By Brian Glenney

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Gordon College- Massachusetts- USA

Abstract:  There remains considerable conflict between the spheres of inquiry of science and religion.  Our five senses undergo an analogous conflict yet the experience gained from them is united.  I locate the secret of the senses in the deference principle: when in conflict over which object property to perceive: like shape, location, or size, the sense which specializes in the object property, like touch for shape, is the deferred to sense.  I argue by analogy that such a principle should be employed when negotiating conflicts between spheres of inquiry where religion is deferred to in matters of meaning and value and science is deferred to in matters of fact.  I further argue that, like the unity of the senses, a unity of inquiry is made manifest when the deference principle is applied.  Unity of inquiry is further substantiated by the existence of “religious scientists” Eddington, Maxwell, and others.

Keywords:  SCIENCE, RELIGION, CONFLICT, NOMA, UNITY, PERCEPTION, SENSES

 

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.[i]

 

Einstein

 

            There is no telling which shape you might perceive if while feeling a “P” shaped letter you saw a “b” shaped letter.  In experiments, subjects usually report perceiving a “P” (subjects see an inverted image of the touched “P”).[ii]  Why does touch usually win out?  The shape looks a certain way and feels a different way; it would seem that there is no single shape to identify, rather two relative to the sense being used-a perpetual perceptory conflict.  And notice that there is not going to be a morphed shape, a “B” for instance-the felt “P” and seen “b” images do not ‘add up’ to a perceived “B” image.[iii]

The senses are in conflict and remain so until a perceptual judgment is made.  This non-morphing veridical judgment is based on a principle-the deference principle: whichever sense specializes in the property of the object experienced, that sense is deferred to in matters of conflict.[iv]  A similar principle can and should hold, I will argue, in other matters of conflict such as that between spheres of inquiry as science and religion.  Human origins is one such conflict.  Another, which I take up below, is religion’s belief in the miraculous and science’s in laws of nature.

This strategy of the senses preserves a surprising feature of our perceptual experience of the world, its e pluribus unum character-our many senses unite to create one unified experience of the world.  Our experience of a rose isn’t of a fragmented hodgepodge of brilliant color distinct from a floral bouquet separated from a silky texture.  Sensory experience is “gestalt”, is greater than the sum total of its parts, and projects out a unified whole from its specific sensory elements.[v]  Furthermore, when one of the parts is missing, the whole suffers.  A stuffy nose has an adverse affect on one’s floral experience.  For, when a particular sense is functioning poorly (or not at all), it is recognized not only in its specific absence, but in an overall narrowing effect on our experience of the world.

A similar effect applies in issues regarding spheres of inquiry.  As Einstein noted above, when science’s factual inquiry disavows the value and meaning inquiry of religion, the factual inquiry is worse off.  By dismissing scientific facts, the meaning and values investigated by religious discourse are similarly flat.[vi]  But this is not to advocate a naïve blending of these disparate inquiries that gets things wrong.[vii]  Just as in the sensory conflict case, uniting inquiries does not entail a morphing of method or overlapping of inquiry: the areas of inquiry remain partitioned off and the phenomena being investigated are not amalgamations.  One must recognize that there is a difference between fact, like the reflectance properties of the surface of a rose, and value, gifting a rose to another, even though the division may not be as clear cut as once thought.[viii] A prescription of unity between science and religion allows for the possibility of a united search for truth that projects out beyond the disparate elements of inquiry.  Not unlike a set of images viewed through a stereoscope with both eyes, a unification of science and religion opens up the possibility that our investigations in matters of truth result in a more expansive and complete three-dimensional portrait of reality.

Unifying the sources of inquiry of science and religion is a rather striking claim given that most practitioners of science and religion claim to advocate Stephen J. Gould’s “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” (NOMA) view: that when engaging in scientific work, religious valuations should be set aside, and when working in a religious context, scientific insights should be ignored.[ix]  The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) adopts such a view, “[S]cience and religion occupy two separate realms of human experience. Demanding that they be combined detracts from the glory of each.”[x]  The basis of NOMA is just that which Owen Gingrich has recently argued; the scope of scientific inquiry is conversant on matters of fact, on “how” stuff works-on explanations of what produced a particular effect.[xi]  Religious inquiry, on the other hand, is adept at “why” explanations, providing meaning and value-on explanations of the purpose or end goal of a certain result.  Were these magisteria to maintain their realms of reason, the rather incendiary issue of human origins, to which the comments of the NAS in support of NOMA are directed, would defuse by becoming two separate issues: ask how humans originated and science explains by way of natural algorithmic processes of evolutionary fitness, but ask why humans are the way they are, religion explains that humans share a “common image” with God.  Under NOMA, inquiries into the meaning of humanity and humanity’s evolutionary upbringing are not be disparate enemies, but disparate communities of inquiry.

