A friend of mine, who is severely allergic to pork products, recently asked whether it would be okay for him to order a Western Omelet (ingredients: eggs, cheese, ham, onions, peppers). Superficially, this might seem like a fairly easy question: the incompatibilities between Western omelets and pork allergies seem pretty obvious. But I was able to use a sophisticated philosophical argument to convince him that everything would be okay.
My inspiration was Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of NOMA, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria. This principle establishes the fundamental compatibility of science with religion, arguing that the two simply don’t address similar questions, and therefore cannot come into conflict. Science deals with the workings of the world (“is” questions), while religion deals with ethical behavior (“ought” questions), so there is way they can be incompatible.
In this spirit, I have developed what I like to call the principle of Non-Overlapping Food Groups, or NOFOG for short. The basic argument is as follows: throughout history, humans have divided our culinary products into a set of grand groupings. Among these are the Egg Group and the Pork Group. Clearly these are non-overlapping: eggs come from chickens, while pork comes from pigs. Q.E.D.
Now, I don’t know about you, but a Western Omelet falls squarely within the Egg Group where I am from. Growing up in our small house in the Pennsylvania suburbs, I would look forward to eggs every Sunday morning, most often in the form of a yummy Western Omelet. While the identification is not perfect, we won’t go far wrong by recognizing the Western Omelet as a crucial component of the Egg Group on which we all depend.
Clearly, since the Egg Group is non-overlapping with the Pork Group, and my friend’s allergies are only to pork, the NOFOG principle justified encouraging his interest in ordering the omelet. I’ll be visiting him in the hospital tomorrow, hopefully he’s feeling better.
Sean, don’t feel bad.
I have discovered in my travels a surprisingly large number of people who don’t recognized bacon as a pork product. What is even more staggering is that you occasionally bump into a vegetarian that is oblivious that bacon is a meat product.
@Sean
“a crucial component of the Egg Group on which we all depend”
LOL! 🙂
@rob knok
“cases where people use religion to address a science question (and get it wrong). And, you can find cases where people assert that science addresses a religious question (and get it wrong)”
Any sentient animal, whatever how stupid it is, should feel in his heart the correctness of your view. But be carefull! You made a typo at the end of your sentence!
“cases where people use religion to address a science question (and get it wrong). And, you can find cases where people assert that science addresses a religious question (and get it right)”
jesus sean, let it go.
you’re not religious.
you think religion is idiotic.
we get it, we get it.
Heh. I think andy s. has said it best.
Remarkably, after years of trying, no blog commenters have yet convinced me to stop being interested in questions I’m interested in, and therefore stop blogging about them. But, it’s a free country!
@ Neil J. King #6
I feel you have missed the point of the analogy. The point is that though science and religion might not overlap most of the time, there do exist examples where they do. Of course there are plenty of examples where religious questions and scientific questions have nothing to do with each other. But is this always the case, considering the wide diversity of both religion and science?
A trivial counterexample: Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I believed that science is fully compatible with religion, and is in fact one of the kinds of religious inquiry. This belief is not too outlandish; I was taught that sort of thing in high school. Now, “science” may have a mostly prescriptivist definition which I have no control over. But “religion” is nothing more than my beliefs and practices. So by believing that my religion overlaps with science, I have made it so!
A more unfortunate counterexample: Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I am a Young Earth Creationist. This belief is far from unheard of (have you seen the polls?). Then, it is my religious belief that the Earth is 6000 years old. But that’s a scientifically testable statement, don’t you think?
It is all too easy to pretend religion is made up of no more than rituals, moral guidelines, and beliefs in the scientifically untestable. But then we would have to ignore all these real-world examples of religion.
Where I live, the word “ham” means “any kind of meat-like substance cut into very thin slices.” Thus it is perfectly reasonable to ask to have “chicken ham” on your sandwich [as an alternative to “turkey ham”].
This is a mystery, almost comparable to the mystery of how a rabid leftist like SJ Gould could come up with religious crackpottery like non-overlapping blah blah. Come to think of it, that’s not such a mystery: one form of superstition drove out another. OK, then, the mystery is that such an intellectual non-entity got a job at Harvard.
flying spaghetti monster andy, let it go.
you’re didn’t enjoy the article.
you don’t enjoy sean’s articles on religion.
don’t read it, don’t read it.
Luckily, people who get hay fever will not become inflamed by this post, since straw and hay are also non-overlapping monocotelydonae (NOMA).
Fortunately, both are suitable fuels for flame wars.
It is false to say that religion and science are incompatible. There is nothing in science that excludes the entirety of religion and nothing in religion that excludes science. Extremists aside, I have been able to reconcile my religious beliefs with my scientific knowledge because I am able to modify my religious belief in light of fact. Saying the world is 4 billion years old does not cause me a crisis of faith. Even the Pope has come out against those that would deny scientific fact.
Some people always point out that there is no evidence of God’s existence. I am not going to debate that because I see evidence of him every day all around me. If you don’t see wonder and awe in the world around and see everything as coincidence and mathematical probability, I truly feel sorry for you.
