Truth
God, Gould and the Non-Overlapping Magisteria of Science and Religion (NOMA)
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 10 July 2002
Non-Overlapping Magisteria
Rational people and perhaps scientists particularly are intellectual cowards in the face of the traditional religions, even when they will speak boldly to expose modern cults. The late Stephen Jay Gould, who described himself as a Jewish agnostic, in Natural History (March 1997), astonishingly concluded from pope’s Pius XII’s generosity about evolutionary theory in his encyclical, Humani Generis, that science and religion do not, or need not, conflict. Gould ended up trying to find a way in which science can tolerate religion.
Gould decided, science and religion are not in a perpetual conflict about anything. He blamed the nineteenth century American Professor of science, John William Draper, in A History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), and the Cornell historian and first president, Andrew Dickson White, in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) for starting the unnecessary conflict.
Science and religion are not in conflict, for their teachings occupy distinctly different domains—I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat.
His argument for tolerance between science and religion seems in parts more like a plea to reform Christianity, which should not claim God’s miraculous interventions in history, and must accept the overwhelming mass of coherent evidence in science for ideas rejected by many Christians, such as evolution. By making claims in the scientific domain, religion generates enmity. Gould seems to envisage religion as one writer put it “as a philosophical theism free of superstitions, or as a secular humanism grounded on ethical norms”. If this is what religion was, it could flourish along with science with no conflict. Unfortunately, Gould was involved in a popular American misapprehension—that the world is how he would like it to be, and not how it actually is.
Science and religion, Gould believed, each has its own domain or school of knowledge over which it presides as the appropriate source of wisdom. He called the distinct domains “magisteria”. There are other magisteria like art and music. Science covers the empirical universe, religion, moral and spiritual affairs and the search for ethical values. These magisteria do not overlap, and so Gould arrived at his acronym NOMA, Non-Overlapping magisteria.
NOMA is a simple, humane, rational, and altogether conventional argument for mutual respect, based on non-overlapping subject matter, between two components of wisdom in a full human life: our drive to understand the factual character of nature (the “magisterium” of science), and our need to define meaning in our lives and a moral basis for our actions (the “magisterium” of religion).
The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value.Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages
NOMA says that science deals with facts, religion with morality. The first focuses on what is, the latter on what ought to be. Citing what in philosophy is known as the “naturalistic fallacy”—one cannot derive what ought to be from what is—Stephen J Gould concludes that science and religion are forever separate.
Perhaps to hide his embarrassment, Gould illustrates the difference facetiously:
We get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages. We study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.
The first is a metaphor for God from Isaiah 26:4. There is no reason why the “magisterium” of literature should not teach metaphors as poetic means of expression, but Christians and Jews say that this metaphor really exists. If that were true, it is within the scope of the “magisterium” of science, not religion, unless the two overlap. The second suggests that the “magisterium” of religion has some nostrums that enable people to ensure that they go to heaven. Yet this “magisterium” has never shown that its nostrums work. Surely, then this is the “magisterium” of Confidence Tricks.
Gould likes to cite scientists who themselves sought to keep their religion and reason apart through NOMA-like concepts. Well, a 1998 survey in Nature by E J Larson and L Witham found “leading scientists still reject God”, or 95 percent of them did, but for Gould they must have been deluded. Concerning the perceived atheistic implications of natural selection Gould’s hero, Charles Darwin, wrote:
I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.
Darwin “understood the difference between factual questions with universal answers under the “magisterium” of science and moral issues that each person must resolve for himself”. It arose when he despaired of the death of his young daughter, and despair shines through it. If any thoughts are too profound for human intellect, then only by trying to think them will we find out. Moreover, Gould is not pointing us through Darwin towards some “magisterium” of morality but to our own ways of resolving these issues. Darwin proved he needed no moral “magisterium”. Indeed, his distress led him to abandon the one he once had, Christianity.
As a youth, Darwin accepted the Bible as the inspired word of God, and he spent three years at Cambridge preparing for ordination to follow the profession of his father, an Anglican clergyman. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887), by his botanist son, Francis, demonstrate Darwin’s increasing rejection of Christianity, leading to his adoption of T H Huxley’s idea of agnosticism. His belief was in science but he was civil and considerate enough to his still devout wife, his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, not to force his views on to her. Yet, in one of Emma’s letters to Charles, written before they married, she implored him to give up his habit of “believing nothing until it is proved”. Christians want to force their beliefs on to others, not scientists.
Patriarchal religions have caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than any other cause. As we have recently seen, the darkest wrongs are still inspired by them, yet to accept NOMA is to accept their religious myths as the basis of our moral behaviour. But why must we accept that divine inspiration mediated by ancient mythologies is the only source of morality for humans? The science of cultural anthropology shows us that many moral beliefs are relative, they depend on cultural context, and the ones central to the human condition, the social ones, have evolved. So, why should science relinquish its right to discuss rationally and modify moral beliefs to an authority that doesn’t have a shred of supporting physical evidence to submit?
Divine laws like those in the bible or the Koran are simply the expression of acceptable social behaviour as a contract (covenant) enforceable by the king with God’s unchallengeable authority. The psychology of Christianity is rooted in the fear of god, fear of hell, fear of death, and fear of the unknown, all intended to compel obedience. Religions benefit politicians, rulers, and power thinking theologians. People who are enslaved by superstition and deceived by mysticism are more easily governed and held in bondage. Spouting superstitions to the ignorant is the Christian way. Saint Jerome said:
There is nothing so easy as by sheer volubility to deceive a common crowd or an uneducated congregation.
