“Religion” and “science” are typically held to be opposing worldviews, especially in the United States where they identify two sides of a cultural divide (such that Jesus fish and Darwin fish are as common on American cars as are bumper stickers). For those of us who are trying to learn from both, it often seems like a relief to hear compromises like the late Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of “non-overlapping magisteria” (abbreviated NOMA). Briefly, in effect, Gould says that there is no need for conflict between science and religion, because science deals with questions of fact and religion with questions of value (or of “moral meaning”). Ken Wilber puts forward a slightly more sophisticated version of the non-overlapping magisteria view:
Simply imagine what would happen if we indeed said that modern physics support mysticism. What happens, for example, if we say that today’s physics is in perfect agreement with Buddha’s enlightenment? What happens when tomorrow’s physics supplants or replaces today’s physics (which it most definitely will)? Does poor Buddha then lose his enlightenment? You see the problem. If you hook your God to today’s physics, then when that physics slips, that God slips with it. (from Grace and Grit, p. 20)
Gould’s claim would be a great way of resolving the conflicts between science and religion – if it were true. The problem is that it isn’t. A rigid separation between fact and value cannot be rationally sustained, and rare is the “religious” person who tries to do so. Gould approvingly cites encyclicals from Pius XII and John Paul II allowing Catholics to believe in evolution; but they don’t do so on the grounds of a fact-value distinction. The popes say we may believe in the evolution of the body as long as we also believe those bodies have souls; but the existence of souls, if true, would be a fact. It is a fact imbued with moral meaning – but so are the existence of grinding poverty, the development of a fetus, and the heritability of homosexual orientation.
Other “religions” are similarly concerned with questions of fact. Much of Buddhism is composed of psychological hypotheses about the nature and origins of human suffering. If we can disprove empirically that suffering is caused by craving, then we have effectively disproved Buddhism. Wilber is right to see that if we tie our “religious” claims to scientific ones, then they become far more tentative, far less a source of certainty; but that’s just in the nature of knowledge itself. People have disagreed on matters “religious” since time immemorial. (The soul that’s so essential for the Popes is explicitly and directly denied by the Buddha of the Pali suttas.) Science does offer ways of resolving some of those disputes, for those inclined to listen. To refuse to tie your beliefs to experimental evidence, for fear that they might be disproven, is to refuse to allow your beliefs to be true.
It’s not just that “religion” deals in matters of fact. It’s also that science deals in matters of value. I’ve previously discussed the way in which health is itself a value, and medical science is inescapably normative in prescribing the healthy functioning of human beings. The point applies even to biomedical science with no explicit psychological component, but it goes double for psychology and neurology, which cannot help but deal with questions of happiness, virtue and vice.
The NOMA idea only has a chance of making sense if we separate questions of value out into an a priori realm completely detached from the physical world – as Kant tried to do, for example. But it’s an inordinately difficult task to try and derive a full set of answers to questions of value without reference to the physical world, and I don’t think that even Kant managed to succeed at it. Even when asking questions of ethics and meaning, we need evidence from the physical world. And that means that, indeed, science may disprove matters like the Buddha’s enlightenment – not causing him to lose it, but demonstrating that he never had it in the first place. The point is all the more reason to embrace some degree of uncertainty; new connections in the physical world are likely to be discovered, in ways that change things we thought we knew for sure. I’ve previously noted the difficulty with attempts at certain knowledge. Since writing that post, I’ve become a little more confident in saying we can never truly have certain knowledge – but, of course, I have not become certain.
Why do we need a ground that can mediate truth-claims by “religion” and “science,” Amod? Why not a communitarian, non-foundational theory of knowledge? I follow James K.A. Smith on this: We can subscribe to “knowledge without certainty, truth without objectivity.” Isn’t that what Wilber too is saying?
Hey Topher – great to hear from you again. I’d just been thinking about how good it had been to have your comments before.
Your comment raises many different issues, and I think they need to be picked apart from each other. I’m all for knowledge without certainty, a position I’ve become more confident about lately. But truth without objectivity seems rather a different prospect. Truth and knowledge have to do with a known object as well as a knowing subject, and neither’s role can be left out of the process; the philosophies that collapse the two (like Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta) really only do so at the ultimate level where all distinctions are collapsed, not in any attempt to think the everyday world. (Wilber takes a similar approach as far as I know: only at the highest level are things nondual.) We need the object in its objectivity.
Similarly, I have strong doubts as to whether or how a non-foundational theory of knowledge is possible. Theories of knowledge that attempt to be non-foundational (such as coherentism) still seem to require the principle of non-contradiction in order to argue anything at all; and that seems to make non-contradiction into a foundation.
I suspect I would agree, though, that thinking in terms of “religion” and “science” isn’t particularly fruitful. I’ve expressed my doubts about the concept of “religion” before. I find it more helpful to think in terms of philosophy, practice and community – but philosophy must include concepts from “religion” as well as from science, without a division formed between the two.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply to my question, Amod! I see once again I’ve quickly gone beyond my depth. But this is such an important line of thought that I hope you don’t mind my pressing you further and restating my question. This is my problem with epistemology in the most elementary form I can think of:
Philosopher A: “Any objective ground is a mental construct.”
Philosopher B: “Any mental construct presupposes an objective ground.”
And I can’t conceive of a solution to this chicken v egg conundrum. My response, and I hope it’s a dignified one, is to take the objective ground on Faith, but to restrict my conversation to the constructs. Is a more nuanced stance possible?
