How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [85]
The Institute for Creation Research: A monument to confusion on the relationship between religion and science.
John Paul II’s 1996 Truth Cannot Contradict Truth falls squarely in this tier as he argues here, and in his 1998 Fides et Ratio, that faith and reason can work together toward the same goal of understanding the universe and our place in it. At first blush that sounds reasonable, but as we shall see, trying to mesh these two radically divergent methods of understanding the world into one worldview does not work.
3.
Separate-Worlds Model. Residents on this tier are still in the minority in their belief that science and religion are neither in conflict nor in agreement, but, in Stephen Jay Gould’s apt phrase (adopted from the Pope’s 1996 address), are “nonoverlapping magisteria.” Science philosopher Michael Ruse agrees and notes: “If you want evolution plus souls, that is your option, and if you want evolution less souls, that is also your option. Either way, evolution is untouched … . More than this, together with the Pope, I believe that his tradition is right in feeling that evolution—even evolution through selection—is no barrier to faith. Were I a Catholic, I would positively welcome Darwin as an ally.” Anthropologist Eugenie Scott also believes the worlds of science and religion should be kept separate, especially in the classroom, for three very practical reasons: “Using the classroom to indoctrinate students to any belief or nonbelief is, first of all, a violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution’s establishment clause; second, it will be misleading to students who will have difficulty separating science as a way of knowing from personal philosophy; and third, it is bad strategy for anyone concerned about the public understanding of evolution.”
To clarify further the similarities and differences among these three tiers, it might be useful to make a distinction between the two primary purposes of religion and belief in God: (1) an explanation for the natural world in the form of cosmogony myths, and (2) a guide to human life and an institution for social cohesiveness in the form of morality myths. Clearly, modern cosmology has displaced ancient cosmogonies in the minds of all but a tiny handful of young-earth creationists. Most believers have now abandoned the six-thousand-year-old young-earth model in favor of one that more closely parallels the tenets of deep geological time. This process of displacement has been under way for the past four centuries and continues to this day, with a few holdouts from the same-worlds tier struggling to squeeze the square peg of science into the round hole of religion. Evolutionary biology and the study of the chemical origins of life have also paved new roads into the ancient question of life’s origination, to the point where these types of religious myths are now obsolete. And, most dramatically, modern cosmology has presented us with theories so unlike anything described in any ancient myths (black holes, wormholes, quantum foam, inflationary cosmology), that a separate-worlds model really is the only viable alternative.
The distinction may not be so clear as we move into the human realm, but it is there nonetheless (at least for now). Although some progress has been made since the Enlightenment to ground moral values in nonreligious, metaphysical concepts such as “rights,” and to construct a secular system by which one can live a meaningful and moral life without any belief in God, we are a long way from finding agreement among scientists and philosophers about whether, say, abortion is moral or immoral; whether lying is permissible