The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Sacks

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton, a Hachette UK company, London, in 2011, and subsequently in the United States by Schocken Books, a divison of Random House LLC, New York, in 2012.

  Schocken Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  A portion of this work originally appeared on TheDaily.com (May 27, 2012).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sacks, Jonathan, [date]

  The great partnership : Science, religion, and the search for meaning / Jonathan Sacks.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-8052-1250-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8052-4302-4

  1. Religion and science. I. Title.

  BL240.3.s23 2012 201′.65—dc23 2012006601

  www.schocken.com

  Cover image (hands) illustrated by Steven Stines

  Cover design by Brian Barth

  First Paperback Edition

  v3.1_r1

  To my brother Brian

  with love

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  PART ONE God and the Search for Meaning

  1. The Meaning-Seeking Animal

  2. In Two Minds

  3. Diverging Paths

  4. Finding God

  PART TWO Why It Matters

  5. What We Stand to Lose

  6. Human Dignity

  7. The Politics of Freedom

  8. Morality

  9. Relationships

  10. A Meaningful Life

  PART THREE Faith and Its Challenges

  11. Darwin

  12. The Problem of Evil

  13. When Religion Goes Wrong

  14. Why God?

  Epilogue: Letter to a Scientific Atheist

  Notes

  For Further Reading

  Appendix: Jewish Sources on Creation, the Age of the Universe and Evolution

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  I’ve been thinking about this book for over forty years, and it’s impossible to thank all those who have helped me on my way. But as I make clear in the book, I owe a great debt to my philosophy teachers at Cambridge and Oxford, especially James Altham, Roger Scruton, Jonathan Glover, the late Sir Bernard Williams and Philippa Foot; to those who inspired me to become a rabbi, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn and Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik; and most of all to my teacher and mentor for twelve years, Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, a man to whom I owe more than I can say, not only for his insistence on fastidious scholarship, but also for his intellectual clarity and moral courage. I consider myself blessed to have been his student.

  I tried out the central thesis of the book some years ago in a Credo column in The Times. The then Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, himself a distinguished author, expressed an interest which encouraged me to stay with the idea. When, in 2009, Iain McGilchrist published his magisterial The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, I knew I was on the right lines. I benefited enormously from a conversation I had with him.

  Stuart Roden persuaded me that this was a book worth writing. As always I was encouraged by the lay leaders with whom I have had the privilege to work, especially Dr Simon Hochhauser, Peter Sheldon, Professor Leslie Wagner and Sir Ian Gainsford. I could not have asked for better friends. Thanks too to my office team, especially Joanna Benarroch.

  Two sad events occurred while I was writing it. My mother died, as did Marc Weinberg, son of the former director of my office, Syma Weinberg. I hope in some way what I have written is a tribute to their memory.

  My thanks to my literary agent Louise Greenberg for her endless patience and tireless efforts; to my editor Altie Karper and her wonderful team at Schocken; to my publisher Ian Metcalfe and the team at Hodder, who have shown faith in their author bordering on the miraculous; and to Dayan Ivan Binstock and David Frei of the London Beth Din who read the manuscript and made many important suggestions. The errors that remain are my own: ‘But who can discern their own errors? Acquit me of hidden faults’ (Psalm 19:22). Finally, as always, my greatest thanks go to my wife Elaine, whose kindness makes gentle the life of this world, and whose faith in people has been my inspiration.

  Jonathan Sacks

  February 2011 / Adar Rishon 5771

  Introduction

  If the new atheists are right, you would have to be sad, mad or bad to believe in God and practise a religious faith. We know that is not so. Religion has inspired individuals to moral greatness, consecrated their love and helped them to build communities where individuals are cherished and great works of loving kindness are performed. The Bible first taught the sanctity of life, the dignity of the individual, the imperative of peace and the moral limits of power.

  To believe in God, faith and the importance of religious practice does not involve an abdication of the intellect, a silencing of critical faculties, or believing in six impossible things before breakfast. It does not involve reading Genesis 1 literally. It does not involve rejecting the findings of science. I come from a religious tradition where we make a blessing over great scientists regardless of their views on religion.

  So what is going on?

  Debates about religion and science have been happening periodically since the seventeenth century and they usually testify to some major crisis in society. In the seventeenth century it was the wars of religion that had devastated Europe. In the nineteenth century it was the industrial revolution, urbanisation and the impact of the new science, especially Darwin. In the 1960s, with the ‘death of God’ debate, it was the delayed impact of two world wars and a move to the liberalisation of morals.

  When we come to a major crossroads in history it is only natural to ask who shall guide us as to which path to choose. Science speaks with expertise about the future, religion with the authority of the past. Science invokes the power of reason, religion the higher power of revelation. The debate is usually inconclusive and both sides live to fight another day.

  The current debate, though, has been waged with more than usual anger and vituperation, and the terms of the conflict have changed. In the past the danger – and it was a real danger – was a godless society. That led to four terrifying experiments in history, the French Revolution, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Communist China. Today the danger is of a radical religiosity combined with an apocalyptic political agenda, able through terror and asymmetric warfare to destabilise whole nations and regions. I fear that as much as I fear secular totalitarianisms. All religious moderates of all faiths would agree. This is one fight believers and non-believers should be fighting together.

  Instead the new atheism has launched an unusually aggressive assault on religion, which is not good for religion, for science, for intellectual integrity or for the future of the West. When a society loses its religion it tends not to last very long thereafter. It discovers that having severed the ropes that moor its morality to something transcendent, all it has left is relativism, and relativism is incapable of defending anything, including itself. When a society loses its soul, it is about to
lose its future.

