OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, NOVEMBER 2013Early in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, a clown named Trinculo takes shelter from the storm in a most unappealing place: Under the monster, Caliban, explaining that “misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows.” This phrase subsequently morphed into “politics makes strange bedfellows.” But in fact, there have been many strange bedfellows, not all of them resulting from misery, or involving politics.
Prominent among these odd couples is the pairing of religion and science. Which is the clown and which the monster? Maybe both, or neither. Or maybe a bit of each, depending on circumstances. The “new atheists” (notably Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris) have claimed that religion and science are not just separate but downright antagonistic. The late Stephen Jay Gould, by contrast, made a case that science and religion (Trinculo and Caliban) are compatible since they constitute what he called “NOMA”—Non-Overlapping Magesteria. For Gould, science explains how things are while religion deals with why; that is, science is largely concerned with the facts of the world whereas religion deals with issues of ultimate meaning and ethics. Accordingly, the two are and ...