Why should any intelligent and educated person condone the myths, fables, and folklore found in the bible as true history, let alone believe them? To do it, believers have to distort or reject what is real to preserve a system of beliefs that are incompatible with reality. Consequently, it is difficult to have a discussion with believers. Faith is their excuse for ignorance.
Gould tells us that because a lot of people suffer from the delusion of religion, it should not be dismissed or denigrated. Was that a consideration for Christians when they dismissed and denigrated Pagan religions, and persecuted them into extinction? Since Gould, the agnostic, now seems to think the Jewish scriptures are true, then was it a consideration for the Israelites who committed genocide in Canaan because the Canaanites were called idolaters? Was it a concern for the Catholics who murdered the Cathars into extinction, the crusaders who killed everyone they met, even Christians, for the booty they were getting, but all in the name of religion. You do not expect an agnostic scientist to indulge in special pleading like this, not one like Gould, who has gained our respect from his popular science writings over the years.
His own fallibility stares us in the eye, just as he plainly stared death in the eye and seems to have decided to make a truce with God. He tells us that he still believes we have no special importance in the world, but:
I recognize that such a position frightens many people, and that a more spiritual view of nature retains broad appeal.
The logic of all this contortion is that Gould is himself among the people who have just taken fright. These people want to find meaning in human life, and think they get it from religion, even though the clergy are just feeding to them what they want to hear with no proof or even evidence for the supernatural medicine they offer. He admits that talking with believers in these nostrums would enlighten him, and give him a deeper understanding of these “deep and ultimately unanswerable issues”. The only thing deep about these confessions is their stupidity. NOMA, Gould says, enjoins respectful discourse between the “magisteria” towards the common goal of wisdom. Regrettably, Gould has obviously stepped away from wisdom into the teeth of the soul-eating monster called Belief—the subjection of wisdom to mendacity. His whole testament in this essay is that he wants to believe before he dies, and he must think that this testament should settle it with God.
The true psychological, moral, and ethical characteristics of humans are produced by evolution, behaviours that have been selected as advantageous in the situations we were in as primates and hunter-gatherers. Gould partitions science and religion but any phenomena that we experience are legitimate subjects of rational investigation by empirical methods and testing against reality.
It might be that people like Gould and, less cringingly, Carl Sagan were ready to accommodate religious belief because they did not want it to stand in the way of religious people seeking scientific literacy. Well, there are no preconditions on science classes anywhere except in religious schools that insist on teaching non-science as if it were science. Science does not prevent religious people from studying it. Religious people do, claiming it is ungodly!
Science has to be skeptical basing itself on doubt and the insistence of empirical proof. Christianity requires unquestioning belief basing itself on the certainty of dogma based on imagined revelation. Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All (1998), died with no self-deception, still knowing no two approaches could be more incompatible than science and Christianity. That is the reason for the conflict between them.
Scientists themselves have to learn to take moral positions that serve the good of the whole world rather than just that of exclusive castes. To do this, they must publicly dissociate science from selfish lobbies and harmful industries. They must distance it from self-serving corporations and governments. Scientists have to form their own moral and political power group that can and will take the high ground. Adelphiasophism is it.
The Testament of Stephen J Gould
What is the consequence of NOMA for science?
Scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution.
It sounds innocent, but it is nonsense. Gould is telling scientists not that they should not claim any “higher insight into moral truth”, but that they should claim no interest or involvement at all in moral truth. It is not in their “magisterium”, so they can claim no authority over it. NOMA foolishly equates science and religion—religion cannot dictate scientific matters and science cannot have any say in what is moral truth. So, it gives religion total control over moral issues and over matters of value. Thus, NOMA is fair to both sides!
It is popular, even among scientists, to claim that science cannot pronounce what is morally right and what is morally wrong, but they frankly are just accepting religious propaganda they have been fed since childhood, and are too uninterested in to think about afresh. Scientists who cannot be bothered with religion are often willing to accept that those who need it are sincere. They too easily concede to religion ownership of morals. Everyone should remember what Nietzsche said:
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose!
Moral truth must be the concern of us all no matter whether we are religious or not. Scientific knowledge can be essential in moral judgments. Science is good at distinguishing what is true from what is false in the material world, but the world of morals, it seems, is necessarily the world of religion. Science therefore, according to the NOMA theory, has nothing to say about the moral rectitude of killing. Religion has! This is why it is important for scientists not to be so narrow minded and bored by religion in practice and why they should be more ready to stand up and use their scientific knowledge and training to decry what has proved for two millennia to be an utter enormity.
Laplace had no need for the idea of God, and nor does science in general. The very bases of the scientific and the religious universes differ. Either the universe is a scientifically knowable natural one, or it is a supernaturally founded and sustained one and so is unknowable. Yet Christianity cannot allow that it has no rights within the natural “magisterium” of science, and Gould knows it. Despite the supposed criterion of non-overlappingness, Christianity must retain a stake in the domain of science.
The “magisteria” are not and cannot be non-overlapping. Gould actually has to admit that the two “magisteria” abut each other so closely that they actually interlock in a complicated way—“interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border”. What he is trying to avoid is the plain fact that they do overlap because religion can claim no basis for its support if its supernatural therapies do not work. Attending communion somehow has a beneficial effect on the destiny of the soul. Perhaps it has, but can the magisters of the religious “magisterium” say how they know that it is not doing the opposite, or nothing at all?
Christians must make claims about the natural world refuting Gould’s idea. Historically, they have speculated on the origin of earth, the universe, and humanity, and matter, space and time. Hundreds of millions of Christians still believe the earth is 6,000 years old, because that is the date deduced from the bible, and they would sooner believe it than the discoveries of science. If that is not an aspect of the battle that Gould rejects, then what is it? Science has now eliminated the need for such speculation. It is only its retreat against science that has forced Gould to find for religion a “magisterium” of its own.
