Paleontologist [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StephenJayGould|Stephen Jay Gould], in his short work Rocks of Ages, seeks to reconcile or at least explain the seeming incompatibility of a scientific worldview and the fact of evolution and the religious belief in a supernatural entity. In doing so he introduces the concept of NOMA—non-overlapping magisteria—which may seem superficially satisfactory, but ultimately isn't.

Now, Rocks of Ages is at this point a rather old book, released in 1999, but the concept of NOMA is often invoked even today, even if the invoker is not aware of this fact. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins|Richard Dawkins] himself argued against NOMA as late as a year ago in his The God Delusion (a book which I wholeheartedly recommend, by the way). So what is this idea, this mysterious NOMA?

The word itself is a phrase coined by Gould in Rocks of Ages, an abbreviation for “non-overlapping magisteria”. A magisterium is said to be a particular domain of knowledge where there exists a way of talking about and discussing the domain; for instance, it can be said that science is the magisterium for talking about how the natural world works, and indeed science is one of the two magisteria Gould talks about. The other, he claims, is religion, and the jovially prefixes the two with the phrase “non-overlapping” and believes that he thus has solved the problem of science interacting with religion.

Science and religion, Gould claims, are non-overlapping magisteria; in other words, the two realms of knowledge that the two cover are entirely separate and do not interact with each other at all, and thus there can't be any conflict between the two. The idea is that while science gets to take care of the natural world and the empirical discoveries we make about it, religion occupies a completely different realm, namely that of the spiritual and moral. To sum it up in one short phrase, science answers the question “How?”, while religion answers the question “Why?”.

At this point one can almost hear the religious moderates breathe a sigh of relief, especially those that manage the feat of theological acrobatics of believing both in the theory of evolution and in a personal deity. And indeed there is something compelling, to those who wish to see the two coexist, to suspend one's thought processes and conclude that we have reached a solution to our problem of reconciling scientific observation with religious dogma. However, as we shall see, we really have not.

The most glaring problem with the idea of NOMA is that religion does indeed make claims about things which belong squarely within the realm of science: Namely, the existence of an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent creator is squarely posited, and all of religious dogma (especially Abrahamitic such, with which I admit I am most familiar) then flows from this claim, supporting itself on the presence of this deity. Without the existence of a God to judge us and give us commandments, religious morals fall quite flat on their face. Indeed, a universe created by a God and one arising through complex emergent physical interactions are very different things, the effort of discerning one from another would certainly by an endeavour to be carried out through observation. Now, having this pointed out, it should seem obvious that this is a scientific claim; the existence of some entity or process in the natural world is practically by definition something that belongs within the magisterium of science.

Already NOMA is beginning to crumble, but the overlap does not end with the simple position of the existence of a creator deity, significant though it may be. Looking at Christianity as the most well-known example, the source material is littered with claims of occurrences that are completely observable (at least in theory—a 2000 year time gap makes the practicalities a bit more tricky) and testable. Was the Savior really born of a virgin? Did he really heal the blind and raise the dead, and did he himself rise from the dead after being crucified? While an exact method for answering these questions would of course be up to debate, there is absolutely no doubt that we are wholly within the realm of science when considering these questions and how to answer them. These are simple claims, easily (potentially) testable through empirical means.

Furthermore, it is the belief of many religious people that God intervenes in our daily lives, and has done so in the past; and they call such intervention miracles. In fact, the whole concept of prayer is ostensibly centered around compelling a benevolent deity to intervene in the life of the praying person in some fashion. Underlying all this is again the tacit assumption that such a deity not only exists, but that he has the capability to directly influence the natural world. Very well, then—again, that is a scientific claim, and scrutiny to the same procedures as every other scientific topic is.

Ah, but here some would interject: “God does not intervene in our daily lives,” they claim. This viewpoint is proclaimed now and then, especially by apologetics who are finding it increasingly difficult to defend, in the face of steadily advancing scientific enlightenment, such a belief. Unfortunately for them, the belief that a deity indeed does intervene in our daily lives, in no matter how small a manner, is a belief held by the vast majority of modern believers—in fact, I think most of them would be quite offended if you suggested to them that God does not interfere with humanity, that he is either powerless to act or unwilling to act. Even if we were to accept that God does not deal in the happenings of mortals, and thus gutting religion of one of its major components, it does nothing to alleviate the problems already mentioned above.

So far, NOMA isn't holding up all that well. But let us imagine, for a moment, that the concepts “science” and “religion” were somehow separable to the point of no overlap— let us call these truly non-overlapping magisteria “NOMA-science” and “NOMA-religion” to separate them from their real-world counterparts. Presumably NOMA-sciene would retain its components of natural observation, including of such phenomena normally touted as religious in nature; there is no reason, after all, to exclude otherwise observable phenomena from the realm of science simply because they are associated with faith. What would remain of our NOMA-religion?

The idea touted by Gould and others is that NOMA-religion would deal exclusively with questions of morality and conduct, and questions like “Why?”; in particular questions like “Why does the world work the way it does?” Let us tackle that part first; though it's exceedingly simple to rebuke by simply asking oneself whether such a question makes sense in the first place, whether it could ever have an answer.

Underneath this question, when it is asked by a NOMA-ist, is the tacit assumption that the question is meaningful in some fashion; I submit that it is not. It may seem attractive to our mortal senses to ask ourselves why something exists, but it assumes that there is some kind of entity dictating that such a reason exists in the first place—a strictly scientific idea, and not very NOMA at all! Even if it somehow were, there is no reason to assume that simply because we can ask the question that it's going to have some kind of meaningful answer: we can pose many questions that ultimately don't make sense, about any dreamed-up topic we choose. I can ask over and over again the question “Why does the Flying Spaghetti Monster touch me with his noodly appendage?” without that question making any more sense because I do.

What now remains of NOMA-religion? As mentioned, issues concerning morality and conduct. Having already excised the question of God's existence from our hypothetical NOMA-religion, we can no longer base our moral principles upon such an existence, so what are we left with? Simply put, the same stuff we've always had to base our moral principles on: Philosophy, other people, instict, and the ever-changing moral Zeitgeist. This strange NOMA-religion is actually no longer religion; if anything it's ordinary moral philosophy in disguise, a concept that does not require any kind of belief or faith to function properly—there are many secular moral philosophers in history both past and contemporary to prove this.

With NOMA duly disemboweled, we arrive at the final question, though slightly tangential, of why people stick to it so staunchly. Dawkins hypothesizes that people such as Gould pay lip service to religion, for whatever reason. I don't wish to speculate too much about the motives of others, but it's easy to see the allure, however misguided, of simply dismissing the magisteria of science and religion as non-overlapping in order to not offend anyone. Personally, I'll keep calling a spade a spade. And those who tout NOMA as a principle need to wake up and realize that if you want to call your thing a religion, you need to admit to the cosmological parts of it as well.