Non-Overlapping Magisteria
From RationalWiki
The Non-Overlapping Magisteria concept (often abbreviated to NOMA) was proposed by Stephen Jay Gould in his book Rocks of Ages. Gould hoped it would be a way to eliminate the conflict between science and religion by suggesting that both contribute to different areas of human existence and give meaning to life in different ways. At root it puts forth the idea that science is based on "methodological naturalism" and offers no insight into issues of what is morally "right." He suggested that although science automatically assumes a lack of supernatural causation or existence in its methods, the possibility of supernatural or theological explanations could still exist side-by-side with science.
He suggested that the two "Magisteria" were so different that they could not inform, comment on or criticize each either.
The topic was revisited by Barbara Smith in her book Natural Reflections and by Stanley Fish in a review of the same.[1] Smith discusses how both religion and science seek what she calls "underneath-it-all status," but that they should not be viewed as competing.
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[edit] Pros
NOMA certainly provides and end to the conflict thesis between science and religion. The two are proposed as describing entirely different things; science describing what is known and religion giving answers to what cannot be known. Providing one isn't a biblical literalist this is an attractive position. An advocate of NOMA can be confident that their religious beliefs cannot be affected by the materialism of science, and in theory, science can be confident that supernatural entities cannot mess around with its work in understanding reality.
[edit] Critics of NOMA
One of the primary criticisms of the NOMA concept is that, in practice, it is often used as an excuse to make religious doctrines totally immune from examination. Religious individuals often feel that statements of empirical reality - such as the theory of evolution - that conflict with literal readings of religious work, are overstepping the "bounds" proposed by NOMA. This often leads to NOMA being more of a "one-way street" in the sense that science is not allowed to examine miracles or prayer (or when it does, and the conclusion is negative, the excuse is there to ignore the evidence) or conduct any research that would have a detrimental affect on people's ideas about divine intervention. With the famously negative prayer studies, it has often been wondered whether religious persons would maintain their NOMA stance should the result have been positive; if NOMA says that science can't disprove religious ideas, then it certainly can't provide evidence for them.
Advocates of NOMA - particularly religious ones - rarely afford the same protection to scientific methods to be free from religious input, as such views are still allowed to comment on policies relating to scientific ethics, essentially controlling what science can and can't study legally. Issues such as stem cell research are almost entirely dominated by religious individuals claiming to be fighting for morality and rarely will the media at large cover secular objects or more subtle but more meaningful scientific debates on the subject.
The system itself has met with some resistance and harsh criticisms from figures such as Richard Dawkins (who suggests that Gould was straining to be apologetic when he proposed it), PZ Myers and numerous other so-called new atheists. These critics propose that questions such as the existence of God can be tested just like any other material hypothesis and that, in principle, even things that are "outside our universe" are still within the grasp of human understanding and the scientific method. The reasons for this are that God's alleged effects on the material world are, of course, material and can be studied much in the same way that all science really just detects the effects of things on the real world. In this sense, critics certainly reject the "non-overlapping" aspect of the two magisteria and conclude that if the two genuinely didn't overlap, supernatural entities would have no effect on the real world and thus their existence, or not, is a moot point.
[edit] See also
- Debate:Is Non-overlapping magisteria merely political correctness?
- Theistic evolution
- Templeton foundation
- Goddidit