Miracle stories and the promise of life after death are used to impress and convert simple people to swell congregations. Yet such matters are to be defined as outside of the scientific “magisterium”. If Gould suppossed that the world is the “magisterium” of science then the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and the survival of souls after death are scientific claims. If Jesus had no human father, then he was a clone of his mother. If there are genetic remains of them anywhere, the truth could be scientifically demonstrated. It would be most likely that Jesus had the genes in his remains of an unknown father, proving that he was born naturally but perhaps illegitimately. It is a scientific problem.
Intelligent Americans do not question evolution. Gould said that only once, in nearly thirty years of teaching at Harvard, did anyone ask about it, and it was not because the student, a devout Christian, doubted the science, but because his room mate, who was an evangelical cracked pot kept insisting he could not be a Christian and believe evolution. Since Catholics and most Protestants have no problem with it, Gould reassured the young man.
Creationism does not raise any unsettled intellectual issues about the nature of biology or the history of life. Creationism is a local and parochial movement, powerful only in the United States among Western nations, and prevalent only among the few sectors of American Protestantism that choose to read the Bible as inerrant… Creationism based on biblical literalism makes little sense in either Catholicism or Judaism for neither religion maintains a tradition for reading the Bible as literal truth rather than illuminating literature… Most Protestant groups take the same position.
Gould seemed much impressed by the Papal vagueries on evolution in the encyclical Humani Generis. John Paul II, in his statement to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on 22 October 1996, admits that the facts of evolution are beyond reasonable doubt—evolution is not just a theory, but a fact that Catholics should accept. So, now Catholics “are permitted” to accept evolution as established in the scientific “magisterium”, so long as they accept the original Creation as God’s. Only bent spoons who idolize a book as the perfect God try to counter a wealth of science with Genesis. Moreover God necessarily infused the soul into humanity. The pope thus endorses evolution except that humans get a divine soul at sometime in it. The pope, being a religious leader, must have his bit of unfounded dogma—the supernatural—so he is not actually endorsing evolution at all. That is a natural process, so why has God got to intervene to give humans alone a soul?
A Jewish agnostic scientist can doubtless ignore such foolishness, but suddenly Gould turns up defending it. But perhaps not surprisingly, since he then offers a quotation from Proverbs declaring it to be the wisdom of king Solomon! Gould increasingly sounds more gnostic than agnostic. He freely ackowledged that some of his friends and fellow scientists viewed his surrender to superstition with dismay. He continued to maintain he was not religious, but even so was fascinated by and respected religion. He was able to respect it, despite the horrors he accepted it has perpetrated, because they were not the fault of religion but the secular powers! The Jews in the Jewish scriptures were the same, committing atrocities when they were the secular as well as religious power. Gould is now really losing our respect. He is doing what no respectable scientist should do—making up incredible excuses that fool no one, except apparently himself. Moreover, what of the atrocities that are laid directly at the feet of God in the Jewish scriptures. Did God get too invoved in the secular powers too? Gould confesses freely that he has lost the plot.
Christian morality has scientific implication in that it places an artificial barrier between Homo sapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom, through the need somewhere to have God allowing souls to occupy human bodies. The idea is contrary to the smooth progression of evolution, and so it is hard to believe that Gould thought his NOMA proposal through properly.
I know that souls represent a subject outside the “magisterium” of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain.
Gould thinks science has nothing to say about a soul, being unable to prove or disprove it. Yet, a soul is a disembodied mind or personality, and science says there is not the least reason to think consciousness or mind can exist independently of a brain that is part of a material body.
There are many things like the soul that science can say nothing about simply because they are imaginary things. Anything that is imaginary does not exist in reality. Science cannot say that Harvey the Rabbit does not exist. Yet Gould must know that both Christian schoolmen, who originated it, and science accept the good sense of Occam’s razor, which insists that all entities that are superfluous should be ruthlessly cut out. Science now tends to treat this rule as one of its chief bases, necessary to keep hypotheses from being over elaborated and to control the number of hypotheses necessary to test.
The trouble is that soul, contrary to Occam’s Razor, has been magnified from a descriptive quality to an immortal entity in its own right. If the soul is supposed to be some incorporeal entity that enters and leaves dead bodies thus animating them into life, then the soul is imaginary. But Christianity needs such an entity or it cannot proclaim an eternal life after death. The truth is that the soul is not supernatural at all but simply another word for life. It is an old synonym for life. A live body has a soul and a dead one does not have one. When the soul departs from a body, in this notion, life does too. The fact that the this entity supposed independent of life is the same thing or just a figment is ignored by Christians because they want it to be!
Soul is a primitive explanation of life itself, which serves to show that at one time religions were in the business of trying to explain things in the material world. They invented the soul or spirit as an explanation, saying that it was the breath of God! They had noticed, then, that life required breath and their explanation was that it was God who supplied it. The words “ruach” in Hebrew, “pneuma” in Greek, and “spiritus” in Latin all simply mean breath, showing that these concepts were primitive interpretations of life.
“Soul”, which is a teutonic word of unknown etymology plainly means the same thing. Gould no longer has a soul because he is dead, but if his soul still exists in some non-material space it should get in touch with us to enlighten us further. Needless to say, no soul has ever been shown to have done it, and no case of supposed contact with spirits that has been investigated has been proved to be genuine.
There is no coherent evidence that life exists in the abstract. Life is a description of a body that is still working. What no longer works has no life left in it, and therefore no soul. The two are identical. Religious people want to imagine that life can exist in the abstract simply because they do not want to die. Religion is a scam that panders to this desire. The Catholic Church above all has been happy to pressurize people on their deathbed, whose resistance has already died, to convert. Perhaps some people’s resistance goes even before they find themselves dying, out of exhaustion from a long struggle against illness. Did Gould feel himself yielding in his long fight against cancer, and succumb to the scam?
