Free Rocks of Ages by Stephen Jay Gould

Alexander Pope in the most incisive of all epitomes:
    Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night
    God said “Let Newton be,” and all was light.
    Many people are then surprised to discover—although the great man made no attempt to disguise his commitments—that Newton (along with all other prominent members of his circle) remained an ardent theist. 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.
    Scientists with strong theological commitments have embraced NOMA in several styles—from the argument of “God as clockwinder” generally followed by Newton’s contemporaries, to the “bench-top materialism” of most religious scientists today (who hold that “deep” questions about ultimate meanings lie outside the realm of science and under the aegis of religious inquiry, while scientific methods, based on the spatiotemporal invariance of natural law, apply to all potentially resolvable questions about facts of nature). So long as religious beliefs do not dictate specific answers to empirical questions or foreclose the acceptance of documented facts, the most theologically devout scientists should have no trouble pursuing their day jobs with equal zeal.
    The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: “Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordainsimportant events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science.” In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as “miracle”—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat. (I know that some people use the word “miracle” in other senses that may not violate NOMA—but I follow the classical definition here.) NOMA does impose this “limitation” on concepts of God, just as NOMA places equally strong restrictions upon the imperialistic aims of many scientists (particularly in suppressing claims for possession of moral truth based on superior understanding of factual truth in any subject).
    All consensuses of this sort develop slowly, and from inchoate beginnings before later distinctions become clarified and established. In the early days of modern science, the conceptual need to place miracles outside this developing magisterium had not been fully articulated, and the issue generated much discussion, eventually resolved as outlined above (with God’s direct action in the creation of living species persisting as a last stronghold, long after miraculous action has been abandoned for all the rest of nature’s factual realm). Ironically, Newton himself held a fairly lenient view on the admissibility of miracles to scientific discourse. He certainly recognized the explanatory advantages of God’sworking within His own established laws, but he regarded as unnecessarily presumptuous any attempts by students of the natural order thus to confine God’s range of potential action. If God wished to suspend these laws for a moment of creative interference, then He would do exactly as He wished, and scientists would have to pursue the task of explanation as best they could.
    Interestingly, the sharpest opposition to such latitude within the developing magisterium of science, and the strongest argument for defining miracles as strictly outside the compass of scientific inquiry, arose from the most prominent professional cleric within Newton’s orbit of leading scientists, the same Reverend Thomas Burnet who graced our first chapter. This irony of a clergyman’s firmest support for NOMA, in direct opposition to Newton’s looser view, should convince us that the magisteria need not exist in conflict, and that a committed theologian can also operate as an excellent and equally devoted scientist.
    Newton,