But answers to ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions are rarely separate.  This is particularly clear in the questions related to human origins as the ‘how’ answer to humanity of fitness has an inflected ‘why’ answer-the purpose of humanity is the same as all species: self-perpetuation.  Fact spills over into meaning.  The issue of humanity’s uniqueness is similarly affected. “Fossils remind us of the irrelevancy of our own ephemeral time,” a pseudo popular book on cretaceous insects claims,  “How significant is Homo sapiens when our species has only graced this planet for little more than 200,000 years, an infinitesimal blip in the entire chronology of life”[xii] Claims arguing for the mundaness of humanity are ubiquitous in scientific discussions.  The question we need to grapple with is whether scientific judgments that explicitly transcend matters of fact should have any merit.

The question emphasizes an important point; NOMA is a claim of what one ought to think regarding opposing magisteria.  But this normative parsing of spheres of inquiry is at odds with descriptions of present discussions within science and religion and the centuries of territorial conflict that has existed between them.[xiii]  These discussions of conflict, some argue, best support those who advocate an “ultimate magisterium” (ULMA) a view that either science or religion but not both, is an ultimate source of inquiry.  Richard Dawkins infamously goes one way.  “[T]he belief that religion and science occupy separate magisteria is dishonest. It founders on the undeniable fact that religions still make claims about the world that on analysis turn out to be scientific claims.”[xiv] Medieval courts went the opposite, Theology presiding as its intellectual queen. The forcefulness with which both proponents of ULMA present their case seems rather to show that both science and religion are irreducible facets of human inquiry.  Such exclusivism, however descriptive of the relationship of conflict between science and religion, undermines the importance of the opposing sphere of inquiry.[xv]

ULMA’s emphasis on conflict need not, however, be discounted.  Nor should NOMA’s emphasis on the distinctiveness of science and religion.  Advocating constraints on the strained relationship between the distinctive sources of inquiry of science and religion, a constraint like the deference principle, is an alternative reconciliatory approach.  It works for the senses.  Why wouldn’t it work for spheres of inquiry?  But in doing so, the overall relationship between these spheres of inquiry needs to be rethought in the context of real descriptions of the historical discussions, rather than the overblown popular accounts.  These real descriptions feature cases of “religious scientists” who work from a unity of these inquiries.

Unity and Conflict between the Senses and Spheres of Inquiry

Historical accounts of the central figures in Science and Religion, particularly throughout the 17^th -19^th cent., advocate the unity of spheres of inquiry as beneficial to inquiry as a whole.[xvi]  (This, again, does not mean “overlapping magisteria” as it has been normally construed as an amalgam or morphing of these sources.)  There is, however, an understandable reticence to adopting any notion of a combination of disparate sources as each sphere of inquiry is quite specific in its general aims: fact vs. value, objective vs. subjective, physical vs. non-physical, quantitative vs. qualitative.  The analogy from our e pluribus unum integration of sensory experience provides, I argue, an answer to these questions and reservations concerning this unity.  In particular, the deference principle lays out an applicable method of assigning appropriate constraints on this convergence for when these sources of inquiry are in conflict-constraints that, if met, would protect the misapplications of this unification which motivate the alternative views NOMA and ULMA.

The existence of “religious scientists”, religious believers engaging in thoroughly scientific pursuits, presents a case for the united pursuit of truth by science and religion.  As has been recently discussed by Matthew Stanley, the success of A.S. Eddington’s uniquely “theoretical” work in astrophysics was a consequence of the benefit of this unitary pursuit, seeing both spheres of inquiry as an innately motivated human “seeking” or “striving” for truth rather than based on religious dogma or law of nature.  This seeking is a primarily religious influence which, when unified with scientific methods, provides an almost instinctual motivation for scientific discovery:[xvii]  As Eddington writes:

The desire for truth so prominent in the quest for science, a reaching out of the    spirit from its isolation to something beyond, a response to beauty in nature and        art, an Inner Light of conviction and guidance-are these as much a part of our being as our sensitivity to sense-impressions?[xviii]

James Clerk Maxwell similarly pursued his scientific insights of unification based on a general view of reality influenced by his religious belief, a unity that inversely suggests that scientific insights should influence religious meaning and value:

At the same time I think that each individual man should do all he can to impress his own mind with the extent, the order, and the unity of the universe, and should carry these ideas with him as he reads such passages as the 1st Chap. of the Ep. to Colossians (see Lightfoot on Colossians, p. 182), just as enlarged conceptions of the extent and unity of the world of life may be of service to us in reading Psalm viii.; Heb. ii. 6, etc.[xix]

As part of this unity of pursuit, both Maxwell and Eddington maintained the distinctiveness of science and religion in claiming that religious belief could not be based on scientific claims-there existed no inferential relations between science and religion.  Eddington even renounced this refined strategy of natural theology in his Gifford Lectures, “I repudiate the idea of proving the distinctive beliefs of religion either from the data of physical science or by the methods of physical science.”[xx]

For Maxwell and Eddington, the unity of science and religion occurred at the meta-scientific or philosophy of science level, a level concerned with how scientific and religious inquiries are even possible.[xxi]  Instances of the grounding of inquiry include claims such as acceptance of the general principles of the unity of laws of nature or the transparency of reality that leads to scientific discovery or again the reliability of our faculties to discover natural truths-claims that ground both scientific and religious inquiry.[xxii]  The cases of Eddington and Maxwell demonstrate that sharing a unitary vision of spheres of inquiry provides a uniquely holistic picture of reality that advances truth in much the way that our sensory experiences unify to enable knowledge and interaction with physical reality.

Holistic cases, like those of religious scientists, appear to be, for whatever reason, uncommon today.[xxiii]  But flipping through the annals of scientific discovery one sees a majority of religious scientists of some stripe.  Like the debacle between Galileo and The Church, such disharmony in the contemporary science and religion is likely magnified beyond its true scale, a distortion that is in some part the cause of this displacement of a historically-common view of unification of inquiry.  For instance, Galileo’s own view of the relation between science and religion advocated unity through the deference principle.  In his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, he states that where science and an interpretation of the Bible appear to conflict on matters of fact, science should be deferred to and the conflicting reading of scripture rejected.[xxiv]  But rather than an emphasis on Galileo’s strategy, the church’s ultimate magisteria position made the history books.

A return to unity can be fostered by analogy to the unity of our sensory experience that is born out of contentious conflict.  We rarely notice the time differential at a ballpark between seeing a bat make contact with a ball and the crack of the bat, though with minimal attention such a differential is apparent.   Similarly, every morning we absent-mindedly grab a hold of a felt-cylindrical cup, which, from the perspective of the seated, appears to the eyes as elliptically shaped.  The “unitary” experience of the senses is born out of significant conflict and disparity of sensory experience, time, and application of the deference principle.  Notice, however, than when sensory correlations fail, the correlations are not abandoned and made separate, but corrected by deferring to the “specialty” sense-in this latter case of the shape of the cup, given by touch and in the former case of the temporal immediacy of ball/bat contact acquired by sight.  In other words, if sight, touch, or audition are in conflict over an object or event property, the sense that is dedicated to the specific property under dispute is the deferred to sense.  The deference principle is the maintenance manager of conflict.

To start an exchange of knowledge between science and religion requires, on this analogy, a respect of scope-a recognition that the religious source of knowledge is better equipped for handling meaning and value whereas science is better equipped for handling fact.  Given this, science and religion would defer to the specialist when there is conflict. This principle is particularly apt in special cases when there is long-standing conflict such as religious belief in the existence of miracles as contrary to science’s unassailable laws of nature.  The deference principle prescribes the claim that factually miracles are in harmony with laws of nature though perhaps improbable, and are meaningful instances of God’s interaction with reality, an interaction analogous to our own.[xxv]  There can be a tidal exchange of information, an ebb and flow across distinctive knowledge sources.  Such an exchange would lead to a resolution that suits both arbitrators as long as each live out the deference principle by respecting their turf’s scope of knowledge and honoring the other.  Specifying the use of the deference principle in the long standing debate of miracles and laws of nature might help to get a grip on what exactly this prescription amounts to.

Brian Glenney is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Gordon College, 255 Grapevine Rd., Wenham, MA 01984; email brian.glenney@gordon.edu

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[i] Einstein, A. The World as I See It, New York: Philosophical Library (1949),  pp. 24 - 28.

[ii] Heller, M. A., ‘Haptic dominance in form perception: vision versus proprioception.’, Perception  (1992)  22, pp. 655 - 660.

