Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

194 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
tists have no reason to be hostile to religion “since our subject doesn’t
intersect the concerns of theology.” The two have nothing to do with each
other. “There is no warfare between science and religion, never was except
as a historical vestige of shifting taxonomic boundaries among disciplines.
Theologians haven’t been troubled by the fact of evolution, unless they try
to extend their own domain beyond its proper border” (“Darwinism Defined”
70).
Mary Midgley takes much the same approach. She is not so cavalier in
dismissing any possible clash between the two, but she is certain that the
way to keep peace is to keep religion and science separate. “The religion
which does clash with science has left its own sphere, for bad reasons, to
intrude on a scientific one. It is bad religion” (12–13). Similarly, when science
intrudes on the realm of religion, it is bad science. What, then, are
their proper realms? Midgley tries to give the world of fact to science and
reserve meaning to religion, but she immediately concedes that this is difficult
to do. What we recognize as a fact is determined by the way we give
order to our experience, the way we give meaning to it. If religion is to
confine itself to values and purposes, how is it to guide us when it is required
to be silent on all questions pertaining to the factual nature of the
world? For its part, science is not, nor can it be, a mere piling up of facts. As
Kuhn makes clear, it must provide meaning or it could not function.
Scientists disagree about just what sort of meaning it provides. There
are those, like M. T. Ghiselin and Herbert Simon who insist that science
(Darwinism in particular) shows us that we are intrinsically and inevitably
egoists. “Scratch an ‘altruist’ and watch a ‘hypocrite’ bleed” (247), says
Ghiselin. Simon ascribes altruism to “bounded rationality,” which is a
slightly pompous way of saying that if we behave with less than perfect
selfishness, it is because we are a bit stupid (1667–68). Scientists like Gould
insist on the segregation of religion and science as a way of rejecting such
views. They point out that the sociobiology and social Darwinism of
Ghiselin and Simon are based on fallacious reasoning, and they agree with
Shaw that natural selection is without moral significance. They generally
invoke some version of the naturalistic fallacy. The term was coined by the
English philosopher G. E. Moore, but the concept is linked to remarks
made by Hume to the effect that people often leap unjustifiably from
propositions involving terms linked by “is” to relations described by the
word “ought.” The simplest statement of the idea is that one cannot derive
“ought” from “is.” In this commonsense form it has been attacked by philosophers,
particularly those who advocate any form of naturalistic or sci-