Why NOMA Fails to Separate Science, Metaphysics and Religion

Category: Philosophy of Religion

Summary

Stephen Jay Gould’s principle of “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” — NOMA — claims that science and religion cannot conflict because they address separate domains: science deals with facts, while religion deals with values and meaning.

This article argues that the separation does not hold. Moral judgements generally depend partly on factual premises; metaphysical claims about God, the soul or human nature are constrained by scientific knowledge; and a religion stripped of every factual claim no longer resembles most historically constituted religions.

The article also examines the authority Gould grants religious traditions on questions of value and meaning. It argues that religious expertise faces a trilemma: either it is accidental, rests on factual claims about revelation that violate NOMA, or depends on publicly accessible reasons whose authority is not specifically religious.

NOMA therefore fails in each of its main forms: as a separation of facts from values, of science from metaphysics, and as a prescriptive attempt to confine religion to meaning alone.

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