This essay from the New York Times by William Broad makes a case (in my opinion a weak one) for why science and religion need not struggle against each other; the essence of his argument is that science and religion inhabit separate spheres and if scientists would show some humility and not expect to explain everything in naturalistic terms, science and religion could peacefully co-exist. (Since I set great store by our ability to explain things in naturalistic terms, I found this essay extremely irritating.) Science and religion are distinctly different kinds of endeavors, so in that sense they are non-overlapping. But there is plenty of overlap in the subject matter they cover (the origins of the earth and the universe, the origins of humankind, and increasingly the reasons for emotions and behavior). And that is where many of the problems lie.
Broad takes as an example the discovery that the prophecies of the ancient Oracle of Delphi were fueled by a mix of intoxicating gases arising through geological processes to the temple where the oracle presided. While explaining the trance states the oracle entered, these scientists declined to discuss the meaning of her utterances or why people set such store by them. I don’t know what field these scientists were in, but they sound like geologists to me, and since the brain science behind how humans use language to create and find cultural meaning is in its infancy if that, I can understand why geologists would not want to speculate in that area. (Actually the “seeming reliability of her pronouncements” can probably be understood in terms of people remembering and maybe writing down the good ones and forgetting the bad ones, or possibly interpreting them after the fact the way people do with Nostradamus.) In other words, just because one branch of science can’t explain everything right now about a phenomenon, that doesn’t mean that the not-yet-understood bits have to be left to religion to explain.
Furthermore, this story about the Oracle of Delphi doesn’t touch on any of the things that exercise religious fundamentalists today. Few people care all that much about how the oracle inspired Socrates, and I’d bet that no one’s religious identity relies on any of her words or their supposedly divine inspiration. This is not a very realistic test for the ability of religious fundamentalists to accept science’s findings about something that matters to them, like for example the origins of humankind. And if it had been, say, the Sermon on the Mount or the Ten Commandments that had been found to be inspired by subterranean intoxicating gases percolating up through a fault system, if scientists had studied just that and nothing about the enduring meaning that people have found in these things, the protests would likely range from cries of “Reductionism!” to cries of “Blasphemy!”
