Rocks of Ages by Stephen Jay Gould
Darwin, who has been setting Gray up for this denouement all along, now moves in for the kill. If a single baby is only an individual in a population of human beings, why should a single species rank as any more than an individual among all earthly species in the fullness of geological time? And why should Homo sapiens be viewed as a goal and a generality, when Pharkidonotus percarinatus (a favorite fossil snail of mine—I am not making this name up), which lived for a much longer time with markedly larger populations, ranks only as a particular accident of history? What, beyond our dangerous and unjustified arrogance, could even permit us to contemplate such a preferred status for one species among the hundreds of millions that have graced the history of our planet? Therefore human existence must also be judged as a “detail … left to the working out of what we may call chance.” And we have already agreed, for the man killed by lightning and the child born with severe handicaps, that such details cannot embody moral messages or reveal ultimate meanings. Darwin writes: “I can see no reason why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws.”
Darwin wrote this letter to Gray on May 22, 1860. Gray’s response elicited a further statement from Darwin in July—an even more forceful argument that nature’s facts, even the ones we like best (especially the origin of our own species), cannot reveal God’s purposes or life’s ultimate meaning:
One more word on “designed laws” and “undesigned results.” I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun and kill it, I do this designedly. An innocent and good man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you believe (and I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? … If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man and the gnat are in the same predicament. If the death of neither man nor gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed.
To people who find such a cold bath depressing, who feel that the quality of human life must be degraded and cheapened in a universe without intrinsic meaning recorded in our terms, and who fear that our inability to glean moral truth from the facts of nature can only lead to a destructive ethical relativism (or even to a denial of the existence or importance of morality at all), I can only urge the wisdom behind the opposite reading, as championed by Darwin and embodied in NOMA.
What can be more deluding, or even dangerous, than false comfort that blinds our vision and inspires passivity? If moral truth lies “out there” in nature, then we need not struggle with our own confusions, or with the varying views of fellow humans in our diverse world. We can adopt the much more passive approach of observing nature (or just accepting what “experts” tell us about factual reality) and then aping her ways. But if NOMA holds, and nature remains neutral (while bursting with relevant information to spice our moral debates), then we cannot avoid the much harder, but ultimately liberating, task of looking into the heart of our distinctive selves.
I do not deny the comfort of older views that fractured NOMA and defined the universe in terms of our hopes and supposed powers. “All things under his feet” may fuel the body, as “all things bright and beautiful” fuels the soul. But this food may be poison under a sugarcoating. The combined wisdom of all classes in all cultures—from the pomp of past power reduced to legs of stone in the desert of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” to the common fate of palookas (“the bigger they are, the harder they fall”)—proclaims the virtue of tough-minded modesty, and the location of real power in realms of appropriate and effective action.
To anyone who feels cosmically discouraged at the prospect of life as a detail in a vast universe not evidently designed for our presence, I offer two counterarguments and an item of solace. Consider, first, the much greater fascination and intellectual challenge of such a mysterious but knowable universe, compared with a “friendlier” and more familiar cosmos that only mirrors our hopes and needs. Then contemplate, secondly, the happier prospect of fulfilling the Socratic dictum to “know thyself” by actively trying to fathom a distinctively human nature within, rather than passively imbibing a generalized external nature without, as we struggle to define the purposes of our lives.
Finally, and for solace, I present a wonderful sonnet by Robert Frost, so tightly keyed to Darwin’s argument in his letters to Gray (another quintessential New Englander) that I must locate Frost’s inspiration in his intimate knowledge of Darwin’s writing (as expressed in several other poems as well). Frost, on a morning walk, encounters an odd conjunction of three white objects with different geometries. This peculiar but fitting combination, he argues, must record some form of intent; it cannot be accidental. But if intent be truly manifest, than what can we make of our universe—for the scene is evil by any standard of human morality. We must take heart in Darwin’s proper solution: We are really observing one of those “details” that, “whether good or bad,” belongs to the domain “of what we may call chance.” Design does not govern here:
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.
Homo sapiens also ranks as a “thing so small” in a vast universe, a wildly improbable evolutionary event, and not the nub of universal purpose. Make of such a conclusion what you will. Some people find the prospect depressing. I have always regarded such a view of life as exhilarating—a source of both freedom and consequent moral responsibility. We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximal freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.
