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.  

Science and possible worlds

At least since the 19C, if not earlier (16-17C), there's been an ongoing debate about whether Christianity and science stand in conflict. On the one hand, critics say science has falsified the creation account and the flood account while neuroscience has falsified the immortal soul. I've discussed those allegations on multiple occasions and have nothing new to say at the moment. 

But at a presuppositional level, some apologists argue that the Christian worldview is necessary to justify the scientific interpretation. Elements of this argument include the claim that the rationality of the universe implies a mind behind the universe–while the reliability of human reason needs divine grounding. Likewise, it only works if God created man and the universe in a state of mutual preadaptation, so that the rationality of the universe is at least translucent to human reason, if not altogether transparent. 

I think those are legitimate lines of argument, but rather than flesh them out, I'd like to turn to a different line of argument: 

Stephen Jay Gould (1989) famously argued that evolutionary history is contingent...Gould claimed that if we could rewind the tape of history to some point in the deep past and play it back again, the outcome would probably be different.

Beatty (2006), however, has shown that there are two different senses of ‘contingency’ in play in Gould’s work. In addition to what Beatty calls contingency as causal dependence—basically, sensitivity to initial conditions—there is a second form of contingency that Beatty initially called contingency as unpredictability, but now calls contingency per se (Beatty 2016). These two senses of contingency correspond with two versions of the famous thought experiment that Gould (1989) deployed. Sometimes, Gould imagines rewinding the tape of history, tweaking an upstream variable, and then playing the tape back. On other occasions, he talks about playing the tape back from the same initial conditions. Beatty (2016) thinks that both senses of ‘contingency’ are important, and he takes it that the second sense—contingency per se—must commit us to some sort of causal indeterminism. On the other hand, Turner (2011a) has tried to give an account of this second sense of contingency that is neutral with respect to determinism. His suggestion is that what Gould really cared about was random or unbiased macroevolutionary sorting. Processes such as coin tosses, or random genetic drift, can be random or unbiased (in a sense) without violating causal determinism. One way to think about this is by adopting a frequentist conception of probability: the outcome of a coin toss could be causally determined by small-scale physical influences, but the outcome is still random or unbiased in the sense that over a long series of trials, the ratio of heads to tails will approximate 50:50. 

Finally, historical contingency is a counterfactual notion, and although this issue has not gotten as much attention as it deserves, there is a nascent philosophical literature on historical counterfactuals (Tucker 2004: 227ff; Nolan 2013; Radick 2016; Zhao 2017 in Other Internet Resources). The debate about historical contingency can be construed as a disagreement about the truth of various historical counterfactuals. Gould claimed that if things in the Cambrian had been slightly different, there would be no vertebrates today, let alone humans, while other convergentists claim that humanlike cognitive abilities, language, tool use, and sociality would have evolved even if other things had been different in the past—for example, if the non-avian dinosaurs had not gone extinct.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/macroevolution/#HistCont

That's also presuppositional. Is natural history contingent? If so, can we make truth-valued counterfactual statements about natural history (or the future, or that matter)? If that's the case, then what grounds the truth of counterfactual scenarios? According to the correspondence theory of truth, a statement about the past is true if it matches something that happened in the past. But in the nature of the case, counterfactual scenarios never happened in the actual timeline, so what makes them true?

The common explanation is resort to modal metaphysics (i.e. possible worlds). Unexemplified timelines. But that pushes the question back a step. What's the metaphysical basis for possible worlds?

A Christian, or a Calvinist in particular, can say unexemplified timelines inhere in God's imagination and omnipotence. What might have been had God willed an alternative scenario to play out. It may even be the case that these are exemplified rather than unexemplified timelines if God created a multiverse. Unexemplified in our universe, but exemplified in a parallel universe. 

So that's another line of argument for the necessity of the Christian worldview to underwrite the scientific enterprise. Of course, that also needs to be fleshed out. But it's another promising strategy. 

NOMA

The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise—science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains—for a great book tells us that the truth can make us free and that we will live in optimal harmony with our fellows when we learn to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly. 

Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology. I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature. But I also know that souls represent a subject outside the magisterium of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain. Moreover, while I cannot personally accept the Catholic view of souls, I surely honor the metaphorical value of such a concept both for grounding moral discussion and for expressing what we most value about human potentiality: our decency, care, and all the ethical and intellectual struggles that the evolution of consciousness imposed upon us. 

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html

That's a classic statement of the no-conflict thesis regarding the relationship between science and religion. They cannot directly compete with each other because they make claims about different domains. The scope of science is the physical real whereas the scope of religion is moral and spiritual realm–assuming such a realm exists.

Not surprisingly, Gould's position has been attacked as an ad hoc compromise by Christians and atheists alike. But ironically, Gould is taking the same position as proponents of methodological atheism, who insist on the same compartmentalization. They typically defend methodological atheism on three grounds: by definition, scientific method disallows supernatural or teleological explanations; supernatural are explanations are untestable; and making room for supernatural explanations would bring science to a grinding halt.

Atheists invoke the same strictures in reference to historiography. It's not that reported miracles are false; rather, reported miracles aren't even false. They fall outside the purview of what historians can take into consideration. So historians and scientists must be neutral on the supernatural. That's not something they're in a position to affirm or deny, for supernatural claims are both unverifiable and unfalsifiable–at least by scientific and historiographical criteria. 

But that generates an acute dilemma for atheists. Methodological naturalism commits them to the no-conflict thesis. 

