MIM Notes No. 199	 December 1, 1999

BOOK REVIEW

Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life 
by Stephen Jay Gould 
NY: Ballantine, 1999, 241pp.

Reviewed by MC5

Stephen Jay Gould is a hero of ours for flaying creationism, eugenics 
and pseudo-scientific theories of race and gender. Nonetheless, this 
book is an accommodation, a political sell-out from our point of view. 
From Gould's point of view the book is a political necessity to show 
that the majority of religious practitioners already have their own 
reasons for leaving creationism out of the schools. He proposes a false 
peace between science and religion, religion being defined almost 
exclusively as Christianity when it comes to examples in the book.

The thesis of this book is that there are two rocks, one science and one 
religion. Science has the turf of the natural world and religion has the 
turf of the spiritual. According to Gould their separation can be called 
NOMA (Non- Overlapping Magisteria). The word "magisterium" has some 
application in Catholicism as meaning "turf."

Stephen Jay Gould admits to being an agnostic (p.8) and also admits to 
not being an expert in religion. He says he does not understand it, but 
at the same time he assures the religious community that science can do 
it no damage, that it's all a matter of how religious thinkers interpret 
their own scriptures. However, we hard-core atheists believe Gould is 
wrong, because there is no way to identify "dogmatic theology" (p. 105) 
as the enemy instead of all religion. Gould settled for an unscientific 
determination of "dogmatic theology" and has surrendered the boundaries 
of science into the foggy mists.

Gould takes up a case-by-case method to show that religious people 
understand science well enough to leave it alone (e.g. Isaac Newton). 
Such a case-by-case approach abandons Stephen Jay Gould's usual 
preference for accounting for chance. The fact is, a large portion of 
religious people do not accept Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA and cannot by 
the precepts of their religion--Christian Scientists being one classic 
example.

Unfortunately it has been left to Marxism to be the entirety of the 
science of science or the science of the advance of science. By now 
there should be many non-Marxists taking the object of study known as 
the "history of science" and generating scientific theories. It is 
political reality of the sort dealt with by Stephen Jay Gould that has 
undercut this possibility. The result of scientific practice regarding 
the history of science would confirm harsh atheist conclusions and is 
not supported by the academy.

Gould does admit that science had to expand its turf against 
Christianity.(p. 64) It wasn't always in the condition that it is today 
of having the prestige and class power behind it to be separate from 
religion. Science had to fight to its current position, but now Gould 
says it can afford to make peace with religion.

Ironically, when Gould should be calling on all people of scientific 
understanding to defend high school textbooks from fundamentalists 
trying to insert their agendas, he takes up agnosticism and denies the 
underlying basis of scientific thought. His strategy will end up leaving 
biologists fighting this fight by themselves.

Visit MIM's on-line bookstore for a more extensive review of this book 
and to buy this book. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/ bookstore/