Christians have made numerous
of claims that have turned out to be wrong. Everyone knows about a few of them: the
age of the earth, where biblical stories came from, how the diversity of life
on earth arose, the impossibility of an Australasian continent, the biblical
chronology, the nature of disease, and the structure of the solar system are a
few examples.
Up until the late Middle Ages,
Christians believed that science was entirely consistent with Christianity.
According to the orthodox line God had written two books: the Bible and the
natural world. Truth cannot contradict truth, so it followed that the two books
must necessarily be fully in accord. If they appeared not to be, then that was
because of our limited understanding.
By the end of the Enlightenment this
position had become untenable for educated Christians. It was clear that the
bible did contradict the evidence of the natural world. By the time
Darwin published his Origin of Species the case was already closed, although
the shouting continued. It continues today, although the number of biblical
literalists in the West is now minute outside the most backward parts of the
USA.
The only realistic reaction to the growing realization
that nature and the Bible contradicted each other was religious retreat. Very
slowly Churchmen started acknowledging, often in a round-about way, that
Christianity did not provide some of the answers. The bible had traditionally been
a comprehensive encyclopedia of all world knowledge. Now it was something less
than that.
One solution to the problem, as
religious minds saw it, was the idea of “non-overlapping magisterial”. In this
solution the Church accepted that it had overstepped itself in the past and had
erred. It had trespassed into areas where it had no dominion. There were two
separate areas of teaching: science addressed questions of how things are as
they are, and Christianity addressed questions of why things are as they are.
According to this idea, science and religion occupy two fundamentally different
and distinct domains of inquiry, two inherently different kinds of knowledge, two non-overlapping magisteria.
This idea has found a number of
supporters, including some in the scientific community. In principle it appeals
to accommodating types who would like to see science and religion get along
together. Stephen J Gould for example was an advocate, though he seems never
to have fully thought it through.
The weakness is that the idea
only works if the Church makes a full retreat. There are Church leaders who
have tried to make such a retreat. Liberal theologians are safely ensconced in
a world where Christianity makes no claims about real historical events, or
about anything testable. For them the virgin birth and the resurrection are
true only in some vague mysterious non-factual sense. God’s revelation is inherently
ineffable. Their position is not unassailable, but for present purposes we will
leave them in the safety of their mystical island far removed from the worlds
of science and reality.
For Christians other than the
most ethereal divines, the solution of non-overlapping magisterial does not
work. Traditional Christian doctrine cannot help leaking out of its own magisterium
and into the scientific magisterium.
First, it is necessary to
redefine a whole host of traditional ideas. Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell can no
longer be real places in the physical universe, at a known distance from the
surface of the earth, which can be visited, heard or seen by living people in
the flesh as they used to be. (In the 1960’s space exploration was opposed by
Christians on the grounds that astronauts were trespassing in heaven. One
Russian Cosmonaut countered that he’d had a look and God wasn't there. On the
internet you can easily find Christian websites claiming to have recordings of
the screams of souls in hell, but this is now considered eccentric even by
other Christians).
Similarly, Christians had to give
up the traditional idea that the soul was a physical organ in the body. (It had
been thought to be, or to be part of, the pineal gland). Research to find it
stopped, as did experiments to establish its mass by weighing human bodies just
before and just after death. The bonus here was that if we cannot find the
soul, then we have no chance of seeing the various stamps that God puts on it
to mark the sacraments it has undergone.
On the other hand all sorts of
supernatural phenomena are able to remain on the grounds that they are not
physical. So we can keep angels, demons, ghosts, sanctification, transubstantiation,
life-after-death, and religious experiences – as long as we define them in such
a way that they are inherently untestable. As has been observed before, this
involves a degree of intellectual dishonesty. No philosopher, other than tame
theologians, would accept that the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is
even meaningful, let alone true.
This opens up another problem for
the non-overlapping magisterial theory. In which of the magisteria does
philosophy sit? In medieval times philosophy was a branch of theology, but it bore no
fruit, withered away, and is now studied only by historians. Modern philosophy
is overwhelmingly secular, and has comprehensively discredited every attempt to
reinvent theological philosophy. None of the traditional “proofs” of the
existence of God survived the Enlightenment. If the Churches had accepted the loss of all philosophical territory then the two magisteria would not overlap. But the Churches have not retreated. There are still University departments of philosophy run by theologians. The Catholic Church is still formally attached to the long-discredited Medieval philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas. And Christians regularly cite medieval "proofs" of God's existence that no reputable philosopher has espoused for centuries. The two magisteria do overlap because Christians have refused to move away from the territory they lost long ago.
There is another problem here.
Most Christians are not willing to retreat into the territory of their own
magisterium. For example those angels and demons are alright as long as they
don’t do anything. But what if they do. What if demons start possessing people,
and taking over their behaviour, and need exorcising. Now you might think that the mainstream
Churches had abandoned such ideas long ago. But they have not. All mainstream
Churches still employ exorcists to deal with naughty demons who possess
believers (oddly, these demons only ever possess believers). The phenomenon of demons
possessing people is by its nature one that can be investigated scientifically.
Whoops. The two magisterial just overlapped again.
And there are other overlaps.
The efficacy of petitionary prayer can be tested. It has been tested and shown
to be totally ineffective – but the fact that it can be tested places it in the
science magisterium. There are any number of examples like this. Christians who
claim to be able to determine the moment of a person’s death (an ability denied
to all general practitioners of medicine). Holy relics that work miracles. Christians
who can “feel” the sanctity of a sanctified place, and so on.
Yet another problem is that of
religious experience. Neuro-scientists have found that by electronically
stimulating a certain part of the brain they can generate experiences that the
subject regards as “religious”. As you might expect, people of difference
religious traditions enjoy different experiences, so that Christians enjoy
typically Christian experiences. In which magisterium does this belong? A
scientific experiment about religious experience is not easy to place fully in
either magisterium.
The whole idea of non-overlapping
magisterial is weak as long as Christians continue to make any
substantial claims at all.
Now, let’s go back to those
liberal theologians who thought they were safe on their remote island of fuzzy
thinking and no substantial claims about anything. The central concept in Christianity is the doctrine of Original Sin.
No matter that it was invented well after the time of Jesus. No matter that it
lacks rational coherence. It is central to Christianity. The doctrine goes like
this: Adam and Eve sinned by eating of the Tree of Knowledge. Their sin was so
great that (for some reason that has never been articulated) God needed to
sacrifice himself in order to expiate such a great sin. Here’s the problem:
this central idea depends on a real event, where real people committed a real sin. But
our liberal theologians on their island accept that Adam and Eve did not really
exist. If they did not exist then they did not sin. And if they did not sin, then
there was no sin to expiate, and no need for the crucifixion of resurrection.
In other words the whole foundation of Christianity is removed.
The upshot is that those liberal
theologians have not found a safe refuge after all. The two magisteria do overlap, and
always will as long as Christianity holds to its most central doctrine.
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