I am wondering if you might give me some feedback on the text below with regard to two things:
1. Is the opening too obscure as to what the "smallest room" is? Or worse, inappropriate?
2. Does the three-tier division make sense, and is my defense of the third tier tenable?
This is the beginnings of an essay on science and religion.
Discoveries made at the end of a long and ordered journey, with the discovery as the goal of the trek itself, yield a predictable but expected pleasure. Discoveries made by accident, with no journey planned or goal in mind, generate their own unique pleasures reserved for those rare occasions when contingent sequences include us in their wanderings. As a minimalist example of the latter, while temporarily occupying the smallest room in a friend's home I grabbed for the nearest piece of reading material when it appeared my stay there would last longer than a headline. Quite by chance I pulled down a 1954 edition of The Story of the Starry Universe, part of the Popular Science Library's series of illustrated books of science for the general reader. Since this was the year of my birth I flipped to the final page to see what prognostications were being made for the future of astronomy. The authors (Amherst's David Todd, with revisions by Harvard's Donald Menzel) explained that V-2 rockets were being hurled into space with scientific instruments (instead of the warheads of ten years prior), so that the stars might be studied from above the ultra-violet filter of the ozone layer. The research was so new it was not even published yet, but as all authors do in looking for something grand to say in wrapping up year's of toil, they boldly speculated (381):
Scientists are even talking about the possibility of sending rockets completely outside of the earth's atmosphere and causing them to move in an approximately circular orbit, permanent satellites of the earth for special laboratory studies. It has been estimated that perhaps ten years or so will elapse before such a ladder to the skies will have been perfected.
My contingent gem was that an earlier trip to this room with that day's newspaper found me starring at newly released magnificent color photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope, our ladder to the skies.
Okay, so it took four decades instead of the estimated one, but the prize was well worth the wait. In science, as in most cultural productions, time frames rarely match expectations. But rates of change do vary among professions, and there is no disputing the fact that science changes faster than religion. Compare the 30-year discrepency between Todd and Menzel's prediction and Hubble's products, to the 361-year abyss between Galileo's 1632 indictment for heresy and the church's acquittal of him in 1993; or the 137-year gap between Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species and Pope John Paul II's acceptance of evolution as a viable theory for everything but the human soul in his 1996 Truth Cannot Contradict Truth, addressed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences:
Today new knowledge has led to the recognition of more than one hypothes is in the theory of evolution. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory. However, the moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation.
As Pope's go, John Paul II is relatively progressive, broadly and deeply read, and sensitive to the important issues of his age, one of the most important being, as we turn the millennial corner, the relationship between religion and science, faith and reason. In October, 1998, the Catholic Church released the Pope's thirteenth Encyclical Letter "Fides et Ratio of the Supreme Pontiff to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Relationship Between Faith and Reason" weighing in at no less than 35,000 words, divided into seven chapters and 108 sub-sections, and featuring a weighty 132 scholarly endnotes. Fides et Ratio, by any standards, is an impressive work of scholarship by a man who has obviously read and thought a lot about the subject. The Pope's position falls squarely in the second tier of a three-tier taxonomy of the relationship of science and religion I developed (1997) to classify the many and varied viewpoints developed over the centuries:
1. Conflicting-Worlds Model: This "warfare" model of science and religion, in its modern incarnation dates back to the 1890 publication of Andrew Dickson White's The Warfare of Science and Religion in the Age of Christendom, for three-quarters of a century considered the definitive history of the relationship. White presented noncontextualized potted histories of such prominent events as Galileo's 1632 trial for heresy in teaching the Copernican theory, and the Thomas Huxley-Samuel Wilberforce 1860 Oxford debate over evolution. Among the holders of the conflicting-worlds model today are fundamentalist Christians and young-earth creationists who believe that religion is right and science wrong, and militant atheists, secular humanists, and combative scientists, who believe that there is only one reality and one way of understanding that reality, that science is that way, and that the day will come when science dislodges religion into the dust heap of history.
