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The religious views of Stephen Gould and Charles Darwin - Special Issue: Science and Religion: Conflict or Conciliation?

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1999 by Martin Gardner

Rocks of Ages is the clever title of the latest book by Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard's famous paleontologist and best-selling author. One of the title's two "rocks" is religion. The other is science, typified by the fossil-rich rocks that support the fact of evolution.

Professor Gould strongly opposes the notion that science and religion are irreconcilable, a claim defended in two classic works: The Conflict Between Religion and Science (1877) by the American scientist John William Draper, and the two-volume History of the Warfare of Science and Theology (1894), by Cornell historian and first president Andrew Dickson White. Both books, which Gould discusses at length, regard science and religion, especially Roman Catholicism, as locked in eternal combat.

More Articles of Interest: Gould's Separate 'Magisteria': Two Views. - Review - book reviews; You can't have it both ways: irreconcilable differences? - Special Issue:...; Non-overlapping magisteria - Special Issue: Science and Religion: Conflict or...; What does the dreaded "E" word mean, anyway; Stephen Jay GouldÂwhat does it mean to be a radical?

Although Gould calls himself an agnostic inclined toward atheism, his book is a passionate plea for tolerance between the two realms. Science and religion, he contends, are examples of a principle he calls NOMA, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria. There is indeed a conflict between the two if religion is taken in the narrow sense of a creed that requires God's miraculous interventions in history, and refuses to accept the overwhelming evidence for evolution. Such superstitions, by entangling the two magisteria, generate mutual enmity. If, however, religion is taken in a broader sense, either as a philosophical theism free of superstitions, or as a secular humanism grounded on ethical norms, then Gould sees no conflict between the two magisteria. Not that they can be unified in a single conceptual scheme, but that they can flourish side by side like two independent nations at peace with one another.

Science, Gould reminds us, is a search for the facts and laws of nature. Religion is a spiritual quest for ultimate meaning and for moral values that science is powerless to provide. To echo Kant and Hume, science tells us what is, not what ought to be. "To cite the usual cliches," Gould writes, "we get the age of the rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven." There is no mention of John Dewey, but Gould's theme is not far from the essence of Dewey's little book A Common Faith.

Gould quotes liberally from the letters of Charles Robert Darwin, who, together with Thomas Henry Huxley, are two of his greatest heroes. These quotations sent me to The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887) by his botanist son Francis. One chapter deals entirely with Darwin's slow disenchantment with Christianity, and his eventual decision to call himself an agnostic. The term had been coined by Huxley, known in his day as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his vigorous defense of natural selection, and his unremitting attacks on the crude protestant fundamentalism of England's prime minister William Ewart Gladstone.

As a youth Darwin firmly believed the Bible to be the inspired word of God. His Anglican father wanted him to become a clergyman, and Charles actually spent three years at Cambridge preparing for ordination. Although he gradually lost his faith, he always remained tolerant and respectful of the views of his Christian friends and associates, especially of the devout beliefs of his wife.

Darwin married his cousin Emma Wedgwood, who bore him ten children. They loved each other deeply, but throughout their otherwise happy marriage each agonized over their irreconcilable religious differences. Janet Browne, in her splendid biography Charles Darwin (1995), reprints one of Emma's letters to Charles, written before they married, in which she implores him to give up his habit of "believing nothing until it is proved." Darwin called it a "beautiful letter," and wrote on its envelope, "When I am dead, know how many times I have kissed and cried over this."

The death of their daughter Anne intensified Darwin's antipathy toward Christianity, and widened the religious rift between Emma and himself. She never abandoned her faith. As a widow she may have died still tormented (as Browne puts it) by the thought that "she might not meet him [Charles] in heaven." Some biographers have even speculated, though without evidence, that Darwin's chronic illnesses were the psychosomatic consequences of the theological divide between himself and his beloved wife.

Darwin's religious tolerance is at the heart of Gould's book. He even praises Pope John Paul for his 1996 statement that evolution is no longer just a theory, but a well-established fact that Catholics should accept provided they insist that immortal souls were infused into the evolved bodies of the first humans. Gould sees this as a major step on the part of Rome's magisterium toward accepting the NOMA principle.

"Nature is amoral," Gould writes, "not immoral. . . . [It] existed for eons before we arrived, didn't know we were coming, and doesn't give a damn about us. . . . Nature betrays no statistical preference for being either warm and fuzzy, or ugly and disgusting. Nature just is - in all her complexity and diversity, in all her sublime indifference to our desires. Therefore we cannot use nature for our moral instruction, or for answering any question within the magisterium of religion."

The religious views of Stephen Gould and Charles Darwin - Special Issue: Science and Religion: Conflict or Conciliation?

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1999 by Martin Gardner

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