Dan Sawyer answered my opening volley in our debate on science and religion in a post titled A Skin-Deep Territory Distinction. He makes some good points regarding areas where science and religion touch, overlap and even (as he says) aim for the same territory. For the most part I don’t think I can really disagree with what he said. There is one thing I’d like to examine though.

He says that the concept of Non-overlapping Magesteria, which is similar to what I’m proposing, isn’t historically representative of the relationship between science and religion. That may very well be true, in fact I guess based on his examples I know it to be true. I suppose when I think of religion I’m thinking of it as a tool though. Not how that tool has been used, but how it should be used. Again, just trying to think this through and I could well be wrong, but here goes.

Let’s go back, let’s go way back. Religion was a tool that man used historically to explain things going on around them and more than likely they didn’t make a clear cut distinction between the natural and the supernatural. if it rained, a natural phenomenon, they may come up with a supernatural cause. Let me pause here and say that I think all religions (even my own) were sort of manufactured by men. I think that Christians/Jews had the advantage of the basis of their religion, their relationship with God, being true. So, man historically used religion as a tool for everything from examining the natural universe, to making laws, to relating to their god(s).

Along comes science. Science as earlier defined is based on observation and reproducible test results and not on superstition or mythology. I think that gives us better results where the tool is appropriately used. Currently science does have a lot of useful things to tell us about human nature, consciousness, the ultimate nature of reality, origins, endings, and morality. I think religion certainly has things to say about those topics too. So I suppose making a stark contrast between the natural and the supernatural and thus making a stark contrast between science and religion may be a mistake.

It seems that the magesteria do overlap to a degree, whether its simply bumping up against one another or getting thoroughly muddled. It doesn’t surprise me. There’s nothing magical about either “magesteria” after all. They are tools and like any tools they can be misused. If the only tool you have is hammer then everything you encounter may look like a nail. Sometimes, just like physical tools, science and religion can be misused by themselves to answer questions they aren’t best suited for and sometimes they can be used in tandem for a better result.

Stephen Jay Gould, advocate of the NOMA view seems to indicate this in this quote:

[E]ach subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority … This resolution might remain all neat and clean if the nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA) of science and religion were separated by an extensive no man’s land. But, in fact, the two magisteria bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border. Many of our deepest questions call upon aspects of both for different parts of a full answer—and the sorting of legitimate domains can become quite complex and difficult.

Dan goes on to say that religions’ focus is “on securing and/or maintaining power” and is “concerned with controlling the behavior of beings in the temporal world”. Again I can’t argue that this hasn’t pretty consistently been the case. I would argue that this is not the fault of the tool or in fact its actual purpose. People have used science and philosophy and probably another thing or two lying about for the exact same purposes. That is a people problem.

He closes by saying:

Besides, I daresay that a religion which made no claims about reality, made no demands on its patrons, promised no rewards (temporal, eternal, or existential), and said nothing substantive about human nature would maintain a hold on parishioners for very long. Don’t believe me? Look at the thin attendance of liberal protestant churches compared to moderate and conservative ones.

All religions I’m aware of do all of these things. My original definition said that religion was “to put us in touch with whatever we believe to be true about something that exists outside of the natural realm”. There will be claims about where reality meets god. There will be demands made on how we are to relate to the supernatural and the natural. There will be rewards, though in Christianity most of those rewards are rightly laid up in Heaven and thus supernatural, not all of them are. They do say something about human nature and since there is something of the divine in us it is right for religion to speak to those areas. So religion is not purely supernatural, but it is that which allows us to examine where the supernatural and the natural collide and influence one another, something science can’t do.