[iii] Some cases of conflict bring about a kind of morphing.  For instance, if one saw a face pronouncing a “ga” sound but heard a “ba” sound, one would perceive a “da” sound. (McGurk, H., MacDonald, J. ‘Hearing lips and seeing voices’ Nature (1976) 264, 746-748). The lesson of the McGurk effect, as it is called, in this context is the importance of deferring to one sense as it provides a veridical perception of the world.

[iv] Cases where sensory experience conflicts and the brain defers to the specialty sense are called cases of “sensory dominance”.  For a classic introduction see Rock. I., Harris, C.S., ‘Vision and Touch’ Scientific American (1967) May.

[v] See the work of Wolfgang Kohler.

[vi] This is my gloss on Einstein’s statement.

[vii] See note 3 on the McGurk effect.

[viii] See Putnam, H. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays,  Cambridge: Harvard (2004).

[ix] See Gould, S.J. Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, New York: Ballantine Books, (1999).

[x] Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, 2nd Ed. Washington DC: National Academy Press (1999), p. ix.

[xi] Gingrich, O. God’s Universe, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, (2006), p. 73. A much more nuanced account, which includes other spheres of knowledge like aesthetics, is given by Flanagan, O. The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World, Cambridge: MIT Press, (2007)

[xii] Poinar, G. Jr., Poinar, R What Bugged the Dionosaurs? Insects, Disease, and Death in the Cretaceous,  New Jersey: Princeton University Press (2008)

[xiii] A historical description of this relationship is outlined in the series Science and Religion published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

[xiv] Dawkins , R. ‘Snake Oil and Holy Water’ Forbes, 10.4.99

[xv] Karl Giberson has argued, for instance, that neither of these UMA positions are tenable. See Giberson, K., Artigas, M. The Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion, New York: OUP (2007) and Giberson, K. Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, New York: HarperOne (2008).

[xvi] See, for instance, Stanley, M., Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A.S. Eddington Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2007)

[xvii] Some in the scientific community viewed Eddington’s scientific methodology as irresponsible speculation as it shied away from scientific dogma, from established doctrine, livened by the search into the unknown which often required inserting unaccounted for assumptions.  See Stanley’s (2007) description of the debate between Eddington and James Jean on stellar constitution, pp. 54 ff.  This reflects Eddington’s religiously motivated “seeking” in his scientific practice, a consequence of his unitary pursuit of science and religion.

[xviii] Quoted in Stanley (2007), p. 49.  from Eddington’s Science and the Unseen World, New York: Macmillan (1929) p. 42-3.

[xix] Maxwell to Charles John Ellicott, Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, 22 Nov 1876, SLP 3: 418 cited in Stanley, M. ‘Maxwell’s Divine Unification: Light, Electromagnetism, and Evangelical Nature’ (in progress)

[xx] Stanley (2007), p. 8

[xxi] This is similar to Stanley’s own proposed basis of Eddington’s reconcilation between science and religion, what Stanley calls “valence values”, “valence” referring to the combinatorial power of certain chemical elements.  He writies, “…values fashioned the interaction of scientists with both worlds.  Because values clearly exist in both categories looking for values that move between them gives us a way to speak of specific historical interactions between science and culture without reducing either one.” Pp. 239-40.

[xxii] Gonzalez, G., Richards, J., The Priveleged Planet,Washington DC: Regnery (2004) contains some arguments for this “transparency of nature” claim.  Alvin Plantinga has provided a number of arguments for the reliability of reason for discovery.  See Plantinga, A. Warrant and Proper Function New York: OUP (1993) and Beilby, J., Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, New York: Cornell (2002).

[xxiii] The specificity of scientific programs which churn out specialists rather than scientists with a holistic grasp of scientific pursuit might be thought, if the description is correct, to be one reason for why science and religion are so at odds today.  However, those with broad-minded insights into scientific practice, like E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, seem to be the ones for whom religion is not only irreconcilable with science but primitive and dispensable.  What seems to be the root of this dismissive attitude toward religious inquiry by science is the now century old program of “scientism”, the claim that all questions are in the end answerable by science, a view engendered by Huxley, Wells, Peel, and Spencer among others.

[xxiv] See McMullin, E. ‘Galileo on Science and Scripture’ in The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1998) pp. 271-347.

[xxv] See, for instance, my paper ‘God, Laws of Nature, and Miracles’ (in progress).  See also Willard, D. The Divine Conspiracy New York: HarperSanFrancisco (1998), Chapter 3, the section entitled, ‘Master of Molecules’.