I will leave you with a quote, from the program The Universe (which Sean appeared on at least once) from Carl Sagan.
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
31, miller:
The point of the NOMA approach is that you have to establish limits for the claims of religious and the scientific worldviews. I would not accept the 6000-year claim for the age of the Earth (as I already stated earlier in $19) because it is not within the scope of religious issues.
Just as I don’t accept any claim that there is “the scientific” view of the meaning of life, justice, or abortion.
Taking a NOMA position means pushing back on the claims of both many specific religions and of some over-expansive scientists.
Where this all starts to get hairy is when we move from acknowledging that (to choose just one example among a great many) “the Earth is X years old” is a scientifically testable statement, to wondering what other religious assertions are scientifically testable. Such as (to choose just one example among a great many) “human beings may be resurrected/reincarnated”. Or “heaven & hell are actual places with a physical location,” etc.
Even if this NOMA idea is granted, the fact remains that matters within the realm of scientific inquiry only increase with the continued development of science. If we consider earlier and earlier times, eventually we will come to a time when science was not yet able to grapple with questions about the age of the Earth, which celestial bodies orbits which, the origin of species, etc. But as our knowledge increases, so does the scope of our ability to question allegedly divine teachings (which are, of course, reported by human agents).
Religions, by definition as it were, do not “expand” in this same way. So I fail to see how the NOMA principle resolves anything at all.
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Well, I think the analogy is pretty good. The NOMA people ignore the fact that religion – whatever else it may be – almost always makes claims of fact about the real world. Religions that don’t tend to have few followers because – lets face it – the whole point of religion is to have someone to pray to when your child is sick or hurt. Christianity is a case in point: Jesus came to destroy the works of the evil one, and to the first century mind that explicitly includes disease whioc, as we know, is caused by evil spirits.
Anyway. These claims of fact do not become nonscientific simply because they are wrapped in religios language, any more than port becomes nonporky when it’s wrapped in egg.
More succinctly:
If the sphere of operation of science is fact, and if science and religion are non-overlapping, isn’t this just a sneaky way of pointing out that religion is fiction?
It just goes to show ya …
Logic: The ideal way to go wrong … with certainty.
Two pointless observations:
1. Omelettes get spelled differently in Britain, for some reason. It appears from the ending that they are feminine whereas your omelets are masculine.
2. Contrary to popular belief the word “omelette” (or omelet) does not necessarily imply that you’re referring to something with eggs in it. The word originally means “a flat plate” and is actually from the same root as “amulet”.
The “omelet”/”omellette” controversy is at least as heated as the science/religion fracas. But according to Google, omelet wins. If only other realms of inquiry had recourse to such an impartial judge.
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What makes this specifically religious? One could argue that the kinds of critical thinking skills and ethics training that scientists have can be excellent preparation for tackeling moral questions.
Of course I’m inclined to think that neither religious nor scientific training give any special moral insights. Many theologians have had moral insights, but that’s because that’s what they spent their time thinking about, not because of the concepts of religion. Secular moral philosophers are just as good.
Sean,
That would be the frequentist in you speaking. Perhaps elsewhere in the multiverse there are omelettes made of cosmic eggs too.
Peter
@Neal J. King:
While I could certainly be convinced that ethics isn’t really a science per se, it doesn’t follow that it’s part of religion either. After all, ethics and religion have hardly always been the best of friends, and it’s clearly possible for ethics to exist outside any religious framework.
Conflating ethics and religion would seem to be the wont only of certain “over-expansive” religionists, whose claims should be pushed back upon just as hard as those of the other two. (In other words, there are at least three magisteria: science, ethics, and religion.)
“Science deals with the workings of the world (”is” questions), while religion deals with ethical behavior (”ought” questions), so there is way they can be incompatible.”
Within Gould’s argument, isn’t there a typo in the above quote? I think it should read “there is A way they can be COMPATIBLE”. Sorry for the caps, I don’t know how to use HTML markup in this site, and there’s no “preview” option before submitting. I suggest a short and sweet pop-up guide for formatting text, as some sites, for example, require for italics while others prefer [ i ], so it’s hard to keep track of where to apply each.
Anyway, egg and fish a resounding yes (try some mayo on your next fish taco), but not egg and lamb. Beef and peaches, no, and I’ve never understood pineapple with anything except maybe rum, and only at the hand of experts.
Finally, fundamentalist zealots pushing for, among other things, their creationist agenda on schools, makes Gould’s gentle and conciliatory viewpoint impractical in the contemporary climate of superstition and literal interpretation of ancient texts. Whenever the backwards idiots act aggressively, they should rightfully get an equal and opposite reaction, a lá Richard Dawkins et alia.
I dunno about the analogy, but this post just make me hunger for an omelet.
A western omelet.
Neil J. King #36
It seems like you are taking NOMA to be prescriptive rather than descriptive. That is, NOMA is how things ought to be, rather than how they are. I can certainly agree with you that NOMA is how things ought to be.