Gould wants us to believe that religion and science are needed for complete answers to some difficult questions, yet he gives no authority for religion’s “magisterium”. Science has established a genuine authority, but religion has none, or has any number, judging by the religious sects there are in the world, especially Christian sects. He cites two questions in evidence as involving both evolutionary facts and moral arguments:
- Since evolution made us the only earthly creatures with advanced consciousness, what responsibilities are so entailed for our relations with other species?
- What do our genealogical ties with other organisms imply about the meaning of human life?
Accepting that these questions involve moral judgements, the next question is, “Why is religion necessary for discussion of the moral part of them?”. It is not. Religion has no track record on morality, unless it be on wickedness. Gould cites Pius XII’s encyclical, Humani Generis:
Disagreement and error among men on moral and religious matters have always been a cause of profound sorrow to all good men, but above all to the true and loyal sons of the Church, especially today, when we see the principles of Christian culture being attacked on all sides.
On this basis, “the true and loyal sons of the Church” were consumed by “profound sorrow” for centuries as they burnt innocent people at the stake in the most horrific way. Pious rubbish like this simply cannot absolve the Christian churches, Protestant as well as Catholic, of their crimes, and these crimes exclude them from any right to declaim on moral matters. After the appalling crimes of the Nazis in the last century, no one good could accept a modern practising Nazi as being anything other than abhorent. The crimes of the clergy have been worse and spread longer in time. Gould cannot have been thinking clearly or disinterestedly to advocate the crazy idea of NOMA.
Christianity has no good claim to be any authority on moral matters. It is simply an arbitrary set of dogmas, and has no historical moral high ground to occupy in defence of them. Sciences such as psychology, sociology and ecology seem likely to offer a much better foundation for a science of human morality, using philosophical principles like those propounded by the late John Rawls for whom justice should be that decided by someone totally unaware of their own place in society and what society could accept. Plainly such a person would have to make laws not knowing how they would affect himself, for good or ill, and so necessarily has to produce a fair balance in them.
Yet morals need the asseveration of some truth first. Once the truth has been stated, then other means of human enquiry can be used to decide whether the truth has been violated in some particular case. Usually it is the law, but it could equally be science, and often it is both. What is the role of religion? It is simply to lay down the moral truths. And what right has it to do so? That it claims to be speaking for God! The clergy tell us that they guard the revelations of God, sent to earth through prophets, priests, holy authors, or long standing practices of the Church, no doubt another form of revelation. Despite the beliefs of Christians, there is no good reason why anyone should believe any of this a priori, as the clergy want us to. The authority of the bible to lay down what is moral truth just does not exist as anyone can see from a cursory glance. Most people, particularly scientists do not even give it a blink. Let us return to killing. The bible prescribes death for:
- Defiance of parental authority (Dt 21:15-21)
- Sex outside of marriage (Dt 22:20-24)
- Adultery (Dt 22:22, Liv 20:10, 1 Cor 7:2 Ex 20:14-17)
- Fornication (Heb 13:4, 1 Thes 4:3, 1 Cor 6:15, Rom 1:15-27)
- Homosexual sex (Liv 20:13)
- Bestiality (Liv 20:15-16)
- Incest (Liv 20:11-14)
- Divorce (Mk 10:11,12, Mt 19:9, 1 Cor 6:9-10)
- Sorcery (Ex 22:18, Dt 18:9)
- Blasphemy (Liv 24:16)
- Apostasy (Dt l3 passim)
- An assortment of “vile passions” (Rom 1:32)
Christians like to get particularly worked up about homosexuality and blasphemy but few, even of them, today, think people should die for these “vile passions”. But the bible, the supposed inspired word of God, says they should. Christians have never believed the whole word of God, if only because the New Testament teachings of the Son unequivocally say repeatedly that salvation depends on people being poor! It has been the promise of rich Christians to the poor ones to keep them content with pie in the sky, but all rich Christians think they are rich through God’s blessing not the machinations of the Devil, though that is what the Christian Son thought.
Christianity is an arbitrary pick and mix religion, and so can be no absolute authority on moral questions. No sane and civilised person could possibly want an ancient book, essentially of ancient laws not morals, to be uncritically applied as today’s standard of morality. It is only indoctrination or intellectual flabbiness that can impel Christians to want to use this vile book as their standard. They do it because they have been threatened that if they do not they will lose eternal life, and none of them can bear the thought of dying themselves even though their holy book prescribes death for trivial reasons. Perhaps they were different and harsher times, but in that case the holy book is plainly no longer suitable as a moral code, and the fact that people have come up with different and less harsh moral values proves that no biblical authority is needed to provide them.
Christian morality has nothing absolute to say about killing. You can kill animals to eat or for sport or just because you do not like them and consider them a nuisance, but abortion and euthanasia in human beings are murder even if they are to relieve suffering. For ten centuries killing human beings was a positive benefit to them, in the Christian view, because it saved their immortal soul. Some Christians still think so, but fortunately most do not. Human life on earth is now sacrosanct to most Christians, not their immortal souls. What happens to them is rightly their own affair.
