Rocks of Ages by Stephen Jay Gould Read Free Book Online Page B

in human history.
Faute de mieux
, theology once occupied this realm of factual inquiry as well. We can hardly expect anyone to withdraw from so much territory without a struggle—no matter how just and true the claim may be that such an apparent retreat can only strengthen the discipline.
    Finally, how far apart do the magisteria of science and religion stand? Do their frames surround pictures atopposite ends of our mental gallery, with miles of minefields between? If so, why should we even talk about dialogue between such distantly non-overlapping magisteria, and of their necessary integration to infuse a fulfilled life with wisdom?
    I hold that this non-overlapping runs to completion only in the important logical sense that standards for legitimate questions, and criteria for resolution, force the magisteria apart on the model of immiscibility—the oil and water of a common metaphorical image. But, like those layers of oil and water once again, the contact between magisteria could not be more intimate and pressing over every square micrometer (or upon every jot and tittle, to use an image from the other magisterium) of contact. Science and religion do not glower at each other from separate frames on opposite walls of the Museum of Mental Arts. Science and religion interdigitate in patterns of complex fingering, and at every fractal scale of self-similarity.
    Still, the magisteria do not overlap—but then, neither do spouses fuse in the best of marriages. Any interesting problem, at any scale (hence the fractal claim above, meant more than metaphorically), must call upon the separate contributions of both magisteria for any adequate illumination. The logic of inquiry prevents true fusion, as stated above. The magisterium of science cannot proceed beyond the anthropology ofmorals—the documentation of what people believe, including such important information as the relative frequency of particular moral values among distinct cultures, the correlation of those values with ecological and economic conditions, and even (potentially) the adaptive value of certain beliefs in specified Darwinian situations—although my intense skepticism about speculative work in this last area has been well aired in other publications. But science can say nothing about the morality of morals. That is, the potential discovery by anthropologists that murder, infanticide, genocide, and xenophobia may have characterized many human societies, may have arisen preferentially in certain social situations, and may even be adaptively beneficial in certain contexts, offers no support whatever for the moral proposition that we ought to behave in such a manner.
    Still, only the most fearful and parochial moral philosopher would regard such potential scientific information as useless or uninteresting. Such facts can never validate a moral position, but we surely want to understand the sociology of human behavior, if only to recognize the relative difficulty of instituting various consensuses reached within the magisterium of morals and meaning. To choose a silly example, we had better appreciate the facts of mammalian sexuality, if only to avoid despair if we decide to advocate uncompromising monogamy as the only moral path for human society,and then become confused when our arguments, so forcefully and elegantly crafted, fare so poorly in application.
    Similarly, scientists would do well to appreciate the norms of moral discourse, if only to understand why a thoughtful person without expert knowledge about the genetics of heredity might justly challenge an assertion that some particular experiment in the controlled breeding of humans should be done because we now have the technology to proceed, and the results would be interesting within the internal logic of expanding information and explanation.
    From Mutt and Jeff to yin and yang, all our cultures, in their full diversity of levels and traditions, include images of the absolutely inseparable but utterly