Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)

The theory of Non-Overlapping Magisteria, usually abbreviated to NOMA, is most closely associated with the American palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. He proposed it as a way of resolving the apparent conflict between science and religion. The basic idea is that science and religion are not rival explanations of the same reality because they have different areas of legitimate authority, or different "magisteria". Science deals principally with empirical facts and the workings of the natural world, whereas religion deals with questions of meaning, value, purpose and morality. If the two remain within their proper domains, Gould argued, there need be no conflict between them.

Gould developed the idea particularly clearly in his 1997 essay "Nonoverlapping Magisteria". He defined a magisterium as "a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution". Science, on his account, concerns "the empirical constitution of the universe", whereas the religious magisterium extends over "questions of ultimate meaning and moral value". Thus the question "How did human beings arise?" belongs to science and can be investigated through evolutionary biology, genetics, palaeontology and related disciplines. The question "What ought human beings to do with their lives?" is of a different kind and cannot be settled by an experiment or fossil discovery.

The attraction of NOMA is that it offers a principled way of rejecting the idea that science must inevitably destroy religion. If science explains how the universe works, it does not automatically follow that it has explained away every question that human beings regard as important. Knowing the chemical composition of a rose does not, by itself, tell us whether the rose is beautiful; knowing the evolutionary history of altruism does not by itself tell us whether we ought to be altruistic; and knowing the neurological correlates of religious experience does not necessarily settle the philosophical question of whether such experiences have any transcendent significance. NOMA therefore draws an important distinction between questions of fact and questions of value and meaning.

There is also a strong argument from the limits of scientific method. Science is extraordinarily successful precisely because it restricts itself to questions that can be investigated empirically. It can tell us what happens, under what conditions it happens, and what causal mechanisms appear to be involved. It is much less obvious that scientific investigation can establish what is morally good, what human life is for, whether beauty has objective value, or whether existence as a whole has meaning. The fact that science cannot answer such questions does not necessarily make them meaningless. A person can therefore accept the authority of science over empirical questions without concluding that empirical science is the only legitimate form of rational enquiry.

NOMA also has an important historical argument behind it. Religion and science have not always been understood as competitors. Medieval Christian thinkers, for example, did not generally regard theology as simply an alternative form of physics or astronomy. Theology, philosophy and natural philosophy were regarded as different intellectual activities, although their boundaries were certainly not as sharply drawn as Gould's formulation suggests. One can therefore argue that the apparent conflict between science and religion is partly produced by the modern tendency to expect every intellectual discipline to operate according to the same standards and to answer the same sorts of questions.

A further argument for NOMA is that it can accommodate religious people who accept modern science without qualification. Someone might accept evolutionary biology, the Big Bang theory, modern cosmology and neuroscience while nevertheless finding religious narratives valuable as expressions of moral, existential or spiritual truth. This is particularly relevant to non-literal approaches to religion. The biblical creation narratives, for example, need not be interpreted as primitive scientific accounts in order for them to have theological or symbolic significance. On such an interpretation, Genesis is addressing questions about humanity's relationship with God, nature, morality and creation rather than competing with evolutionary biology for an account of biological origins.

Objections

However, NOMA faces some substantial objections. The most obvious is that religion does not confine itself to questions of value and meaning. Traditional religions make numerous claims that appear to be empirical or historical. Christianity, for example, makes claims about the historical existence of Jesus, his crucifixion and resurrection; Judaism makes claims concerning historical events recorded in its scriptures; and many religions make claims about miracles, divine interventions, answered prayers and supernatural events. These are not merely questions of subjective meaning. If someone claims that a particular miracle actually happened, that is at least partly a claim about what occurred in the empirical world.

This creates a serious problem for the strict version of NOMA. If religion says that God created the universe, intervenes in history, answers prayers or raises the dead, then religion and science potentially do overlap. Science cannot necessarily investigate every such claim directly, but that does not mean the claims fall outside the domain of factual enquiry. If a person says that a particular event occurred in the physical world, evidence concerning that event is relevant regardless of whether the claim originates in a religious tradition.

The problem becomes even clearer with claims about human origins. Suppose someone interprets Genesis literally and maintains that human beings were specially created rather than having evolved from earlier organisms. That is a claim about the natural world, and evolutionary biology has something directly relevant to say about it. NOMA cannot simply declare the question to belong to religion. The boundary between the magisteria must itself be justified.

