Stephen Jay Gould‘s famous ‘Two Separate Domains‘ argues, roughly, that religion and science operate in different domains of inquiry, and as such do not conflict with each other:
We get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.
Or, science gets the descriptive and the quantitative, religion gets the prescriptive and the qualitative. Facts on one side; values on the other.
‘Two Separate Domains’ is an essay I read some years ago; yesterday, I discussed it with my philosophy of religion class. On this revisitation, I was struck by how weak and narrowly focused Gould’s arguments are.
Most crucially, Gould is almost entirely concerned with responding to a very particular religious tradition: Christianity. Moreover, within that, he takes himself to be pushing back against that species of Protestant fundamentalism which…
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A Philosopher's Take 
Lage
May 11, 2016
Yeah, Gould’s thesis is pretty silly in my opinion. As far as I’m concerned there is no fact-value distinction and the moral-realist “goal theory of ethics” illustrates this point. Values are based on facts, including facts on what makes us and others happy, satisfied, fulfilled, etc. A science of morality, if ever established formally, will be able to answer so many questions in a more systematic way, but nevertheless people are either obtaining their values from dogmatic sources, or they are reasoning those values based on the facts of the matter. Gould had it wrong. Science and religion are certainly different, but only science has been shown to reliably result in any increased knowledge about the world and our existence. Claims of the supernatural and other shenanigans brought out by religion are simply undemonstrated claims — even if people WISH them to be true. Science uses reason and evidence to arrive at knowledge reliably and repeatably whereas religion just makes claims to acquiring knowledge based on faith and dogma without actually demonstrating the validity of that supposed knowledge.
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Angra Mainyu
May 11, 2016
Hi Justin
I tried a couple of times to reply in the other blog, but it seems I couldn’t (my comment didn’t get published, but I didn’t get an “awaiting moderation” notice, either).
I would say that I agree, but I’d like to add that even in the case of Catholicism, it doesn’t work for Gould, since some of the core beliefs of Catholicism include the claims that Jesus walked on water, that he brought Lazarus back to life, that he himself came back from the dead, that he appeared to Paul/Saul, etc.
Even if one assumed for the sake of the argument that the fact/value (or non-moral fact/moral fact, or however one chooses to make it) distinction can be neatly made, all of those claims would be matters of fact, descriptions, etc., even if further evidence against them (“further” because based on science we can already tell the probability of some of those events is astronomically low, though we didn’t need science for that in my assessment) may never become available.
But purely for example, let’s say a Paul/Saul letter were found, in which he (for one reason or another) makes it clear that it was a lie, and he never saw Jesus (either in dreams or in the flesh). That surely be strong evidence against Catholicism. Nothing like that will ever be found, almost certainly. But the fact remains that Catholicism, even at its core, does not respect the distinction by making assertions that fall very clearly on the “descriptive” side (assuming that the distinction can be neatly made, etc.).
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OJB
May 11, 2016
I think Gould was just trying to be “nice” which he might have thought was the best approach especially when the strength of religion in the US is considered.
On the other hand he is right that science and religion do cover completely different areas of human endeavour. Science is an honest effort at establishing truths about the real world. Religion is an area – basically unrelated to reality – where ideas are explored in the same way as they are in fiction. Unfortunately many religious people think it’s real!
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