Science has not been charged with the task of coming up with a defendable moral position on killing, but if it did, based solely on objective considerations, it might conclude that there are too many human beings alive for the good of the planet and a lot of them should be culled. Criteria would then have to be chosen, and sensible ones would be to pick people before they are conscious beings, in other words, foetuses and new born children, and people who have lost their consciousness and mental vigour, namely old and demented people. Genetic criteria would be invoked too, but only when the functions of all genes are known properly. A gene considered to be the cause of a defect might have some more subtle beneficial effect. People would rightly think such a radical moral regime was unacceptable, though science fiction writers have floated it. The real point is that, without needing to go to extremes, such reasoning would place no falsely moral obstacles in the way of euthanasia and abortion when the responsible adult requests it.
Gould accepts that nature is indifferent to humanity:
Nature is amoral, not immoral… It existed for æons 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.
Yet, he must be conceding to Christianity that it cannot be, so long as God is in it and sustaining it. Gould is actually too simplistic in his assessment of Nature. It is indeed not a conscious being itself, like an anthropomorphic goddess, but human beings are conscious. That means that Nature now has consciousness within it, and emphasises above all the potentially huge role that humanity could have as Nature’s brain. It forces us into caution and responsibility. The caution is necessary because we actually do not know a lot about Nature, and the resposnsibility is that we must not harm it, as we could, but must preserve it until we know enough to be wise. That is the natural source of our morality.
The Net of Religion
Consider what we must accept with Gould’s NOMA. Since religion is not conditioned by reality, anything—ultimately—goes. The absence of testing and self-correcting means that nothing prevents religious sects or ideas from proliferating like rats in a brewery. What then is moral?
According to the 2001 edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia, there are 33,800 Christian denominations around the world. The purpose of Christianity, most of them will tell you is to be “saved”. If God is good and was concerned to save people, you might expect getting saved would be easy, and laid out simply in a book that is easy to understand. Yet, no two Christian denominations seem to agree on how to be saved!
- Those “saved” were predestined.
- Baptism is required.
- Baptism is only a ritual and salvation is through belief in Christ’s sacrifice.
- Christ’s sacrifice has already saved everyone with no need of belief.
- Salvation is through good works.
- Salvation is through the grace of God.
Any combination of the following bible verses can be used to justify how one is saved:
By hearing the gospel and belief in God:
He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life.John 5:24
By baptism:
Jesus answered, I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.John 3:5
By grace and faith, but not works:
For by grace are ye saved through faith… not of works.Ephesians 2:8,9
By works:
Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.James 2:17
By keeping the Law:
If thou wilt enter unto life, keep the commandments.Matthew 19:17
By belief in Christ:
Whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.John 3:16
By belief and baptism:
He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.Mark 16:16
By words:
For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.Matthew 12:37
By calling on the Lord:
Whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.Acts 2:21
Not works but by grace and baptism, or perhaps Christ’s blood and sacrifice, if that is meant by “washing:”
Not by works… but according to his mercy… by the washing of regeneration.Titus 3:5
Thomas Doubting, who formulated these thoughts on the web, asks:
Is it too much for a non-believer to ask why a God, that could allegedly create all this, could not inspire His prophets to write one book that is uniformly adhered to by His followers?
A perfect God should have directed His followers to write one unambiguous sacred book clearly explaining how to be saved. An omniscient God should have foreseen contradictions and divisions in His followers’ faith and sought to prevent them. A considerate God should have explained what people needed to be saved from, and where they went when they were saved. Most are being saved from a hell that God created to punish sinners and non-believers. Not only are people saved from this revolting perpetual punishment that God had devised, even though He is good and especially loving, “saved” people are rewarded at death with an eternity in a balmy place called heaven.
Christian denominations that disagree on these matters are all certain that their denomination is right, but they obviously all cannot be right, and so they should be thinking that millions of them must be wrong and be headed for a perpetual roasting, or whatever unpleasantness hell has in store.
It took almost a millennium, until 1,274 AD, for the church councils to define the Trinity. If belief in the Trinity is essential to salvation, as many Christians think, a lot of Christians were being sent to be cooked before the idea was fully enunciated. Why did God have to take so long about it? The same applies to all those who lived happy lives for millennia before Christ, not realising that they had to be saved and therefore being sent to the sulphurous place.
Until 400 AD, the Church did not place a great emphasis on infant baptisms. Then S Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD) was told by God (presumably) that unbaptized infants went to hell:
If you wish to be a Christian, do not believe, nor say, nor teach, that infants who die before baptism can obtain the remission of original sin.
Original Sin condemns everyone to hell unless they are saved. So, God was being tardy again in not explaining his strict regime, and condemning lots of people who might have wanted to be saved before then to languish for eternity in hell. Cynics would consider, of course, that it was a great improvement to the scam to get parents worried about their infants and have them baptized as Christians long before the children knew what was happening to them. It is disgusting roguery. Why should scientists condone it, even if Gould would?
Most Protestants and Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son equally. Eastern Orthodoxy believes the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, through the Son. Recently the Roman Catholic Church has ruled that it will not accept Mormon baptisms due to the Mormon’s concept of the Trinity. In the Mormon view, the Trinity is three separate entities, whereas, in the Catholic view, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all one and the same.
Southern Baptists have recently reaffirmed that women will not be allowed to be pastors, citing:
Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.1 Corinthians 14:24
But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.1 Timothy 2:12
Billy Graham’s daughter, Anne Graham Lotz, defends her ministry, claiming that Christ instructed Mary Magdalene to spread the “Good News”, so women have the divine authority to be ministers!
But go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples…John 20:17-18
The conclusion to all this has been well expressed long ago:
Every sect is a certificate that God has not plainly revealed his will to man. To each reader the bible conveys a different meaning.Robert Green Ingersoll
How can any scientist accept one jot of this pandemonium of nonsense? Yet to agree to Gould’s NOMA, they must! How could Gould propose it? Mortality was approaching. With it often men’s courage departs, especially of those who have been brought up as Christians.
