NOMA SAYS: Religion is about a transcendent reality that is beyond the universe we see, of matter and energy. It is not therefore subject to nature's rules. It can, or does, make the rules.
What is the relationship between religion/supernatural and science?
It could be conflict: one opposes the other, and you must align with one of them.
It could be independence: one refers to one kind of truth, and the other to another.
It could be collaboration: this would be the preferred one for religion, where science helps support religious claims and religion cherishes science.
Capra wrote, "Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both." But does it follow that man can have both? A slave cannot have two masters. Jesus said you cannot love God and money. It is one or the other. He meant that God is to be loved for His own sake. If you love money for the sake of God, that means you don't love it for itself. If you love money for itself, that contradicts the love due to God—total exclusive love.
Stephen Jay Gould argued that there is no conflict between real religion and real science. There is no overlap, according to him, between the authorities of science and religion. There is a Non-Overlapping Magisteria, or NOMA.
He interpreted religion, though, as being about values, not facts. So NOMA is not about religion so much as his understanding of what a religion is. Many religions do not accept that they are just about moral values. They say they are more than just philosophies.
Religions like Hare Krishna are dismissed as being real religions because Prabhupada was clear in the book Life Comes from Life that scientists are thieves from God. The Mormon faith, Scientology, Urantia, and others are clear that they have a lot to say about science, and their books do the science for them.
Another problem is that there is no single science. Science is one word for a whole conundrum of sciences. A scientist in one branch need not be a scientist in another, such as psychology or medicine. Science consists of several branches. Darwinian evolution is one. Struggle is another—for survival of the most adaptable is true whether evolution is true or not. Cosmology is another, and it contradicts the tidy vision of the Bible as to how all things began. Cosmology basically says that violence and luck got us to where we are, and that only happened because we are an unimaginable distance from the beginning of time. The Bible gives the impression that Adam and Eve did not live many millions of years ago. It certainly implies that there were no dinosaurs on Earth when Adam and Eve lived.
Thus, for the likes of Gould and some Christians to glibly say science and religion fit is breathtaking in its arrogance. It thwarts the huge need to conduct colossal research. It is a matter for research, experimentation, and cross-checking—not opinion.
Survival of the most adaptable, and how that adaptability is at the mercy of chance, is the science behind all sciences. This is totally anti-God and says that if there is a God, then He would have to be just as cruel as chance is. All investigation happens simply because we know our adaptability, and we have to treat it as something that could be lost in a second.
NOMA encourages and opens the door to thinking that evolution is guided to effect progress. Humans want to think they are worth the horrible, terrible, endless suffering and blood that led to us being here today. Science says that if we had not appeared, something maybe better, or a bit worse, might have appeared in our place. Perhaps it would be a planet of apes like in the films. We are not here as a result of progress. It is random forces that just happened to work out in our favor. Other creatures in the world would not see us as progress, but as anything but.
The idea of survival of the fittest looks like it promotes progress, but it does not. Evolution is not about progress. A stone falling in a pond, making a nice pattern, is not about making nice patterns. To say evolution really is evolution, as in progress, is to say it is about promoting the best and weeding out the non-best. That hardly fits any ethic that encourages us to love, and so it cannot fit or arise from a God of love. NOMA is misleading. NOMA does not know what science is, so it cannot say science and religion fit.
Reason is science. Science is reason. Reason is basically: if A, then not B. Science does everything with that principle. Just seeing that your tea is cold, not hot, is science. Your body is the machine you do the experiment with. The computer in your head is what is assessing, interpreting, and understanding the experiment. Science, at its core, goes back to all that. Science is about what can be tested to see if it is there. Then it thinks about it. So reason is based on natural things. Metaphysical reasoning is not reasoning at all. There is no test to see if a being without parts, material components, or a body can exist. NOMA is an outrage for ignoring these truths.
Reason is nature thinking about itself, for you are part of nature.
NOMA orders religion to keep out of science and not state what it thinks are religious facts. Facts are facts, whether they are religious or not. Facts are not really religious. NOMA is then not as tolerant of religion as it tries to look.
DETECTABILITY
God, being creator, means all that exists depends totally on Him.
It is said by the Catholic Church that science only detects what is material, and God, by definition, is not a material being. So it is a mistake to think God doesn’t exist, or at least probably does not exist, because science hasn’t detected Him. This argument supposes science is not religion, and religion is not science. But some religions argue that, as all truth comes from God, math and science are religious even if they don't know it. So the argument is a deliberate lie and does not fit the doctrine of a creator God, who is the origin of all truth.
The doctrine of God says that He is not a thing that can be detected like a marble, but the most important thing is that God is activity. God can then be detected indirectly. We need to be careful and realize that direct and indirect can be equally important. We need to watch that we don’t see an indirect cause as always being lesser than a direct one. Thus the Church is fibbing. Science does oppose God in the sense that it denies any need for Him, for it does not see any activity that could be His, or any need for it. What more denial is needed?
If science says that religion is a separate matter, it does not follow that religion will say the same. Indeed, religion cannot.
SO?
Jesus put science ahead of spirituality in John 3:12: "If I have spoken to you about earthly things, and you believe not, how will you believe if I shall speak to you concerning heavenly things?" For once, He made a little sense. NOMA’s doctrine that science and religion are totally separate and therefore do not contradict each other is illogical. Two disciplines being separate does not mean they are non-contradictory. Just because science cannot answer a question doesn’t mean religion can. It does not mean that science will not answer the question one day. The science that reaches us may have no answer, but maybe science has found the answer and the word has not circulated well yet. Not all answers are really answers. An answer by religion or superstition is best seen as a suggestion, not an answer. Religious or not, a real answer will be granted by evidence and nothing else. It is not about opinion or guesses.
Science tries to avoid faith and repose on hard facts. It thinks about things in a hard, untrusting way. Thus, a God who sets up science does not want a relationship with us. No God would misdirect. If science has faith, after all, then that is in spite of itself. There is more faith involved in science than in religion or spiritual trust in God, for it does not endorse faith in magic or supernatural miracles. Science has to work using mathematical sets, and math is no good if there could be hidden magical interference.
NOMA is just popular because religious ideology needs it to be. It is not popular because it has any intellectual merit. Gould did not believe NOMA himself, for he said:
"In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms."
To repudiate faith and miracles like that tells us what his gut instinct is. Science, in fact, by assuming that it can predict and expects those predictions to come to pass, is using atheism—as in, God will not change anything and will not create a new natural law to replace the current one—as a scientific method. Simple.
NOMA confuses possibility with probability. Possibility never counts. Probability counts. If it is possible religion and science fit, they might as well not fit, for it is always possible you are wrong.
Science is the enemy of religion - or is prepared to be.