Of course I don’t mind, and please don’t worry about “going beyond your depth.” The nature of this site means that nobody here is an expert at everything under discussion, including me. Maybe especially not me. And besides, with the glorification of subject expertise in academia these days, I find that specialists in a field increasingly ignore the most pressing and basic questions that an outsider brings.
The conundrum you present here is a hugely important one: which comes first, epistemology or ontology? (“First” in a logical or foundational sense, not a chronological sense.) I’ve wondered about it a fair bit. Taking faith as a starting point helps with a lot of things; especially with practice, the fact that you have to actually live your life and not just understand it. But if it’s faith seeking understanding (and in your case it’s hard for me to imagine it being anything else), you’re going to want to push further.
The way that I’ve most often seen the issue resolved is to acknowledge that, at the most fundamental level, mental constructs and objective ground are ultimately the same – which is basically to say an idealist view of the world, in which reality is mind. Hegel and Indian Advaita Vedānta tradition both go here, in different ways: Hegel seeing the ultimate objective ground as a world spirit developing in history, Advaita seeing it as an undifferentiated unity in which the subject-object distinction is finally transcended. (Ken Wilber tries to have it both of these ways.)
I’m not sure whether I buy either solution, but your comment has reminded me of one of the biggest reasons that lend plausibility to them. Right now I’m trying to do some reading related to foundational questions in epistemology and ontology before I try and explore my views systematically on the blog. (So far I think my posts have basically been nibbling at the edges of these questions. It probably would be good to take a deeper bite sooner rather than later.)
I am afraid I am insisting on the same point we disagree about (I still believe that St. Teresa may well have had a perception of God), but… why do you think that science can disprove religion? It can disprove a religion such as the one upholding a literal reading of its Sacred Texts (a naive version of “Intelligent Design”), but not one which reads the Sacred Texts as relating to the Sacred and not to the Empirical. You surely know Galileo Galilei’s quote “Sacred Texts do not speak about heaven, but about how to *reach* heaven”.
On the other hand, the Buddha (as far as I understand) did not “explicitly and directly deny” the existence of an ?tman. Rather, he said that it is unessential and, hence, that it is better not to waste time on such vain curiosities –compared to the curiosity to know who was the archer while we are bleeding because of the wound caused by his arrow.
I’m skeptical of the category of “the sacred” in the first place, and for that matter the category of religion. I don’t see “religious” claims as being set aside in a realm separate from the rest of human inquiry. The Buddha claims that suffering comes from craving – that is a psychological hypothesis, put in terms understandable to psychologists, and at least in part empirically testable. Nor is Galileo right here, as far as I can tell – sacred texts do indeed speak about heaven, as indeed they must if they are going to tell us how to reach it!
I think your interpretation of the Buddha is incorrect here, as well. I’ll grant that you are at least technically right on the first part that he did not explicitly and directly deny the ātman: he didn’t say “there is no self” per se. He did, however, speak of non-self all the time; and he was pretty clear that the non-self-ness of people and things was not among the “questions that tend not to edification.” We need to know that we and the universe are anatta, as we need to know they are impermanent and dukkha. This is knowledge about the arrow and the wound, not the man who shot it.
(All this is to speak of the Buddha as he is presented in the suttas, of course – some recent work discussed at the AAR suggests that Pudgalavāda was the most prevalent school in early India, so much so that we might wonder whether the historical Buddha actually preached it and not the non-self for which he is so familiar.)
Whilst one may feel that the sort of atheist who says that all religions disagree on fundamentals and therefore they can’t all be right is himself wrong in an important way, the problem is that it is conventional religion that has lit the fuse for this fine explosion. What is to be said in favour of the proposition that they can disagree as much as they like because there are no facts of the case? There are no contiguous fact fields as NOMA would perhaps have it and religion at the highest level is an apophatic netti netti which catches nothing.
Metaphysical systems play their part in the shepherding of being. They are like the thorn that is used to remove a thorn. Once the job is done both thorns are discarded. Yet there are predilictions. For instance I have never been even slightly persuaded by Idealism of any sort but at the same time I won’t say that the Vijnanavadin couldn’t be enlightened due to his shaky grip on reality.
Evolution is unquestionably a trap for the unwary who argue from the certainty of Doctrinal axioms. From the mechanism of Reincarnation which states that birth is due to merit or demerit in a previous incarnation, Sankara deduces (Brahma Sutra Bhasya) that creation must be beginningless because there could be no first births without previous merit. An ingenious Houdini like wriggle was explained to me by a devout Hindu once. I can’t recall the details.
Monogenism (descent from one set of parents) is taken to be a sine qua non of Original Sin. There can’t be Adam and Eve and Shlomo and Esther if there is to be an actual transgression whose stain is transmitted to all descendants. The word here is that the descendants of other than our first parents died out soon or something of the kind.
This is not so much a jurisdiction infraction as a mythos logos confusion. I mean myth in a positive sense and not just an untruth. A myth may be a way of focusing the mind on mystery.
It is important to note that myths have functions beyond the literal, I’ll grant. I think it would be a tremendous mistake, though, to reduce the phenomena we call “religion” to myth/os entirely. I don’t think there is a sense in the suttas, for example, that the Noble Truths are meant to be taken as metaphors – they are among the truths that the myths point to.
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