A second objection is that questions of value may not be completely independent of facts. David Hume famously distinguished between statements about what is and statements about what ought to be, warning against moving illegitimately from one to the other. But although facts alone may not determine values, facts clearly influence moral judgement. Whether an action causes suffering, whether a person is capable of understanding consequences, whether a particular policy saves lives, and whether a person has particular psychological capacities are all empirical questions that can affect moral reasoning. Consequently, science may not be able to tell us the ultimate purpose of human life, but scientific knowledge can certainly contribute to our understanding of what actions are likely to promote or frustrate particular moral objectives.

There is an even deeper philosophical objection: how does one establish the boundaries between the magisteria? Gould's division may appear intuitively reasonable, but it is not obvious that "meaning", "morality" and "value" constitute a single domain belonging to religion. Secular philosophers can investigate ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy and the meaning of life without appealing to religion. Conversely, theologians frequently make claims about the nature of reality that go well beyond morality and meaning. The division therefore may be less a description of the actual practices of science and religion than a proposed arrangement designed to make them compatible.

Some atheistic philosophers have therefore argued that NOMA gives religion an exemption from the ordinary standards of evidence. If a religious believer makes a claim about the physical world, the critic argues, the fact that it is expressed in religious language should not place it beyond scrutiny.

Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others have argued in different ways that religious believers frequently make factual claims and therefore cannot simply retreat into a protected territory called "meaning". From this perspective, NOMA risks becoming a kind of intellectual truce in which science is asked not to challenge religion's factual claims, while religion is asked not to challenge science's empirical conclusions.

There is also an objection from the other direction. Some religious thinkers have argued that NOMA concedes too much to science by treating science as the unquestioned authority over empirical reality and relegating religion to a secondary domain of meaning and value. For many traditional religious believers, God is not merely the source of moral meaning but the creator and sustainer of the physical universe. If God exists, then the distinction between "scientific facts" and "religious meaning" cannot ultimately be absolute, because both concern the same underlying reality. Theology, on this view, may legitimately ask questions about the ultimate explanation of the universe even though those questions cannot be answered by scientific experiment alone.

This leads to a particularly important distinction between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism. Science normally operates through methodological naturalism: when investigating nature, scientists look for natural causes and explanations. This does not necessarily entail the philosophical proposition that nature is all that exists. Metaphysical naturalism, by contrast, asserts that there is nothing beyond the natural world. NOMA can be interpreted as protecting the distinction between these two positions. Science can operate successfully without invoking God, while leaving open the larger metaphysical question of whether reality contains anything beyond nature. Critics of NOMA may respond that this leaves an unresolved question: if science is our most reliable method for acquiring knowledge of the world, what positive grounds are there for believing in anything beyond what science can investigate?

The strongest version of NOMA therefore probably should not be understood as saying that science and religion never have anything to say about the same subject. That version is difficult to defend. A more modest interpretation is that science and religion employ different kinds of enquiry and that neither should automatically be treated as competent to answer every kind of question. Science has enormous authority concerning empirical questions, while questions about value, meaning and ultimate purpose may require philosophical, ethical, or theological reasoning. On this weaker interpretation, religion is not granted immunity from criticism, but neither is science assumed to have authority over every question simply because scientific knowledge is extraordinarily successful within its own field.

The crucial issue is therefore not simply whether science and religion overlap, but where and how they overlap. Questions such as "How old is the Earth?", "How did species diversify?" and "What causes infectious disease?" are overwhelmingly empirical questions and are appropriately answered by science. Questions such as "Is torture morally wrong?", "What makes a human life valuable?" and "What constitutes a good life?" cannot be answered by empirical observation alone, although empirical knowledge can be highly relevant to them. Questions such as "Does God exist?", "Is consciousness reducible to physical processes?" or "Is there a transcendent reality?" occupy a much more difficult borderland. They involve empirical considerations but also metaphysical and philosophical reasoning.

NOMA is consequently best regarded not as a demonstrated fact about the structure of knowledge, but as a proposal about intellectual jurisdiction. Its great strength is its insistence that explaining the mechanisms of something is not necessarily the same as exhausting its significance. Its weakness is that the proposed boundary between mechanism and meaning is porous, and traditional religions themselves frequently cross it.

For someone interested in a non-literal or fictionalist approach to religion, NOMA is particularly interesting because it can be separated from the question of whether religious propositions are literally true. A person might regard religious stories as metaphysically false while nevertheless regarding them as profound vehicles for wisdom, ethical insight, spiritual practice and existential orientation. In that case, religion is not being used as a competing scientific account of reality at all. The question then becomes whether religious language can convey genuine value and insight without requiring its supernatural propositions to be taken literally. That is arguably a more radical position than Gould's NOMA: rather than saying that science and religion occupy separate territories, it asks whether religion can be reconceived as a form of symbolic, ethical and existential engagement with reality.