2. Same-Worlds Model: In the last couple of decades this position has become popular among mainstream religious leaders, believing scientists, and secular intellectuals, who have moved beyond the oversimplified conflicting-worlds model, but who would still like to have it both ways. Religion and science, faith and reason, they argue, are two ways of examining the same reality. As modern science progresses to a greater understanding of the natural world, we are discovering that the wisdom of the ancients neatly matches the findings of cosmologists, astronomers, geologists, and evolutionary biologists. Sometimes figuratively (as in day-age models where a biblical day represents a geological epoch), sometimes literally (where scientific findings are interpreted as supporting, point by point, biblical passages as read nonmetaphorically), most residing on this tier are believers who work mightily to either read into these ancient writings modern science, or to read into present scientific theories biblical accounts. The German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg (1981) and his scientific counterpart in the mathematical physicist Frank Tipler (1994) meet at this level, arguing that theology and cosmology are rapidly converging into one sphere of knowledge. John Paul II's encyclical, discussed in detail below, is one of the more sophisticated treatises presented in defense of this model.
3. Separate-Worlds Model: Residents on this tier are still in the minority in their belief that science and religion are neither in conflict nor in agreement, but, in Stephen Jay Gould's apt phrase (adopted from the Pope's 1996 encyclical), are "nonoverlapping magisteria." Science is not a "thing," but a "process"--more than a body of knowledge, science is method for obtaining answers to questions about the natural world. Religion, by contrast, deals with matters of morality and myths (as in stories) to offer guidence for living and answers to what have traditionally been unanswerable questions dealing with free will and determinism, good and evil, the meaning and purpose in life, solutions to moral dilemmas and paradoxes, our ultimate fate after death, and the creation of life and the universe. While it is true that more and more science is encroaching on some of these areas (such as the creation of life and the universe), we are a long way from finding agreement among scientists about whether, say, abortion is moral or immoral, whether lying is permissible in certain circumstances, whether we have free will or are determined, how to operationally define good and evil, and especially on such subjective matters as meaning and purpose of human existence. Scientists have opinions on these questions, of course, but there is no consensus (and considerable disagreement) between them to such an extent that such matters are rarely even dealt with in the scientific literature, let alone agreed upon.
To clarify further the similarities and differences between these three tiers, it might be useful to make a distinction between the two primary purposes of religion and belief in God: an explanation for the natural world in the form of cosmogony myths, and a guidence to human life in the form of morality myths. Clearly, modern cosmology has displaced ancient cosmogonies in the minds of all but a tiny handful of young-earth creationists and a few others on the fringe. Most moderate believers have now abandoned the six-thousand year old young-earth model in favor of an old-earth model that more closely parallels the findings of modern science. This process of displacement has been underway for the past four centuries and continues to this day, with a few holdouts from the same-worlds tier struggling to squeeze the square peg of science into the round hole of religion. Evolutionary biology and the study of the chemical origins of life have also paved new roads into the ancient question of life's origination, to the point where these type of religious myths are now nearly obsolete.
Although some progress has been made since the Enlightenment to ground moral values in non-religious, metaphysical concepts like "rights," and to construct a secular system by which one can live a meaningful life without any believe in God, we are a long way from finding agreement among scientists about whether, say, abortion is moral or immoral, whether lying is permissible in certain circumstances, how to operationally define good and evil, and especially on such subjective matters as the purpose of human existence.
To that end, the separate-worlds model is better for religion because science is constantly changing and thus it is dangerous to attach religious doctrines to scientific theories, which may go out of date in a matter of years (if Stephen Hawking's no-boundary universe is true, then there is no beginning, no end, and no need of a creator). It is better for science because religion, by definition, deals with subjects beyond our scope and practice (could scientists ever agree on an operational definition of the meaning of life?).
As the good book extols (1 Cor. 13:12): "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully." That vision and understanding can only be achieved when these two different methods are employed in these two different spheres.