Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life | 
so-so⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️/5 (on a good day)
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This book focuses on the idea of NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria) and how everyone should incorporate it into their lives. Though personally I believe science does have an upper hand (most of the time) in comparison to religion, I liked Gould fairly well. The most enjoyable aspect of this book is how the author details past events and people in the concept of NOMA.
“...life as exhilarating - a source of both freedom and consequent moral responsibility. We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes.”
“We must undertake the hardest of all journeys by ourselves: search for meaning in a place both maximally impenetrable and closest to home - within our own frail being.”
“...we live in a vale of tears (or at least on a field of confusion), and we therefor clutch at any proffered comfort of an encompassing sort, however dubious the logic, and however contrary the evidence.”
“To which, let all people of goodwill; all who hold science, or religion, or both, dear; all who recognize NOMA as the logically sound, humanely sensible, and properly civil way to live in a world of honorable diversity - let them say, Amen.”
“We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have distinctive ways of knowing, valid in their proper domains. No single way can hold all the answers in our wondrously complex world.”
It will always surprise me how far we have come from the past. I can‘t believe at times publishers would write this garbage to give to school children in order to feed into the cycle of bigotry. 🗣🧠
“The enemy is not religion but dogmatism and intolerance, a tradition as old as humankind, and impossible to extinguish without eternal vigilance, which is, as a famous epigram proclaims, the price of liberty.”
“But I must say that I simply don‘t understand what reading the Bible “literally” can mean, since the text, cobbled together from so many sources, contains frequent and inevitable contradictions.”
“...if your particular form of religion demands a belief that the earth can only be about ten thousand years old, then you stand in violation of NOMA - for you have tried to impose a dogmatic and idiosyncratic reading of a text upon a factual issue lying within the magisterium of science...”
On Newton, “He spent far more time working on his exegeses of the prophecies of Daniel and John, and on his attempt to integrate biblical chronology with the histories of other ancient peoples, than he ever devoted to physics.”
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Well damn! The more you know!😮🔬