God as a Falsifiable Hypothesis
God, Massimo Pigliucci points out, is a hypothesis about the physical universe. Even liberal Christians think God acts in the physical universe, otherwise, why have a god? There could be no point in praying otherwise. So, God is active in the physical universe, in the Christian hypothesis. God then is a question within the realm of scientific investigation. He may be investigated by considering His attributes, and treating them as testable hypotheses.
Believers, when challenged by the realities of the physical universe, comfort themselves that belief in god requires faith. Faith defies any investigation—so they are safe! Well, faith might, but God does not! Christians claim that god created the universe in a few days, in a specific sequence of events, not long ago, that this god created all living species, and that he keeps the universe running daily. Subject these claims to scientific criteria of investigation and they are found to be falsifiable. So why don’t Christians, especially those peculiar ones who also think they can simultaneously be scientists, consider whether the evidence falsifies them? Why don’t they test them?
A scientific hypothesis can be investigated by empirical means. Astrophysicists have proposed a theory about the origin of the universe, known as the “Big Bang”. It predicts that the universe should still be suffused by a background radiation, leftover heat from the original explosion. This hypothesis was investigated empirically and the background radiation was discovered by radio-telescopic observation in the 1960s. It matches theoretical predictions quantitatively—the hypothesis is fulfilled precisely. The “Big Bang” theory might be false despite this, but available data do not falsify it—they confirm it.
An argument for God used by theologians in pre-Darwinian times (1831), and still wheeled out by unscupulous evangelists and rabbis intent on tricking the innocent, was Paley’s argument of intelligent design. Hume had demolished the argument, and Darwin turned the argument around by showing that the universe is not perfect at all.
Intelligent Design
• Eyes Consider the human eye, something that Creationists tell us cannot have evolved but must have been designed. If so, there is a careless design fault in the eyes of all vertebrates. Blood vessels serving the eye are positioned in front of the optical nerves, and therefore, can be seen in the field of vision by some people in some circumstances. If God designed us all, and the animals with backbones, he made the same mistake over and over again instead of correcting it.
Squids and octopuses (cephalopods) do not have this same design fault. God knew how to make eyes properly when he made the squidgy creatures of the sea on the fifth day of Creation in Genesis, but not when he made land animals, and even humanity on the sixth day! Supporters of “intelligent design” guiding evolution should be committed to the view that God increases information content during evolution. Here the more primitive animal has the better organ! How do Christians offering Paley’s argument overcome this sloppiness or obtuseness on God’s part? Their standard fall back is that He is testing their faith!
The evolutionary answer to God’s carelessness is that God did not make things as Christians and Jews think, but they evolved, and they evolved in two groups each with complicated eyes, but one with a better design than the other. The better design was that of the squids, not humanity and the vertebrates.
• God of the Gaps The more we know, the less need be attributed to God. God’s role diminishes as human knowledge grows. The trend is for God to disappear as knowledge grows. God therefore serves only to explain what remains to us inexplicable. He is the “God of the Gaps” and when the gaps are closed, God has gone!
• Astronomy Almost everything that was ever believed about astronomy from the bible has been proved wrong. The hypotheses of the bible are better explained as human hypotheses, not God’s profound wisdom, and they show that the bible was written with no omniscience showing itself.
• Geology The scriptures have the ages of the cosmos, the earth and humanity utterly wrong, again showing that no omniscient being had any role in their composition.
• Zoology The scriptures separate out humanity from the animal kingdom and make humans gods over the animals. Molecular genetics show that humans and chimps are almost genetically identical and so are closely related species. The Jewish religion, used also by the Christians, has man made first and women derived from him. Zoology is unequivocal that the femals sex is the original one.
• Anthropology and Religion Different societies have different religions. Religions are historical products of changing human cultures. Religions are born, evolve, and die, as demonstrated by the extinction of ancient religions that were once widespread. The honest judgment and analysis needed for a scientific and rational appraisal of Christian tradition in the evolution of such traditions is impossible for those indoctrinated as Christians. All Christianity can claim is that it is the religion of the dominant society, but there are several others almost as large whose believers are no less certain than Christians that theirs is the only one that is true. The Christian believer keeps within the Christian tradition and is the servant of that tradition. Christians never stop to think that they might be offending the true god by worshipping one of his footmen, or even a demon. Asking a Christian minister for an objective view of Christianity is like asking a blowfly for an objective view of a corpse.
The Theological Fallacy
Eugenie Scott seems to concur with Gould. She made a distinction between methodological and philosophical naturalism to leave a scientific gap for God. She says science adopts naturalism simply as a methodological tool for doing research, but this methodological tool does not dismiss God. The naturalist who denies the existence of God is a naturalist in a philosophical sense—the physical world is all there is. She is saying that Christians who wants to practice science can pretend that Nature is all there is in the lab, and then they can resume their belief that God is all important instead when they leave it. For Scott, naturalism is not a scientific conclusion, but an assumption of the scientific method, and so science cannot inform us as to the existence of God. Since Scott admits that religion has nothing to say about anything natural, then NOMA must be true.
What is ignored is that the scientific method could not work unless naturalism was true in practice. If the finger of God waggled incessantly in everyday affairs according to His whims and the prayers of individual Christians, then science would notice it because effects that are uncaused would be commonplace. Gould admits that a personal God would contradict the scientific evidence. If the God behind the universe works in subtle ways, and entirely through natural laws, as some theistic scientists say, it is impossible to infer His presence. It is therefore more parsimonious to assume His absence. The best that can be had from Scott’s argument seems to be that God is absent in practice! If God is what most people think of as God, NOMA is invalid.
