OVERLAPPING MAGISTERIA: JUDEO-CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY PREDISPOSED WESTERN EUROPEANS TO EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE

Modern science is often said to have emerged with progressive disengagement from Medieval indifference, mythologizing, and theologizing about nature. Incidents of theological resistance (e.g. to heliocentrism) and “meticulous listings of particular discoveries…that leave no room for a discussion of the culture of the Old Testament…” exaggerate the discontinuity between modern science and theology, according to physicist and Benedictine theologian, Stanley Jaki (1974).

Jaki lamented the loss of ethics and values from science. He accepted all but the most materialistic aspects of evolutionary thought and rejected contemporary creationist claims of God’s immanence in nature and their literalist insistence on a short Earth history and consequent compression of evolution (e.g. dinosaurs cavorting with humans).

The scenario of disengagement has left us with “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” or the separate teaching realms of science and religion according to Gould (1997). However, Gould wrote not a word in “Magisteria” about the conceptual framework necessary to organize facts into science (although he did stress it elsewhere).

Exploration of the historical context of this conceptualization validates the idea that Judeo-Christian theology of the Middle Ages predisposed (Jaki would say, preordained) Western Europeans to an evolutionary mindset. Jaki’s rationale is based on a cross-cultural comparison of creation paradigms that shows that only Judeo-Christian theology’s vision of creation was conducive to evolutionary thinking: Earth as a coherent structure of integrated, form-based, material entities; an origin that was a defined event (vs. eternal process); a history that is unidirectional, non repeatable, and finite; and nature governed by laws ordained by God and accessible to Man. He rejects random contingencies as explanations for origin of life on a fortuitously hospitable planet.

This historical perspective prompts one to question whether there is more to the Middle Ages than a dark discontinuity between Greco-Roman and modern thought about nature, whether cartoonish, literalist interpretations of scriptures are a logical outcome of the historical overlap between religious and scientific conceptualization, and whether their stories are at all consistent with theological fundamentals.