One of the more agreeable fallacies to ever have popped up upon on the human brain is the argument to moderation, or the middle-ground fallacy. It is the idea that, given what ever dual-sided issue, the best course of action is to find a false compromise between the two sides and consider your thinking done.
It is so perniciously appealing because it carries a conciliatory and moderate tone that seems to rise above the chaos whenever the public is thoroughly tired of hearing a debate unfold time and time again. And naturally the most annoying recent public dispute, whether in flesh, on paper, or online is that between scientific knowledge and traditional religion which, due to the emotion used in speaking of it, has managed to continue far past its due.
It is only natural that people tired of this continuing conflict wish to simply throw in the towel in some face-saving way and find some common ground; thus when Dr. Stephen Jay Gould characterized the realms of science and religion as what he described as "non-overlapping magisteria" in 1997, many especially in the intellectual community were ready to call it a decisive end to the enmity between the two.
Non-overlapping magisteria (often abbreviated NOMA) were the ultimate conciliatory devices; as Gould's contention went, both science and religion were two different magisteria of study: the scientific magisterium concerned the empirical research of the universe while the religious was one giving people measurements for moral valuation and in all ways irrelevant to the former.
He left the implication that, due to these variant imperatives and tools of critique, both science and religion necessarily functioned on untranslatably different planes of existence and their interrelations could be only complimentary, not contradictory.
Of course it seems even immediately as a strange line of thought, as an evolutionary biologist, Gould had had plenty run-ins with popular religious sentiment, but it appears as if the proposition of NOMA denied that such conflict could even occur. But as it turned out, NOMA worked more to belittle religious belief based on misunderstandings rather than to mediate a truce.
The effort here is made to sever the statement of religious belief from what religious people actually believe: Gould states that "[c]reationism is a homegrown phenomenon of American sociocultural history." That is, in a sense, Gould trust that we (including even all creationists reading) will honestly believe that after thousands of years of Christian teaching and even warfare concerning the interpretation of the Bible, no one actually trusted its empirical validity. Supposedly that also means that no "real" Muslims would be discomforted by the idea that man had not been created from a clot of blood.
Gould however presents his idea of religion as having nothing to do with factual statements whatsoever:
"The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap..."
Apparently Gould thinks that reality doesn't actually matter to the religious. Still when it comes down to it, whether or not Jesus of Nazareth existed or not, and whether or not he rose from the dead is a factual question fundamental to Christianity. It also would not be true to say that knowing whether or not events in religious stories are factual occurrences is impossible. Although we certainly cannot return to several thousand years ago and observe alleged supernatural events or people, that does not mean that whether they happened are of considerable empirical importance to the religious.
Even supernatural breaches of the predictable natural order should be able to be observed if not predicted. If the story of the conversion of water into wine were true and the natural order had been suspended while water molecules instantaneously fermented into alcohol, this still would be an empirical event without empirical back-pinnings for its occurrence. Not to mention it would be a potential supernatural event of importance to the pious.
This all is a fine thing for Gould himself to think, but for essentially all people who are religious themselves, claims about the universe and individual occurrences do matter, and religion is not simply the vague metaphysical ramblings that people without prolonged exposure to religion often see it as.
Religions do make claims of morality and value which cannot in any way been "disproven," but more often than not, the groundwork for these moral assertions are based on an understanding of the physical world that entails a real existence of a god and its effects on reality.
Certainly we can imagine or create some manner of religion which makes absolutely no statements about history or cosmology or humanity, but in essence, such a religion would be only blind moral assertions with no bearing on reality even to those gullible enough to believe it. One of the seemingly necessary aspects of religions, especially the revealed type popular in the west, is to assert its legitimacy by predictions, histories, diving, effectual prayer, and of course a "real" and tangible, even if spiritual, eternal life.
Again, Gould's stance is one relatively common among those pretending to find an amicable middle ground between scientific fact and religion; but if anything it's all the more condescending than even the roughest assaults of the "Four Horsemen." When Richard Dawkins confronts the religious, he acknowledges their sincerity and the fact that for them, religious debates are very much empirical and factual issues.