In addition, W. V. Quine, high priest of scientism, had some radical concessions regarding the limitations of scientific knowledge:

It would address the question of how we, physical denizens of the physical world, can have projected our scientific theory of that whole world from our meager contacts with it; from the mere impacts of rays and particles on our surfaces and a few odds and ends such as the strain of walking uphill, From Stimulus to Science(Harvard 1999), 16. 

There is a puzzle here. Global stimuli are private: each is a temporally ordered set of some one individual’s receptors. Their perceptual similarity, in part innate and in part modeled by experience, is private as well. Whence then this coordination of behavior across the tribe? (20). 

The sensory atomist was motivated, I say, by his appreciation that any information about the world is channeled to us through the sensory surfaces of our bodies; but this motivation remained obscure to him. It was obscured by his concern to justify our knowledge of the external world. The justification would be vitiated by circularity if sensory surfaces and external impacts on nerve endings had to be appealed to at the outset of the justification,”Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionist and Other Essays (Harvard 2008), 328. 

There is much clarity to be gained by dropping the project of justifying our knowledge of the external world but continuing to investigate the relation of that knowledge to its sensory evidence. Obscurity about the nature of the given, or epistemic priority, is then dissipated by talking frankly of the triggering of nerve endings. We then find ourselves engaged in an internal question within the framework of natural science. There are these impacts of molecules and light rays upon our sensory receptors, and there is all this output on our part of scientific discourse about sticks, stones, planets, numbers, molecules, light rays, and, indeed, sensory receptors; and then we pose the problem of linking that input causally and logically to that output (328).  

Much as I admire [David] Lewis’s reduction, however, it is not for me. My own line is a yet more sweeping structuralism, applying to concrete and abstract objects indiscriminately. I base it, paradoxically as this may seem, on a naturalistic approach to epistemology. Natural science tells us that our ongoing cognitive access to the world around us is limited to meager channels. There is the triggering of our sensory receptors by the impact of molecules and light rays. Also there is the difference in muscular effort sensed in walking up or down hill. What more? Even the notion of a cat, let alone a class or number, is a human artifact, rooted in innate predisposition and cultural tradition. The very notion of an object at all, concrete or abstract, is a human contribution, a feature of our inherited apparatus for organizing the amorphous welter of neural input (402-03). 

The conclusion is that there can be no evidence for one ontology as over against another, so long anyway as we can express a one-to-one correlation between them. Save the structure and you save all. Certainly we are dependent on a familiar ontology of middle-sized bodies for the inception of reification, on the part both of the individual and of the race; but once we have an ontology, we can change it with impunity (405). 

This global ontological structuralism may seem abruptly at odds with realism, let alone naturalism. It would seem even to undermine the ground on which I rested it: my talk of impacts of light rays and molecules on nerve endings. Are these rays, molecules, and nerve endings themselves not disqualified now as mere figments of an empty structure? (405). 

Naturalism itself is what saves the situation. Naturalism looks only to natural science, however, fallible, for an account of what there is and what what there is does. Science ventures its tentative answers in man-made concepts, perforce, couched in man-made language, but we can ask no better. The very notion of object, or of one and many, is indeed as parochially human as the parts of speech; to ask what reality is really like, however, apart from human categories, is self-stultifying. It is like asking how long the Nile really is, apart from parochial matters of miles or meters. Positivists were right in branding such metaphysics as meaningless (405). 

So far as evidence goes, then, our ontology is neutral. Nor let us imagine beyond it some inaccessible reality. The very terms ‘thing’ and ‘exist’ and ‘real,’ after all, make no sense apart from human conceptualization. Asking after the thing in itself apart from human conceptualization, is like asking how long the Nile really is, apart from our parochial miles or kilometers (416). 

So it seems best for present purposes to construe the subject’s stimulus on a given occasion simply as his global neural intake on that occasion. But I shall refer to it only as neural intake, not stimulus, for other notions of stimulus are wanted in other studies, particularly where different subjects are to get the same stimulus. Neural intake is private, for subjects do not share receptors (463-64). 

But in contrast to the privacy of neural intakes, and the privacy of their perceptual similarity, observation sentences and their semantics are a public matter, since the child has to learn these from her elders. Her learning then depends indeed both on the public currency of the observation sentences and on a preestablished harmony of people’s private scales of perceptual similarity (464). 

These reflections on ontology are a salutary reminder that the ultimate data of science are limited to our neural intake, and that the very notion of object, concrete or abstract, is of our own making, along with the rest of natural science and mathematics (471).

On Quine's view, it's appearances all the way down. Not in the metaphysical sense that there's no bedrock reality which underlies appearances, but in the epistemological sense that bedrock reality is undetectable. Scientific observation, experimentation, and theorizing can never get behind perception to describe what the world is really like apart from perception. 

This, however, might have the ironic consequence that theological explanations, unlike scientific explanations, do have the potential to describe ultimate reality. In principle, there are two ways that could be the case:

i) Some theological explanations appeal to modal intuitions. They aren't filtered through sensory perception.

ii) If Scripture is divine revelation, then God's knowledge circumvents appearances. He doesn't know the world via sensory perception. Rather, he knows the world because it corresponds to his plan or idea for the world. And he can share his creative ideas with humans. 

It's analogous to the difference between seeing a movie and hearing to a director explain what he had in mind. That enables the viewer to get in back of the film. To access it from the privileged viewpoint of the film's creator. 

This upends the way many people relate faith and science: instead of science getting to the bottom of things while theology is about airy-fairy stuff and wishful thinking, it's theology that gets to the bottom of things.

On the contingency of evolutionary history

Kurt Wise reviews Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould. It's an old review (1997) but more or less still relevant today.

As for Gould's book, much of it is known to be incorrect (cf. Simon Conway Morris' The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals). But insofar as I understand it his main ideas are still alive and well.