Gould argues from the so-called “naturalistic fallacy”. G E Moore, the philosopher who formulated it, says that it means that “good” resists definition or analysis. Moore thought that if no natural features of what is “good” could be determined, then they must be non-natural features.
This is a fallacious argument because the totality of the features of many things cannot be necessarily listed, and yet no one has any trouble recognizing the referent from the word. A malformed sheep with six legs will still be recognized as a sheep even though the features which define a sheep do not include six legs. That “good” cannot be universally defined does not stop it from being defined in practical cases. Once “good” is agreed in a particular circumstance, nothing stops it from being aimed for in practical and realistic ways. Moreover, if “good” cannot be agreed rationally, then how can religion help? It can postulate some ideal “good” that God preserves, but that is no more use to us than what we have with no God preserving anything. This is the theological fallacy.
Science can certainly inform us about the consequences of what has been achieved in any direction, by observation and analysis, and by experimentation can indicate what can best be done to further our aims. Religion attempted the same but begins with ancient authorities instead of the latest knowledge, and therefore will be likely to come up with outmoded conclusions.
Skeptics can perfectly well and properly expect other skeptics not to believe in God because that is the skeptical position. God cannot be accepted until he is shown to exist. God must be the subject of free inquiry and skeptical investigation, and so has to be disbelieved until such time as the evidence for Him is sufficient for belief.
The people’s God does not exist, because the God of the bible can be dismissed by science. There never was a worldwide flood and the evolutionary order of creation does not match anything in Genesis. Dishonest deists try to hide the biblical God behind a less visible and less interventionist figment of their imaginations. No figment can be disproved by science. What only exists in the imagination cannot be studied in reality. Empirical science therefore has to stand aside for reason to take over. Hume’s dictum and Occam’s razor are premises, but, since we have to begin with some premise, they can be considered as working hypotheses. A working hypothesis is rejected if it does not work. If it makes discovery harder and yields false results then it is not working properly. These working hypotheses have been proved to be practical criteria for discovering what happens in reality without being unnecessarily distracted.
Why Are Scientists Silent?
If the idea of an anthropomorphic god can be considered a testable statement about the physical world, and therefore amenable to scientific investigation, why is it that the overwhelming majority of scientists avoid the whole affair, claiming as Gould does that it isn’t science’s business to mess with religion? Why don’t scientists want to fight ignorance and superstition and educate people in what is real and not fancy as they should? They often denounce astrology or parapsychology. Religion is no different from these other superstitions as a confidence trick and a threat to human reason.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679 AD) at the beginning of the scientific era already understood that religion was trickery. Hobbes was a bitter enemy of “priestcraft” or the authority of the clergy. He believed that priests had usurped power that rightly belonged to the secular sovereign.
By their demonology, and the use of exorcism, and other things appertaining thereto, the priests keep, or think they keep, the people in awe of their power and lessen the dependence of subjects on the sovereign power of their country.Thomas Hobbes
Since we now live in democracies, it is even more true today when people are gulled by right wing Christians into how they should think and cast their votes. Hobbes considered, with the ancient materialists like Epicurus, that priests exploited a natural human fear of the unknown to convince people that invisible powers and agents are at work in the world and that the priests alone have the power to intercede on people’s behalf to control these “spirits”.
Who, that is in fear of ghosts, will not bear great respect to those who can make the holy water that drives them from him.Thomas Hobbes
The false belief in spirits, made possible by ignorance about the causes of events, gave the clergy its power. So, the most effective way to fight the power of the clergy was to demonstrate that:
- spirits, do not exist,
- all phenomena can and must be explicable solely in terms of matter in motion.
If Hobbes knew all this 400 years ago, why are modern scientists still taken in? Too many scientists are still Christians even though science and Christianity are incompatible. These are the ones who have to check their brains at the church door, as Will Provine said in 1988 (Scientists, Face It! Science and Religion are Incompatible, The Scientist 9(5)). Pigliucci says scientists like these “simply shut down their higher cognitive functions when it comes to religion. They truly and honestly do not see any contradiction between studying evolution or the ‘Big Bang’ while simultaneously believing in a supernatural being in charge of the whole business”. It is “truly and honestly” impossible to believe this statement, if these people are intelligent enough to be scientists. Psychological factors must be at work that account for it.
Some scientists see the contradiction between reason and the belief in god but do not have the courage to argue a case against religionists. Science has had a bad press when the politicians, corporate bosses and press barons themselves are really to blame. Scientists have become the scapegoats of powerful men for whom science is an easy target. Some scientists do not want another enemy on top of these, and indeed, think they might have a friend if they show some degree of sympathy for supernaturalism even though it is the antithesis of science. Critics say that science is not value-free, and the individual scientist is responsible for the bad ends that politicians and corporations put scientific discoveries to. They avoid the conflict instead of entering the debate, and educating public and politicians about the nature and complexities of science. The religious right are left to say whatever untruths they like, as they have always done, to discredit science.
Not so ignoble as it sounds, scientists are only minions. Few indeed have ever had any degree of power, and the vast majority have none at all. They are employees, mainly badly paid, and have families and responsibilities like anyone else. Scientists are employed by governments and corporations, and even university departments are often funded externally. Theology and religion departments have a clear aim—to maintain the superstition that pays them, but scientists are often morally opposed to the uses their employers have for scientific discoveries. They can only stay quiet, or get out of the profession they have trained for. Needless to say, often the corporate bosses are nominally Christian and would object to their employees criticising the religion that is their cover for roguery.
The authorities use scientists to lend an appearance of objectivity to decisions motivated by political self-interest or financial gain. These scientists are often called “advisers” to corporations or governments, acting as spokespeople to the general public reassuring them of the benefit of certain outcomes. Neither their data nor their reasoning are made public, just their reassurances based on their reputation. The paymasters get away not on]y with presenting spurious conclusions, but also with dismissing people’s concerns as “uninformed”.
