According to a second view, science and religion aren't, in principle, in conflict, but they're in principle non-conflicting. But is there something about religion and science that ensures that they can't possibly conflict? So how would someone develop this view? Well, there are a few different ways. According to one version, science and religion can't conflict in principle because they treat distinct domains of objects. So according to this view, science interrogates the natural world, the world of natural objects. Atoms and molecules, stars and galaxies. Religion, on the other hand, speaks to what we might call supernatural objects. Religion purports to tell us about God or gods, angels, the supernatural, the after life, immaterial souls and that sort of thing. Alternatively, one might hold that religion and science both concern the same domain of objects. But that religion concerns only one's experiences of religious reality in one's life, while science concerns the objects of our sense experience. So the famous 20th century German theologian, Bultmann, acknowledged that while religious revelations do make specific claims about the natural world. So the objects overlap with the scientific domain. These claims are religious only when they bear on ways in which human lives are transformed by theological modes of conceiving of human existence and meaning. So only when we attach a layer of religious significance to these natural object do they come to fall to the domain of religion. So religious revelations aren't really about the natural world, even though they sometimes appear to be, even though they sometimes reference what we might call natural objects. So when we read something like in the Genesis text, God said let there be light, and there was light, the text isn't affirming truths about cosmology, but rather telling us that's God's the creator and sustainer of all that is. A second way you might argue that science and religion don't conflict in principle is to claim that they operate by different methods, or with different aims. So it's not the objects that are different, it's the methods and aims. So for example one adopting this model might argue that the job of science is to determine what things the natural world contains, and how those things behave. Science tells us about things like atoms and atomic theory. Whereas the task of religion is to explain how God's providential purposes play out through the workings of the natural world. From this view, science employs empirical observation and empirically testable theories to explain what there is. And the causal mechanisms that explain why those things act the way they do. But religion, on the other hand, uses religious revelation and maybe religious experience to discover the purpose and the meaning of the happenings in the natural world. The second version, according to which science and religion are non-conflicting in principle has been defended, probably most famously, by the now-late Harvard evolutionary theorist, Stephen Jay Gould. And according to Gould, science and religion represent what he called distinct magisteria, where magisteria are sources of teaching authority. And they were non overlapping in his view in such a way that science covers the empirical realm, what the universe is made of. He called that the domain of fact. And why those things work the way they do, he called that the domain of theory. Whereas the magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. So Gould says, to quote, while the magisteria might discuss a common object or topic, cloning for example, the methods and aims will be different. Science uses theory construction and experimentation to determine how cloning does or might work. Religion uses philosophical theorizing or appeals to authority to determine the moral boundaries in our use of cloning technology. So as a result on this view, science and religion are these non-overlapping magisteria. And he designates this view with the acronym NOMA, non-overlapping magisteria, or NOMA, as it's oftentimes called. So what should we think about Gould's view about the fact that science and religion are, or the claim that science and religion are, in principle, not able to conflict? Non-overlapping. Well, for Gould's position to be tenable, two claims would have to be true. The first is that religion makes no natural or empirical claims. Because, remember for Gould, the idea is that religion talks about ultimate meaning and moral value, not matters of fact and theory. The second claim is that science can make no claims concerning supernatural reality or morality. Because, again for science, it's just supposed to tell us what the natural world contains and how those things work. So are those two claims plausible? And the answer is, probably not. First of all, in the first claim, that religion makes no natural or empirical claims, that seems to be pretty obviously false. When a Muslim affirms that Mohammed ascended bodily into heaven or a Christian affirms that Jesus rose from the dead. They are making just such claims, they're making claims about aspects of the natural world and how that natural world behaves. Here's a real body of a real person, and here's what really happened to that body. Furthermore, when religious believers claim that certain things happened in the world by means of divine action, so creation, or turning water into wine, or parting the Red Seas. As a result of, again, some divine miraculous interaction, they are making a claim about what happened in the natural world. Here's what happened at the Red Sea, here's what happened with this bit of water. So to make this claim that religion doesn't actually make any affirmations about the natural world just seems wrong. It looks like religious believers do in fact make those claims as religious claims. First, Gould might challenge that second part. That is, he might say that perhaps Muslims and Christians and others make these claims about the natural world. But they're not entitled to hold those as religious beliefs, that is, they'd have to hold those as scientific beliefs, but Gould really hasn't given us any reason to accept that claim. Why would we have to hold, and in fact, it would seem odd to hold that for a Christian to claim that the resurrection of Jesus is not a religious claim. That would be really odd and not really an apt explanation of how religion actually functions. So what about the second claim? That second claim that holds empirical observations or science can't tell us anything about the domain of morality or the supernatural. Is that right? Well, maybe it is. But certainly many people have challenged that claim. So many philosophers and some scientists think, for example, that we can draw inferences about the supernatural from the natural world, and here are two different sorts of examples. On the one hand, many people, and they don't have to be scientists or philosophers, think we can draw conclusions about the supernatural from the existence, for example, of natural evil, the existence of pain and suffering. Or maybe pain and suffering that seem to be distributed in ways that aren't merited or justified or warranted in any way. That shows us that they're just, it can't be an all good God. Some claim, now again, that's a contentious argument and it may be wrong. But it shows how one might make inferences from particular natural facts to certain claims about the reality of supernature or the supernatural realm. On the contrary, some have argued that there is evidence in the natural world that it displays a certain sort of fine tuning. That the the laws and constants seemed to have been tuned in a way that makes it suitable to the emergence and existence of intelligent life. And some infer from that that this looks like there's a teleology in nature that can only be explained if somehow a designer is involved in configuring nature in a certain way. Now whether you take that argument seriously or not is not really the point here, the question is, is it possible for us? Were we to discover natural facts like that, to draw inferences about supernature or divine reality? And it looks like, in principle, the answer is yes. And if, in principle, the answer is yes, then in principle, Gould's claim about how science can function just isn't correct.