The Two False Paths of Irenics
I’M ALWAYS OPEN TO A new word. Lord knows we invent enough of them within my domain of science. A few years ago, I came across a theological term that tickled my fancy, both for its touch of the arcane, and its mellifluous ring—irenics (from the Greek word for “peace”), defined in opposition to polemics as a branch of Christian theology that “presents points of agreement among Christians with a view to the ultimate unity of Christianity” (Oxford English Dictionary). By extension (and the word has crept out of theological circles and into general English usage), irenic people and proposals “tend to promote peace, especially in relation to theological and ecclesiastical differences.”
Now, I’m an irenic fellow at heart—and I trust that most of us so regard ourselves, whatever personal quirks and foibles stand in the way of realization. This book promotes an irenic solution under a large umbrella extending far beyond the purely Christian realm of official definitions cited above. I join nearly all people of goodwill in wishing to see two old and cherished institutions, our two rocks of ages—science and religion—coexisting in peace while each works to make a distinctive patch for the integrated coat of many colors that will celebrate the distinctions of our lives, yet cloak human nakedness in a seamless covering called wisdom.
Irenics sure beats the polemics of ill-conceived battle between science and religion—a thoroughly false model (chapter 2) that too often continues to envelop us for illogical reasons of history (chapter 3) and psychology (chapter 4). I do get discouraged when some of my colleag
Similarly (of course), I pronounce my anathema upon those dogmatists and “true believers” who, usurping the good name of religion for their partisan doctrines, try to suppress the uncomfortable truths of science, or to impose their peculiar brand of moral fiber upon people with legitimately different tastes. Careers are short, and while I won’t deny some good moments of comedy, and even of prideful achievement, I’d sure rather be studying the evolution and paleontology of West Indian land snails than fighting creationists. ’Nuff said.
If we embrace the alternative premise that irenicism should prevail between science and religion, then what form should our peaceful interaction take? In making this volume’s closing argument for NOMA as the most honorable, and also the most fruitful, form of irenics, I wish to revisit an important principle of intellectual life, previously discussed in highfalutin terms as Aristotle’s golden mean between extremes (see this page), but here embodied in the “Goldilocks principle” of “just right” between too much and too little, too soft and too hard, or too hot and too cold. NOMA represents the bed of proper firmness, and the right amount of oatmeal at the right temperature. NOMA honors the sharp differences in logic between scientific and religious arguments. NOMA seeks no false fusion, but urges two distinct sides to stay on their own turf, develop their best solutions to designated parts of life’s totality, and, above all, to keep talking to each other in mutual respect, and with an optimistic forecast about the value of reciprocal enlightenment. In other words, citing Churchill’s aphorism, to “jaw-jaw rather than war-war.”
This Goldilocks solution provides the right firmness of extensive contact with respect for inherent differences, the right amount of dialogue for devotees of disparate subjects, and the right temperature of discourse for inputs that do not blend. Call NOMA irenics with a punch. The dialogue will be sharp and incisive at times; participants will get riled up, as a blessed consequence of our unextinguishable human nature; but respect for legitimate differences, and a recognition that full answers require distinctive contributions from each side, should maintain a field of interest, honor, and productive struggle.
On the important theme of enemies within versus enemies without, the anti-irenic conflict-mongers who violate NOMA by trying to expand their side into the other’s magisterium pose a greater threat under conventional notions about overt opposition. But they also display the general virtue of “enemies without”: we know where they stand, and we know how to fight back. However, among those who preach irenicism, two prominent approaches would undermine NOMA from within by seeking peace between science and religion under strategies that paralyze the principles of NOMA. I view these two alternate irenicisms as the extremes within a common domicile (the house of peace, in this case) that Goldilocks rejected for a middle way.
The first alternative—too hot, too soft, and too much—continues to amaze me by persistence, even growth, in the face of massive internal contradictions that should have driven such a misguided notion to extinction ages ago. This syncretic school continues to embrace the oldest fallacy of all as a central premise: the claim that science and religion should fuse to one big, happy family, or rather one big pod of peas, where the facts of science reinforce and validate the precepts of religion, and where God shows his hand (and mind) in the workings of nature. (The word syncretic includes both admirable and unfavorable meanings. In choosing such a name for this overwrought style of irenicism, I had only the negative definitions in mind (of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary): “flagrant compromise in religion or philosophy; eclecticism that is illogical or leads to inconsistency; uncritical acceptance of conflicting or divergent beliefs or principles.”)
