For Bacon, the two books idea was assigning the moral imperative (ends) for the King to support science to the first book (Bible), while the second book (Nature) needed to be read carefully to acquire technical knowledge (means) to improve the human condition.  

As we’ve discussed, the Galileo Affair was centered on his work’s implication that religious authorities were incorrect – not about Earth’s motion per se, but about Earth’s motion contradicting Scripture (Galileo said it did not), and about Scripture as a scientific authority (Galileo said it was not).  As we noted, the Catholic Church eventually

came to recognize that Galileo was right not only about the Earth’s motion, but also about the limited authority of Scripture, in the sense that Scripture is not a scientific authority, but only an authority on questions of faith and morals.  The Church now credits Galileo with having embodied the  principle that religion and science are really in harmony, and not incompatible. 

Robert P. Crease, The Workshop and the World

For Galileo, the two books metaphor supported the division of authority into scriptural authority (over faith, values, morals) and scientific authority (over empirical observations, facts).   Moral authority resides in the Bible.  Scientific authority resides in Nature.

This view would appear to be predicated upon a harmonious relationship between biblical interpretation and modern science. What ensures this harmony?  Many have suggested that  science and religion are harmonious because they are describing different domains. (As in the trope that science can tell us how, but not why.) Most famously, Gould himself wrote about the harmonious relationship between religion and science based on these ways of knowing addressing distinct areas of inquiry. 

Non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) is the view, advocated by Gould, that science and religion each represent different areas of inquiry, fact vs. values, so there is a difference between the “nets” over which they have “a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority”, and the two domains do not overlap. He suggests, with examples, that “NOMA enjoys strong and fully explicit support, even from the primary cultural stereotypes of hard-line traditionalism” and that it is “a sound position of general consensus, established by long struggle among people of goodwill in both magisteria.” Some have criticized the idea or suggested limitations to it, and there continues to be disagreement over where the boundaries between the two magisteria should be.                

Wikipedia

Although Gould describes NOMA as a sound position of general consensus, others seem equally assured of a forever war between science and religion. This warfare/conflict thesis holds that an inevitable and irreconcilable conflict exists between science and religion. It has long been part of the popular imagination and – contra Gould – there is a vocal minority of academic scientists and philosophers who are quite sure science and religion are incompatible. The warfare/conflict has to large extent been maintained by public intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. These “Four Horsemen of New Atheism” have published many popular books critical of religion and promoting atheism.

One problematic of the warfare/conflict position is that it can be self-reinforcing and perhaps even self-serving. That is, arguments for this philosophical viewpoint (from either side) help maintain the warfare/conflict in the minds of readers and as a contemporary state of affairs. The “New Atheists” viewpoint, whatever its merits, thrives on a lopsided engagement between the best scholarship of atheist intellectuals and lowest common denominator religious counterparts who are unversed in their faith tradition. This move is exhibited in Bill Maher’s film Religulous: Heaven help us, which is funny and sad, just as one laughs and despairs when a talk show host asks people on the street to identify countries on a world map. If you are interested in the academic historians’ perspective on the origin of the warfare/conflict thesis, “its reception, the responses it drew from various faith traditions, and its continued prominence in public discourse,” a good starting point is the 2018 edited volume The Warfare between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die (see Further Reading).

What I would like STEM majors to know is that the warfare/conflict thesis – as exemplified in the controversy over teaching evolution in public schools, or six-day creationism in science classrooms – is peculiar to North American populist Christian fundamentalism.  (By fundamentalism I mean a commitment to interpret the Bible in a particular way, not the conviction that Jesus is Lord and commitment to follow Him). Furthermore, ideas such as scientific creationism have often originated in specific, not mainstream, locales of American religion with theological idiosyncrasies, only later to be taken up by populist religious movements.  Many Christian intellectuals and theologians – I will use Alistair McGrath as a representative of this school – are “creationists” in the sense that they believe that God, who exists eternally, created the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing), while viewing scientific creationism and its sequela as unsound both theologically and scientifically.

Another important point is that theologians such as Alistair McGrath consider both the warfare/conflict and non-overlapping magisteria viewpoints on science and religion to be untenable. Watch this short video of McGrath responding to a question about NOMA, while sitting in a magnificent chair worthy of an Oxford don.

I would say it this way. NOMA can be appreciated as gesture of peace that is preferable to open warfare, but it is historically incorrect and impossible to maintain as a philosophical/theological commitment. Religious and scientific discourse are both referring to the same world – the world that we all share. Their “domains of inquiry” may not be identical but (contra NOMA) these domains overlap almost entirely.

The idea that religion and science are non-overlapping magisteria (values vs. facts) implies that religion can not speak to the historical question of whether or not the crucifixion of Jesus actually occurred “under Pontius Pilate,” but – of course – precisely this claim is made. NOMA means that the science of archeology has nothing to say about the people groups described in the Bible, but – of course – there is biblical archeology. NOMA implies that historical knowledge of Babylonian creation myths can not influence the interpretation of the biblical creation stories, but many scholars think that this hermeneutical perspective is key.

To conclude, the warfare/conflict thesis can not be sustained, but neither can NOMA. In fact, the NOMA approach – in my opinion – parallels the epistemological problems of “post-truth” contemporary society, because to have common facts, we need a common reality.  As Latour said, this common reality “needs to be instituted in church, classes, decent journalism, peer review.”

We do not want to surrender to the fact that in contemporary America “large groups of people are living in a different world with different realities” (Latour). Rather, this state of affairs should be extremely troubling to us.

We need to find the political will to restore a common intellectual and political space (maidan) that is based on common presuppositions (civic religion). In that space we can do politics (in the good sense), that is, decide together how to proceed together, using demonstrated facts and whatever values we can agree upon.

Further Reading

Stephen Jay Gould (1997). Nonoverlapping Magisteria, Natural History, vol. 106, pp. 16-22. [PDF]

Alistair E. McGrath (2020). Science & Religion: A New Introduction. John Wiley & Sons. [Amazon]

Hardin, J., Numbers, R. L., & Binzley, R. A. (Eds.). (2018). The Warfare between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die. Johns Hopkins University Press.