Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (34 page)

NON-OVERLAPPING MAGISTERIA

I
NCONGRUOUS PLACES OFTEN INSPIRE ANOMALOUS STORIES.
I
N EARLY
1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidet in each bathroom, and hungering for something more than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of
identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures that can make life so expansive and interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome to attend a meeting on nuclear winter, sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists.
One day at lunch, the priests called me over to their table to pose a problem that had been troubling them. What, they wanted to know, was going on in America with all this talk about “scientific creationism”? One of the priests asked me: “Is evolution really in some kind of trouble; and, if so, what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between
evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both utterly satisfying and entirely overwhelming. Have I missed something?”

A lively pastiche of French, Italian, and English conversation then ensued for half an hour or so, but the priests all seemed reassured by my general answer—“Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism
is a home-grown phenomenon of American sociocultural history—a splinter movement (unfortunately rather more of a beam these days) of Protestant fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean.” We all left satisfied, but I certainly felt bemused by the anomaly of my role as a Jewish agnostic, trying to reassure a group of priests
that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief.

Another story in the same mold: I am often asked whether I ever encounter creationism as a live issue among my Harvard undergraduate students. I reply that only once, in thirty years of teaching, did I experience such an incident. A very sincere and serious freshman student came to my office with a question that
had clearly been troubling him deeply. He said to me, “I am a devout Christian and have never had any reason to doubt evolution, an idea that seems both exciting and well documented. But my roommate, a proselytizing evangelical, has been insisting with enormous vigor that I cannot be both a real Christian and an evolutionist. So tell me, can a person believe both in God and in evolution?” Again, I
gulped hard, did my intellectual duty, and reassured him that evolution was both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief—a position that I hold sincerely, but still an odd situation for a Jewish agnostic.

These two stories illustrate a cardinal point, frequently unrecognized but absolutely central to any understanding of the status and impact of the politically potent, fundamentalist
doctrine known by its self-proclaimed oxymoron as “scientific creationism”—the claim that the Bible is literally true, that all organisms were created during six days of twenty-four hours, that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and that evolution must therefore be false. Creationism does not pit science against religion (as my opening stories indicate), for no such conflict exists. Creationism
does not raise any unsettled intellectual issues about the nature of biology or the history of life. Creationism is a local and parochial movement, powerful only in the United States among Western nations, and prevalent only among the few sectors of American Protestantism that choose to read the Bible as an inerrant document, literally true in every jot and tittle.

I do not doubt that one could
find an occasional nun who would prefer to teach creationism in her parochial school biology class, or an occasional rabbi who does the same in his yeshiva, but creationism based on biblical literalism makes little sense either to Catholics or Jews, for neither religion maintains any extensive tradition for reading the Bible as literal truth, rather than illuminating literature based partly on
metaphor and allegory (essential components of all good writing), and demanding interpretation for proper understanding. Most Protestant groups, of course, take the same position—the fundamentalist fringe notwithstanding.

The argument that I have just outlined by personal stories and general statements represents the standard attitude of all major Western religions (and of Western science) today.
(I cannot, through ignorance, speak of Eastern religions, though I suspect that the same position would prevail in most cases.) The
lack of conflict
between science and religion arises from a
lack of overlap
between their respective domains of professional expertise—science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning
of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains—for a great book tells us both that the truth can make us free, and that we will live in optimal harmony with our fellows when we learn to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.

In the context of this “standard” position, I was enormously puzzled by a statement issued by Pope John Paul II on October
22, 1996, to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the same body that had sponsored my earlier trip to the Vatican. In this document, titled “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth,” the Pope defended both the evidence for evolution and the consistency of the theory with Catholic religious doctrine. Newspapers throughout the world responded with front-page headlines, as in
The New York Times
for October
25: “Pope Bolsters Church’s Support for Scientific View of Evolution.”

Now I know about “slow news days,” and I do allow that nothing else was strongly competing for headlines at that particular moment. Still, I couldn’t help feeling immensely puzzled by all the attention paid to the Pope’s statement (while being wryly pleased, of course, for we need all the good press we can get, especially
from respected outside sources). The Catholic Church does not oppose evolution, and has no reason to do so. Why had the Pope issued such a statement at all? And why had the press responded with an orgy of worldwide front-page coverage?

I could only conclude at first, and wrongly as I soon learned, that journalists throughout the world must deeply misunderstand the relationship between science
and religion, and must therefore be elevating a minor papal comment to unwarranted notice. Perhaps most people really do think that a war exists between science and religion, and that evolution cannot be squared with a belief in God. In such a context, a papal admission of evolution’s legitimate status might be regarded as major news indeed—a sort of modern equivalent for a story that never happened,
but would have made the biggest journalistic splash of 1640: Pope Urban VIII releases his most famous prisoner from house arrest and humbly apologizes: “Sorry, Signor Galileo . . . the sun, er, is central.”

