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

The Marriage of Science and Religion 197
tion is unsatisfactory to scientists because it means disunity in scientific
law. It demands a dualistic or pluralistic metaphysics that most scientists
find deplorable. So the liberal Darwinists, who wish to maintain their credentials
as faithful disciples of science and its fundamental principle of
unity, yet seek to avoid the bleaker implications of materialism, tend to
dance between these two views of holism. They try to maintain that these
emergent principles (which are, at present, entirely unknown) are perfectly
consistent with mechanistic science. According to Gould, “new, or
‘emergent,’ principles are needed to encompass life’s complexity; but these
principles are additional to, and consistent with, the physics and chemistry
of atoms and molecules. They represent, if you will, a higher physics and
chemistry appropriate to more complex levels of our natural hierarchy”
(“Just in the Middle” 26). What is meant by principles “additional to, and
consistent with, the physics and chemistry of atoms and molecules”? Do
they supersede the “lower levels” that govern particles or do they not? Is
this a form of descriptive holism or is it genuinely emergent? That is, does
it entail different causal laws? What is meant by “consistent with” chemistry
and physics? That they are logically consistent? If the two sets of laws
are logically inconsistent, then one or the other must be false. The assertion
would appear to be true but trivial. If it means that the laws of physics
are never superseded, then Gould is advocating descriptive holism. Either
the laws operating at the level of atoms are superseded or they are not. If
they are not, then reductionism is true except in the trivial “descriptive”
sense. If they are, then the laws of physics and chemistry, considered as a
description of the causal relations of the physical world, are incomplete in
a profound way. If life follows such holistic laws—laws that override the
known laws of physics and chemistry—then Darwinism becomes problematical,
for how can you flatly assert that variations in living things arise
“by chance” when you do not know the laws that govern life? How can
you be certain that all direction in the development of life comes from
without?
Peace between religion and science cannot be maintained simply
through the expedient of segregation. Each is vitally concerned with both
facts and meaning. Exclude religion from the realm of the physical world
and confine it to the reservation of values and purpose, and it will ask
where these values are to come from and how purpose can change the
physical world. Shaw rejected this doctrine of separate but equal; he demanded
that religion be scientific and science religious (Road to Equality
323). Such unity cannot be achieved through any pat formula because it