Breaking the Pax Magisteriorum: The New War of Science and Religion

Western philosophy and religion have co-existed more or less uneasily for over two thousand years, sometimes inspiring each other, sometimes engaging in what some have called warfare. In the modern period, science became faith's most visible rival, occasionally prompting public confrontations such as after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and at the Scopes Trial (1925). In the late 1980s and early 90s, the faith-based attack on Darwin resurfaced with a movement to teach "Intelligent Design" in science classes, sparking a new struggle between the authority of science and religion with fundamentalists on the offensive. With the rise of religious violence culminating in 9/11, however, faith found itself playing defense in the latest round of religion/science polemics.

Ironically, the post-9/11 hostilities followed on the heels of Stephen J. Gould's attempt at a rapprochement, his Rocks of Ages (1999), which argued that science and religion ought to be considered "non-overlapping magisteria," i.e., each authoritative in its domain: science concerned with facts and religion concerned with values.¹ If Gould had been right, there would have been no common territory between religion and science worth fighting over. But even if 9/11 had not raised the temperature of the science/religion debate, Gould's proposed pax magisteriorum was not to be. As many critics noted, science and religion both assert facts, science is not indifferent to values, and religion is not consistently authoritative on morality.

In the face of Gould's irenic proposal, four members of the Reason Project—Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett (the neo-rationalists)—entered the fray of public debate on the side of secular reason against the privileges enjoyed by theistic faith. In their wake appeared a burgeoning literature on the public role of religion in a modern democracy. Not surprisingly, much of the literature has consisted of apologetics by the faithful and skeptics' alarms about fanatical faith.

The neo-rationalists cloak themselves in the mantles of reason, argument, and evidence against the irrational excesses of the faithful. Apologists for faith, predictably, tout the virtues of religion and the rationality of believing at least some things without all the evidence in. On closer inspection, however, the intense partisanship seems less like a debate than a duel of dogmatisms, whose conclusions are predetermined either de jure by the current orthodoxies of faith or de facto by the materialist metaphysics that dominates academic philosophy and much secular culture.² Still, notwithstanding the predictable biases, there is still considerable interest in the muck that is raked along the way. Indeed, because the faithful and their scientistic opponents seem dedicated to overlooking the limits of their own perspectives, a kind of rough adversarial justice is achieved by examining the situation from both sides. The atheists not only highlight religion's dangers but also suggest some of the social and psychological causes of fanatical excess. Conversely, because the skeptics are tone deaf to metaphysical thinking, one learns less from their dismissals of theological argument than from those who consider them in historical and philosophical depth.

In the end, as one would expect, real progress lies with approaches that are not predetermined one way or the other. Significantly, where polemicists are typically preoccupied with justifying or condemning supernaturalism, the more promising reconstructions of the science/religion issue focus on 1) the personal-transformational and social significance of religion (while acknowledging the pathologies) and 2) the metaphysical issues that are raised by the science of evolution.

In what follows, I will discuss some of the more high profile members of the contemporary conversation on faith and reason, not to summarize the many views, but to point out certain salient features of the debate itself and on the possibilities of further clarification of the science/religion relationship. I will first focus on the two sides of the debate and their polemical effects, and then consider several non-partisan voices in order to bring some wider considerations into view.

War's Collateral Benefits

Polemics serve to focus...