Interactions Between Science & Religion

Abstract

Though I find it changing now, my approach to the science and religion issue had been close to what Stephen Jay Gould (1999) calls ‘‘NOMA’’ or Non-Overlapping Magisteria. He uses the word ‘‘magisteria’’ to denote domains of authority in teaching; and he sees the domain of science as covering the empirical realm, while the domain of religion ‘‘extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value’’ (p. 6). The important thing for Gould is that these domains are mutually exclusive; they do not overlap, which means that they do not interfere with each other. This is a nice, neat solution to the problem of the relationship between science and religion, a problem that seems to be centered in the late-20th century United States on the issue of teaching about creationism as an alternative to or replacement for evolution. By arguing for NOMA, Gould is saying in effect that creationism has no place in the science classroom because it does not belong to the empirical realm, and like most biologists I agree with Gould. NOMA is also a fairly accurate description of the official teaching of the Catholic church on the relationship between religion and science as presented in the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis where Pope Pius XII states that the study of physical evolution was outside of his purview, his magiste-