectively real, and some Catholics claim to have seen the latter! By Gould's standards, this is a clear violation of NOMA, so it's unclear why he drags in the former pope on *his* side of the debate. Besides, the Catholic Church, implicitly or otherwise, sees evolution as teleological, something Gould considers a violation of the brute facts of science in another section of "Rocks of ages".

Dawkins was in a very uncharitable mood when suggesting that Gould didn't really believe what he wrote in this book, but the work *is* unconvincing, and Gould (of course) was no fool. It is somewhat strange that an intelligent person such as Stephen Jay Gould, one of the leading lights of the scientific community, could write a weak book like "Rocks of ages". Surely, he must have known that NOMA is simply a Diktat of science to religion, rather than a serious proposal for détente?

It would have been more honest to either explain why science has proved religion wrong, except as a denuded ethics found within ourselves, or to argue for a metaphysical position according to which naturalist science is paramount. Personally, I disagree with both propositions. But it would definitely have been a more muscular argument than Gould's bloodless alliance with tired, liberal and very main line Protestants...