Nonoverlapping magisteria

Casey Cole is a Franciscan priest and popular Catholic apologist. A YouTuber with 50K subscribers. I believe he's a cradle Catholic who's studied at Furman, the Catholic University of America, and the Chicago Theological Union.

I've watched a number of his videos. Because Catholic apologists usually recycle the same arguments, I'm not going to remark on most of his stuff. But I will comment on his position in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7M9vgUCinY

Non-overlapping magisteria…independent ways of knowing truth that do not speak about the same things in the same ways. Science uses sense perception and rationality to come to better understanding of what is around us [whereas] religion uses revelation and faith to come to a better understanding of why something is and what we're supposed to with it. 

Of course, he's adapting that from Stephen Jay Gould, the secular Jewish evolutionary paleontologist from Harvard. This dichotomy is a familiar apologetic strategy. By compartmentalizing science and religion, it shields religion from falsification. But it comes at a cost, and is grossly simplistic.

If it was just a generalization, the distinction would have a grain of truth, but to succeed as an apologetic strategy, these have to be separate domains with nothing in common, and that's where it rapidly breaks down:

1. Science operates with some philosophical presuppositions. Can these be justified apart from religion? Take induction, the intelligibility of the natural world, the general reliability of the senses and the general reliability of human reason. According to naturalistic evolution, human beings are the byproduct of an error-ridden process. Most of the time, evolution churns out mistakes. On rare occasion it hits on something beneficial. Given that scenario, wouldn't we expect human reason to be very limited and highly fallible? Why suppose nature would be generally accessible to human reason?

2. If secular science defines what human beings are, then religion only gets to comment on what's left over after science tells us what we amount to. What if science says there is no afterlife. The brain produces the mind. There is no immortal soul. Necrosis is irreversible. There is no resurrection of the body.

Likewise, evolution has no directionality. Humans don't exist because the process was aiming for humans. There's nothing special about humans from a cosmic standpoint. 

Of course, like most Catholic intellectuals, Casey is a theistic evolutionist, but how does theistic evolution mesh with nonoverlapping magisteria? You can't combine naturalistic evolution with guided evolution. Methodological naturalism banishes teleological explanations from natural science. 

Perhaps Casey will appeal to natural theology as a mediating structure. If so, is natural theology a scientific conclusion or a framework within which science operates? Doesn't natural theology make use of unaided reason? If so, don't science and religion overlap in that regard? 

3. Is religion separate from reason and sense knowledge? What about empirical and testimonial evidence for religion? What about philosophical and scientific arguments for religion? If so, that transgresses nonoverlapping magisteria.

Does religion not use sense perception to tell us what the world is like? What about miracles? Those are signs. Visible events. Some miracles are empirically verifiable, are they not? What about theophanies, Christophanies, and angelophanies. Aren't those objects of sensory perception? Or take something more mundane like answered prayer. Isn't there empirical evidence when God grants a petitionary or intercessory prayer request? 

As a Roman Catholic, I assume Casey believes in Marian apparitions. Doesn't that fall between the cracks of nonoverlapping magisterial? If they happen, they're essentially religious, yet objects of sense perception. 

What revelatory dreams, like prophetic dreams. They tell the dreamer something about the future. Something about the world. 

What about history? Doesn't the Christian faith makes claims about God's active involvement in history, including Bible history and church history? Are there not eyewitnesses to God's activity in sacred history? To have an understanding of the world around us includes observation regarding divine intervention in human experience. 

So far from being separate domains that don't speak to the same things, science and religion are often coreferential in scope. And that creates a potential for conflicting claims. 

4. Finally, is it really advantageous that religion in general be immune to empirical and rational scrutiny? What about false prophets? What about charlatan faith-healers? 

5. I don't see how nonoverlapping magisteria can be consistently applied. There are too many counterexamples. And these aren't just special exceptions, but often go to the centrality of religious experience and understanding. Casey has taken refuge in a facile but intellectually unsustainable false dichotomy. Although there's often a difference between the methods of science and religion, that's hardly universal. 

For instance, medical science makes assumptions about what will happen if nature takes its course. The physical world generally operates like a machine, with robotic regularity and predictability. That's the default setting. That's what it's programed to do. 

But sometimes a prayer for healing circumvents natural processes, resulting in miraculous recovery. That provides insight into the kind of world we inhabit. A reality in which spiritual agents can and sometimes do interact with matter to bypass physical cause and effect, resulting in outcomes that are not traceable to an antecedent conditions. Yet these are empirically detectable outcomes.