But I then discovered that such prominent coverage of papal satisfaction with evolution had not been an error of non-Catholic anglophone journalists. The Vatican itself had issued the statement
as a major news release. And Italian newspapers had featured, if anything, even bigger headlines and longer stories. The conservative
Il Giornale
, for example, shouted from its masthead: “Pope Says We May Descend from Monkeys.”

Clearly, I was out to lunch; something novel or surprising must lurk within the papal statement, but what could be causing all the fuss?—especially given the accuracy
of my primary impression (as I later verified) that the Catholic Church values scientific study, views science as no threat to religion in general or Catholic doctrine in particular, and has long accepted both the legitimacy of evolution as a field of study and the potential harmony of evolutionary conclusions with Catholic faith.

As a former constituent of Tip O’Neill, I certainly know that
“all politics is local”—and that the Vatican undoubtedly has its own internal reasons, quite opaque to me, for announcing papal support of evolution in a major statement. Still, I reasoned that I must be missing some important key, and I felt quite frustrated. I then remembered the primary rule of intellectual life: When puzzled, it never hurts to read the primary documents—a rather simple and self-evident
principle that has, nonetheless, completely disappeared from large sectors of the American experience.

I knew that Pope Pius XII (not one of my favorite figures in twentieth-century history, to say the least) had made the primary statement in a 1950 encyclical entitled
Humani Generis.
I knew the main thrust of his message: Catholics could believe whatever science determined about the evolution
of the human body, so long as they accepted that, at some time of his choosing, God had infused the soul into such a creature. I also knew that I had no problem with this argument—for, whatever my private beliefs about souls, science cannot touch such a subject and therefore cannot be threatened by any theological position on such a legitimately and intrinsically religious issue. Pope Pius XII,
in other words, had properly acknowledged and respected the separate domains of science and theology. Thus, I found myself in total agreement with
Humani Generis
—but I had never read the document in full (not much of an impediment to stating an opinion these days).

I quickly got the relevant writings from, of all places, the Internet. (The Pope is prominently on line, but a luddite like me is
not. So I got a cyber-wise associate to dredge up the documents. I do love the fracture of stereotypes implied by finding religion so hep and a scientist so square.) Having now read in full both Pope Pius’s
Humani Generis
of 1950 and Pope John Paul’s proclamation of October 1996, I finally understand why the recent statement seems so new, revealing, and worthy of all those headlines. And the message
could not be more welcome for evolutionists, and friends of both science and religion.

The text of
Humani Generis
focuses on the
Magisterium
(or Teaching Authority) of the Church—a word derived not from any concept of majesty or unquestionable awe, but from the different notion of teaching, for
magister
means “teacher” in Latin. We may, I think, adopt this word and concept to express the central
point of this essay and the principled resolution of supposed “conflict” or “warfare” between science and religion. No such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as NOMA, or “non-overlapping magisteria”). The net of science covers the empirical realm:
what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the usual clichés, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how
the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.

This resolution might remain entirely neat and clean if the non-overlapping magisteria of science and religion stood far apart, separated by an extensive no-man’s-land. But, in fact, the two magisteria bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border. Many of our deepest questions call
upon aspects of both magisteria for different parts of a full answer—and the sorting of legitimate domains can become quite complex and difficult. To cite just two broad questions involving both evolutionary facts and moral arguments: Since evolution made us the only earthly creatures with advanced consciousness, what responsibilities are so entailed for our relations with other species? What do
our genealogical ties with other organisms imply about the meaning of human life?

Pius XII’s
Humani Generis
(1950), a highly traditionalist document written by a deeply conservative man, faces all the “isms” and cynicisms that rode the wake of World War II and informed the struggle to rebuild human decency from the ashes of the Holocaust. The encyclical bears the subtitle “concerning some false
opinions which threaten to undermine the foundations of Catholic doctrine,” and begins with a statement of embattlement:

Pius lashes out, in turn, at various external enemies of the Church: pantheism, existentialism, dialectical materialism, historicism, and, of course and preeminently, communism. He then notes with sadness that some well-meaning folks within the Church have fallen into a dangerous relativism—“a theological pacifism and egalitarianism, in which all points of view become equally valid”—in order
to include those who yearn for the embrace of Christian religion, but do not wish to accept the particularly Catholic magisterium.

Speaking as a conservative’s conservative, Pius laments:

Pius first mentions evolution to decry a misuse by overextension among zealous supporters of the anathematized “isms”: