A friend of mine, who is severely allergic to pork products, recently asked whether it would be okay for him to order a Western Omelet (ingredients: eggs, cheese, ham, onions, peppers). Superficially, this might seem like a fairly easy question: the incompatibilities between Western omelets and pork allergies seem pretty obvious. But I was able to use a sophisticated philosophical argument to convince him that everything would be okay.
My inspiration was Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of NOMA, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria. This principle establishes the fundamental compatibility of science with religion, arguing that the two simply don’t address similar questions, and therefore cannot come into conflict. Science deals with the workings of the world (“is” questions), while religion deals with ethical behavior (“ought” questions), so there is way they can be incompatible.
In this spirit, I have developed what I like to call the principle of Non-Overlapping Food Groups, or NOFOG for short. The basic argument is as follows: throughout history, humans have divided our culinary products into a set of grand groupings. Among these are the Egg Group and the Pork Group. Clearly these are non-overlapping: eggs come from chickens, while pork comes from pigs. Q.E.D.
Now, I don’t know about you, but a Western Omelet falls squarely within the Egg Group where I am from. Growing up in our small house in the Pennsylvania suburbs, I would look forward to eggs every Sunday morning, most often in the form of a yummy Western Omelet. While the identification is not perfect, we won’t go far wrong by recognizing the Western Omelet as a crucial component of the Egg Group on which we all depend.
Clearly, since the Egg Group is non-overlapping with the Pork Group, and my friend’s allergies are only to pork, the NOFOG principle justified encouraging his interest in ordering the omelet. I’ll be visiting him in the hospital tomorrow, hopefully he’s feeling better.
So, he got what he deserved for believing his friend.
Isn’t ham a pork product? That’s where the problem was ? Not the eggs for making the omelet?
Take out the ham and maybe you guys can try the experiment again…..
It would be interesting to see how NOFOG applies to a classic CA (more than a 130 years old) breakfast: the Hangtown Fry? If you haven’t had one, you are missing a really thrilling meal, near divine perhaps (cough cough).
The non-overlapping food groups are, as every teenager knows: box, can, bottle (includes jar), and packet. Anything else is just not food.
My religion says that God is a rational being, and that God created the universe with certain laws that are based on the way God thinks. Therefore, the study of science is one way to find out more about the creator. All scientific laws are God’s laws.
The often-cited “proof” of suppression of science by my (Catholic) religion is the Galileo case. However, if you look at the facts, it was Galileo’s attempt to explain religion using his science that the Church rejected, not the science. In other words, the Church was suppressing a scientist, but it was because he was trying to be a theologian.
Science, which deals with the physical world, cannot prove anything about the spiritual world. The best it can do is say there is no physical explanation for something, so it must be from the spiritual world, or say that something has a physical explanation, so it must not be from the spiritual world.
Did you ever wonder why the Galileo incident is the only one ever cited to “prove” the Church’s suppression of science? Could it be that it is the only case that’s anywhere close? The Church’s critics conveniently overlook the fact that our western university system was started by Church leaders, in part to promote the study of science. They wanted to find out more about the creator by studying his work!