Why do the misrepresented experts put up with it? If they do not, as we saw, they get the sack. A survey of American engineers shows that half of those taking part felt “restrained from criticising their employer’s activities or products”. More than 1 in 10 felt that they were “required to do things which violated their sense of right and wrong”.
Pigliucci tells us that, in the United States, conservative political forces are trying to undercut not just government funding of the humanities, but also of the scientific enterprise unless it is directed to the military or to private gain. Write “evolution” in the statement about funded research that will be its public record and it will be erased and some more politically correct locution substituted. The reason is that the US House of Representatives and Senate are filled with superstitious people who believe in God, and think the study of evolution is purely evil. The aim has to be not to attract their attention.
Rise Up and Answer Back!
Neverthless, scientists must rise up and criticise, because they and the world will be risked if the superstitions of patriarchy get a grip again, as they could do.
Despite public education, poll after poll of the American public shows their poor understanding of basic scientific facts like evolution or the expansion of the universe. The majority of people are ignorant. Even those with college degrees have a poor understanding of the real world—the physical universe. Belief in the irrational and supernatural is due mostly to ignorance. Therefore, the first goal of scientists has to be to teach science effectively.
If people do not comprehend the world they live in, how can superstition be beaten? Too many scientists and educators shilly-shally in their job of seeking and spreading the truth to the best of their abilities. Few are passionate about wanting to stimulate and guide people in the quest for a rational interpretation of the world we live in. What is at stake is the survival of the human race in the face of complex environmental problems. Are we to rely on faith in a transcendental God who supposedly created this obstacle course for us and will therefore take care of us so long as we have faith? Others had a clearer vision:
We must get rid of that Christ, we must get rid of that Christ!Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I had my way, the world would hear a pretty stern command—Exit Christ.Thomas Carlyle
Scientists must stop being on the defensive. Everybody has the right to believe whatever they wish, and convention has it that we should respect other people’s beliefs, but how can something that is just believed with no evidence be respected? Scientists should consider it their duty to help to drag aside the veil of superstition that still shrouds the supposedly enlightened world. Fearlessly teach what science has the evidence for! Do not fear confrontation with ignoramuses, hacks, and politicians, but explain what evidence you have to know it is true. It is useful also to be able to counter the false arguments of the religionists.
Frank von Hippel is a good model here. By providing accessible, informative analyses of controversial issues as ammunition for those who refuse to be bamboozled by the authorities, for 30 years, he has been exposing the way that science and scientists are manipulated by the American political and industrial establishment. He has documented many abuses of science. Reports confirming that the defoliant 2,4,5-T caused birth defects were shelved while enormous quantities of the chemical were being used to strip South Vietnam. The US government was reassuring the public that there was no danger while concealing the relevant information.
Similar stories can be told about false reassurances being given for the Strategic Defense Initiative, nuclear power stations, airport runways, food additives, and gas guzzling, inefficient, polluting motor vehicles—in Europe, uncontrolled testing of a bogus AIDS drug on Romanian babies, the selling of nuclear power as the greenest energy source, and the quasi-scientific lobbying of the meat, tobacco, sugar, pharmaceuticals and motor industries some of which have led to recent disasters.
Since governments and corporate bosses are conspiring against the public, Von Hippel recommends support and encouragement for whistle-blowers. They need it with such powerful enemies, and little public sympathy for causes in their best interests that they ought to support. Rachel Carson was villified in an orchestrated denigration that followed the publication of her book, The Silent Spring, in 1962, until her death.
Von Hippel wanted clear, direct communication between scientists and the citizens whose wellbeing is ultimately at stake. But why is it that relatively few scientists are keen to talk to the public—and relatively few citizens are eager to listen? Why are both professionals and lay people vulnerable to concerted campaigns of public falsehood and evasion?
The answers must lie in the attitudes to science that are instilled in both groups by their socialization, and particularly their education. Science graduates entering teacher training cannot explain science or even convey their enthusiasm for it. Worse than this is the NOMA syndrome. Mmany have been given the idea that science is concerned only with facts and theorems. It is not the role of the scientist to uphold moral or social values. That is the role of clergymen and politicians. It is NOMA, and it suits employers that scientists are restrained from thinking about principles and values, qualms and ideals. “It is not my worry”, is the invited response. It is!
This illusory separation of knowledge and skill from decency creates the routine abrogation of responsibility that the moguls exploit so happily. On weekdays, scientists may develop pesticides or GM crops, but on weekends they tend their gardens and wonder where the ladybugs and butterflies have gone. They know the connexion with their own work but respond as they are invited, “It is not my worry”. They suppress it as required.
Schoolteaching is in such a mess now that little can be taught effectively that is in the least bit difficult. Everything has to be fun, but not everything is. Just enough science is taught to persuade youth that it is too difficult for them. They are successfully immunized against it. Millions of people are programmed to switch off when science is mentioned, especially if it suggests that they should run smaller cars, eat less, or make some other minor sacrifice for the benefit of their children’s environment.
Religionism never plays fair. Its objective is nothing less than a frontal attack on science and rationalism. Do not make the error of underestimating the Christian Right backlash. Pigliucci concludes that if it succeeds, the world will be a much worse place to live than if scientists had stood the ground they inherited from Galileo and Darwin. People will not be burnt at the stake over barrels of burning pitch but instead cooked slowly in a man-sized microwave oven, or subjected to horrific psychological tortures perfected in the cold-war and its successors. Stand aside and superstitious tyranny will rule again. It is an attractive thought to many, so stand up and speak!