Much as modern syncretism riles me, I can at least take comfort in a wry feature of the contemporary version—at least from the parochial perspective of a professional scientist. Older and classical forms of syncretism always gave the nod to God—that is, religion set the outlines that everyone had to accept, and science then had to conform. Irenics in this older mode required that the principles and findings of science yield religious results known in advance to be true. Indeed, such conformity represented the primary test of science’s power and validity. For example, Thomas Burnet (see this page–this page) did not doubt that the biblical narrative recorded the earth’s actual history; his scientific job, by his lights, required validation of this known history in terms of causation by invariant natural laws rather than miracles.
But the spectacular growth and success of science has turned the tables for modern versions of syncretism. Now the conclusions of science must be accepted a priori, and religious interpretations must be finessed and adjusted to match unimpeachable results from the magisterium of natural knowledge! The Big Bang happened, and we must now find God at this tumultuous origin.
I’m sorry. I know that I shouldn’t be so dismissive, especially (and ironically) in a section about irenicism. But I find the arguments of syncretism so flawed, so illogical, so based in hope alone, and so freighted by past procedures and certainties, that I have difficulty keeping a straight face or a peaceful pen.
I also feel particularly sensitive about this issue because, as I wrote this book in the summer of 1998, a deluge of media hype enveloped the syncretist position, as though some startlingly new and persuasive argument had been formulated, or some equally exciting and transforming discovery had been made. In fact, absolutely nothing of intellectual novelty had been added, as the same bad arguments surfaced into a glare of publicity because the J. M. Templeton Foundation, established by its fabulously wealthy eponym to advance the syncretist program under the guise of more general and catholic (small c) discussion about science and religion, garnered a splash of media attention by spending 1.4 million bucks to hold a conference in Berkeley on “science and the spiritual quest.”
In a genuine example of true creation ex nihilo—that is, the invention of an issue by fiat of media reports, rather than by force of argument or content of material—at least three major sources preached the syncretist gospel in their headlines and vapidly uncritical reports: “Faith and Reason, Together Again” (The Wall Street Journal, June 12); “Science and Religion: Bridging the Great Divide” (The New York Times, June 30); and a cover story in Newsweek (July 20) simply titled “Science Finds God.” Scientists could only be mystified by this last claim, but at least we can now be certain about one of God’s attributes: he sells newspapers and magazines.
The Times article admitted the intellectual torpor of the proceedings: “A kind of Sunday school politeness pervaded the meeting, with none of the impassioned confrontations expected from such an emotionally charged subject … The audience politely applauded after each presentation. But there was little sense of intellectual excitement.” But from whence could such excitement arise in principle? If NOMA holds (and I devote this book to advocating the validity of this proposition), then facts and explanations developed under the magisterium of science cannot validate (or deny) the precepts of religion. Indeed, if we look at the so-called arguments for syncretism, as described in these reports, they all devolve into a series of fuzzy statements awash in metaphor and illogic. Consider just three examples, not chosen as egregiously silly, but representative of the standard fare.
1. Woolly meta
Take the difficult Christian concept of Jesus as both fully divine and fully human. It turns out that this duality has a parallel in quantum physics. In the early years of this century, physicists discovered that entities thought of as particles, like electrons, can also act as waves … The orthodox interpretation of this strange situation is that light is, simultaneously, wave and particle … So, too, with Jesus, suggests physicist F. Russell Stannard of England’s Open University. Jesus is not to be seen as really God in human guise, or as really human but acting divine, says Stannard: “He was fully both.”
Now what am I to make of such a claim? That the status of Jesus as both God and man (a central trinitarian concept) must be factually true because electrons, and other basic components, can be construed as either waves or particles? I don’t see what such a comparison could indicate except that the human mind can embrace contradiction (an interesting point, to be sure, but not a statement about the factual character of God), and that people can construct the wildest metaphors.
2. Clutching at straws based on superficial similarity. The Wall Street Journal presents the following two remarkable examples of the syncretist notion that science can validate spiritual claims. We learn, first of all, that Darwin himself was a closet syncretist:
Surprisingly, among the first to reunite science and religion was Darwin. The participants argued that he destroyed the notion of God as an absent clock-winder, restoring the ever-present deity of the Psalms. As Arthur Peacocke put it, Darwin permitted “a recovered emphasis on ancient insights,” showing that “God is creating all the time.”