Adam Gopnik's "Angels and Ages"

This is a wonderful intellectual escapade into the lives of Lincoln and Darwin over the theme of angels and ages. I picked this book because Gopnik writes for the New Yorker and I enjoy the 'literate' style. He met my expectations. It is a rich treat. I discovered lots of interesting 'literate' tidbits about both men. But it was, in a sense, too rich and as I neared the final chapter I was feeling that it was all style and no substance. But the last chapter redeemed the book for me.

The first four chapters introduce the two protagonists. They contrast and compare the two. They explore details and grand ideas. They look at the historical period and the daily life of each man. It is all grand, but I found it unfulfilling. The last chapter went for meaning and that more than satisfied me:

Darwin and Lincoln were makers and witnesses of the great change that, for good or ill, marks modern times: the slow emergence from a culture of faith and fear to one of ob sedrvation and argument, and from a belief in the judgment of divinity to a belief in the verdicts of history and time. First, the change from soul to mind as the engine of existence, and then from angels to ages as the overseers of life. For good or ill, that is what we mostly mean by "modernity," and by the special conditions of modern times.

And this bit summarizes the message of this book:

There is no struggle between science and art or between evolutionary biology and spiritual faith; there is a constant struggle between the spirit of free inquiry and the spirit of fundamentalist dogma. That struggle is the story of human intellectual history.

This is a message of a dynamic tension between science and spirituality. Science is the grand view, the summing up into great theories the facts of an immense and indifferent universe. The spiritual is the irreducible factualness of our individual lives with its petty meanings.

He points out that both Lincoln and Darwin understood death. Lincoln from the hundreds of thousands sent to their death on the battlefields. Darwin in the fact that death is the tool by which selection occurs. But both were not prepared for the immediacy of death in their families.

Gopnik is pointing out that we live our lives at two extremes in the modern world. In the grand understanding of the world achieved by science and the very personal feelings we have as individuals struggling with our own lives. The latter is mediated through religion:

... if we mean by religion what most people have actually meant by it since the beginning of time -- an encompassing practice of irrational rituals that can't be justified but only experienced, and give order and continuity to life -- then, yes, or course, religion is compatible with Darwinism. The fairth of George Herbert and Dr. Johnson, of Kierkegaard and W. H. Auden, has nothing to do with obeying the commandments of an invisible man in the sky who occasionally intervenes, and everything to do with confronting the chaotic reality of the cosmos to find serene order within it. In this sense the "epiphenomena" of religion -- choral music, stained glass, Communion -- are the thing itself.

That pretty well sums it up for me. This is very much the same as what the biologist Stephen Jay Gould put forward as the non-overlapping magisteria.