[2] He suggests, with examples, that "NOMA enjoys strong and fully explicit support, even from the primary cultural stereotypes of hard-line traditionalism" and that it is "a sound position of general consensus, established by long struggle among people of goodwill in both magisteria.
[4] He draws the term magisterium from Pope Pius XII's encyclical, Humani generis (1950), and defines it as "a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution",[1] and describes the NOMA principle as "Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts.
Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve.
If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions residing properly within the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world's empirical constitution.
Gould argued that if indeed the polling data was correct—and that 80–90% of Americans believe in a supreme being, and such a belief is misunderstood to be at odds with evolution—then "we have to keep stressing that religion is a different matter, and science is not in any sense opposed to it", otherwise "we're not going to get very far".
In 1997 he had elaborated on this position by describing his role as a scientist with respect to NOMA: Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology.
I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature.
[6] The astrophysicist Arnold O. Benz proposes that the boundary between the two magisteria is in the different ways they perceive reality: objective measurements in science, participatory experience in religion.
"[8] Gould wrote that he was inspired to consider non-overlapping magisteria after being driven to examine the 1950 encyclical Humani generis, in which Pope Pius XII permits Catholics to entertain the hypothesis of evolution for the human body so long as they accept the divine infusion of the soul.
[6] Francis Collins criticized what he saw as the limits of NOMA, arguing that science, religion, and other spheres have "partially overlapped" while agreeing with Gould that morals, spirituality and ethics cannot be determined from naturalistic interpretation.
Sam notes that "Meaning, values, morality and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures – and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain.