Vladimir Krondan's bit about expecting "immunity from theological scrutiny" is laughable. Science earned its magisterium. What did religion do to get its, apart from bullying people into respecting it, and capitalizing on that as it crystallized into tradition?

Grendelkhan, your comment misrepresents history. Since most TT commenters react to Christianity when religion is mentioned it is worth remembering that Christians were bullied and worse when that particular religion was born. They provided some good meals to Roman lions and Nero used them as Roman candles. I would not want to explore history's details on this if I were you but if you choose to do so I'm more than willing to explain the role of some very prominent secular governments in historic atrocities of the first magnitude.

BTW, although I have mixed views about NOMA its strongpoint, is not the need to respect non-scientific disciplines, but rather maintaining the integrity of science which, after all, should be an empirically grounded area of study; not one that strays beyond empirical boundaries.

Believe it or not, I thought that last comment was better. Much better.

Rodger Rabbitt and I had our discussion in the Kill the Wabbit thread. It is pretty much over.

You will have to excuse me for giving all of my focus to Joy and other science threads. Joy makes my head hurt and I am a masochist.

You might want to listen in if you don't mind a little headache. link

Regards,
TP

However, I do believe there is one aspect to that issue that is quite applicable to the NOMA question and therefore to this thread. (Phillip Johnson has also responded to Gould's NOMA proposals by pointing out the implications.)

If science were to be given exclusive dominion over the realm of the objectively real and the factual, a consequence is that giving morality and values over to religion/philosphy necessarily relegates those disciplines to a status of dealing with subjective views, not objective reality.

In such a division of roles, the ideas that
a) moral evil is objectively real (not merely an opinion or assessment from some viewpoint), or
b) that there is objectively a way that humans ought to behave (such that some ideas about morality might be closer to the truth than others), or even
c) that humans objectively have inalienable rights
– these are all excluded by the division of magesterial roles.

As a tag to this, Thought Provoker expressed the idea that my statement about the limitations of science did not appear very limitting. However, it remains as I said that science (and logic) cannot introduce a term into a conclusion that it cannot include in its premises. This fact applies here. Science has no access to moral axioms, and therefore is incapable of rendering a conclusion about what people "ought" to do.

No one can legitimately move logically from only a list of "is" premises (what science may access and provide) to an "ought" conclusion. So, if science were considered the only toolset to deal with objective reality and therefor its exclusive arbiter, then the perceived status of morals would necessarily become subjective under those terms.

If NOMA is real what then do we make of evolutionary psychology or sociobiology and writers such as E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker and Marc Hauser? By Gould's definition of NOMA are they talking theology?

Good question. NOMA is not about the nature of propositions (e.g., normative, descriptive, scientific, theological) but about the authority, and consequently, power, to establish them. J.B.S. Haldane is one such authority. If there is such a thing as a magisterial authority of science, Haldane would have been it, or at least part of it. Who has the authority to contradict the following statements he made in his 1947 book Science Advances, or to judge them as being outside of Haldane's authority?

…Marxism is the application of scientific method to the widest field so far achieved by man. If Marxism were taken for granted, or even if its general principles were widely understood in this country, such emphasis would be unnecessary.

Sixty years ago Karl Marx died in London. Every year since his death he has had a greater influence on world history above all since Lenin put his theories into practice in 1917. … [Marx] can justly be compared with contemporaries like Faraday, Darwin, and Pasteur, who are still influencing our lives and thoughts, because their ideas were important not only for their own time, but for many generations to come. These men applied scientific method to new fields. So did Marx.

Just as Darwin applied scientific method to the problem of man's ancestry, and Pasteur to that of his diseases, Marx applied it to history, politics, and economics.

We celebrate the anniversary of the great teacher who has shown us the way out of our present distresses, who has demonstrated that there are no limits to the application of science.


If we answer the question like so: "everyone has, if not the authority, at least the right, and even the duty" to oppose Haldane, then we have dispensed with NOMA.

In the middle of all this, Eric asked…

Gee, do we have any actual defenders of standard NOMA, per se, here?

Good Question.

I think the following comment from Grendelkhan comes closest to defending Gould's idea of NOMA with…

That all sounds quite nice, but as I've pointed out, science is a tool used for certain things. As in Gould's original example, you can't use it to find beauty, or other subjective things. (I suppose you could use it to describe what people describe as beautiful, which is kind of close.) You certainly can't use it to set policy; you can only use it to inform policy. Science must remain mute on questions such as "should we raise the minimum wage", or "should we send rockets to Mars"; it can only describe reasons to do or not to do these things.

Grendelkhan went on to say…

Of course, this has nothing to do with the religious asking science to step off their toes when the religious have made the mistake of talking about the material world, but to say that science is the answer to everything is both wrong and irrelevant to the discussion.

And to give equal time to the other side, Vladimir Krondan wrote…

Scientists and scientific cheerleaders should not expect any special immunity from theological scrutiny, especially with respect to dubious statements about the nature of man, free will, meaning, purpose, morality, or lack thereof, etc.

To summarize, I believe whether or not you call it NOMA, Gould's idea that there is no reason for a conflict between science and religion is faulty at best. I would further press that there shouldn't be any reason to worry about whether ID is religious or not, it doesn't matter anywhere but in a courtroom.

Rephrasing Eric's question. Is anyone going to argue that science CAN NOT influence religion and visa versa? Whether they SHOULD be separate has become a moot point because too many people are ignoring NOMA restrictions, IMO.

To borrow a term Joy often says. "We live in a post Wedge world." I suggest it is rapidly transfoming into "We live in a post NOMA world."

As I have indicated, I would like to explore the possibility of a mutual, OMA truth that at least some of us can agreed upon. Here is a link to the TT Wabbits thread where I offer some guidelines for doing so.

Provoking Thought

Thank you for the response. Yes, the descriptive vs. normative is an issue. However, I think that evolutionary psychology uses the descriptive to rationalize the process of normalizing behavior. This is where science becomes a difficult issue because it begins to rationalize normative approaches on "how" questions.

If NOMA is real what then do we make of evolutionary psychology or sociobiology and writers such as E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker and Marc Hauser? By Gould's definition of NOMA are they talking theology? I don't think anyone would take that seriously. These writers are taking seriously not only the development but the continual operation of morality.

late_model,

I think it's important to distinguish between descriptive versus normative views of morality. Evolutionary psychology may describe morality and explain its origin, but it's hard for me to see how it could ever justify a particular system of morals. I am not a NOMA advocate, but I do think that you could satisfy the NOMA paradigm by allocating the normative aspects of morality to religion and the descriptive aspects to science.

That said, I see no evidence that religion is any more competent to deal with normative morality than it has been in dealing with cosmology or biology.

Does anyone else agree or see this different?

NOMA is just another way of protecting scientific charlatans from the scrutiny of taxpayers.

The 'self-correcting nature of science' is no more or less remarkable than the self-correcting nature of cricket, bricklaying, olympic wrestling, politics, or religion.

Religion?

Vladimir, you might want to reassess your claim after comparing the progress of science versus religion over the past 500 years.