  So let us move on.

  I want, in this book, to argue that we need both religion and science; that they are compatible and more than compatible. They are the two essential perspectives that allow us to see the universe in its three-dimensional depth. The creative tension between the two is what keeps us sane, grounded in physical reality without losing our spiritual sensibility. It keeps us human and humane.

  The story I am about to tell is about the human mind and its ability to do two quite different things. One is the ability to break things down into their constituent parts and see how they mesh and interact. The other is the ability to join things together so that they tell a story, and to join people together so that they form relationships. The best example of the first is science, of the second, religion.

  Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. Without going into neuroscientific detail, the first is a predominantly left-brain activity, the second is associated with the right hemisphere.

  Both are necessary, but they are very different. The left brain is good at sorting and analysing things. The right brain is good at forming relationships with people. Whole civilisations made mistakes because they could not keep these two apart and applied to one the logic of the other.

  When you treat things as if they were people, the result is myth: light is from the sun god, rain from the sky god, natural disasters from the clash of deities, and so on. Science was born when people stopped telling stories about nature and instead observed it; when, in short, they relinquished myth.

  When you treat people as if they were things, the result is dehumanisation: people categorised by colour, class or creed and treated differently as a result. The religion of Abraham was born when people stopped seeing people as objects and began to see each individual as unique, sacrosanct, the image of God.

  One of the most difficult tasks of any civilisation – of any individual life, for that matter – is to keep the two separate, but integrated and in balance. That is harder than it sounds. There have been ages – the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries especially – when religion tried to dominate science. The trial of Galileo is the most famous instance, but there were others. And there have been ages when science tried to dominate religion, like now. The new atheists are the most famous examples, but there are many others, people who think we can learn everything we need to know about meaning and relationships by brain scans, biochemistry, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, because science is all we know or need to know.

  Both are wrong in equal measure. Things are things and people are people. Realising the difference is sometimes harder than we think.

  In the first part of the book I give an analysis I have not seen elsewhere about why it is that people have thought religion and science are incompatible. I argue that this has to do with a curious historical detail about the way religion entered the West. It did so in the form of Pauline Christianity, a religion that was a hybrid or synthesis of two radically different cultures, ancient Greece and ancient Israel.

  The curious detail is that all the early Christian texts were written in Greek, whereas the religion of Christianity came from ancient Israel and its key concepts could not be translated into Greek. The result was a prolonged confusion, which still exists today, between the God of Aristotle and the God of Abraham. I explain in chapter 3 why this made and makes a difference, leading to endless confusion about what religion and faith actually are. In chapter 4 I tell the story of my own personal journey of faith.

  In the second part of the book I explain why religion matters and what we stand to lose if we lose it. The reason I do so is that, I suspect, more than people have lost faith in God, they simply do not see why it is important. What difference does it make any more? My argument is that it makes an immense difference, though not in ways that are obvious at first sight. The civilisation of the West is built on highly specific religious foundations, and if we lose them we will lose much that makes life gracious, free and humane.

  We will, I believe, be unable to sustain the concept of human dignity. We will lose a certain kind of politics, the politics of the common good. We will find ourselves unable to hold on to a shared morality – and morality must be shared if it is to do what it has always done and bind us together into communities of shared principle and value. Marriage, deconsecrated, will crumble and children will suffer. And we will find it impossible to confer meaning on human life as a whole. The best we will be able to do is see our lives as a personal project, a private oasis in a desert of meaninglessness.

  In a world in which God is believed to exist, the primary fact is relationship. There is God, there is me, and there is the relationship between us, for God is closer to me than I am to myself. In a world without God, the primary reality is ‘I’, the atomic self. There are other people, but they are not as real to me as I am to myself. Hence all the insoluble problems that philosophers have wrestled with unsuccessfully for two and a half thousand years. How do I know other minds exist? Why should I be moral? Why should I be concerned about the welfare of others to whom I am not related? Why should I limit the exercise of my freedom so that others can enjoy theirs? Without God, there is a danger that we will stay trapped within the prison of the self.

  As a result, neo-Darwinian biologists and evolutionary psychologists have focused on the self, the ‘I’. ‘I’ is what passes my genes on to the next generation. ‘I’ is what engages in reciprocal altruism, the seemingly selfless behaviour that actually serves self-centred ends. The market is about the choosing ‘I’. The liberal democratic state is about the voting ‘I’. The economy is about the consuming ‘I’. But ‘I’, like Adam long ago, is lonely. ‘I’ is bad at relationships. In a world of ‘I’s, marriages do not last. Communities erode. Loyalty is devalued. Trust grows thin. God is ruled out completely. In a world of clamorous egos, there is no room for God.

  So the presence or absence of God makes an immense difference to our lives. We cannot lose faith without losing much else besides, but this happens slowly, and by the time we discover the cost it is usually too late to put things back again.

  In the third part of the book I confront the major challenges to faith. One is Darwin and neo-Darwinian biology, which seems to show that life evolved blindly without design. I will argue that this is true only if we use an unnecessarily simplistic concept of design.

  The second is the oldest and hardest of them all: the problem of unjust suffering, ‘when bad things happen to good people’. I will argue that only a religion of protest – of ‘sacred discontent’ – is adequate to the challenge. Atheism gives us no reason to think the world could be otherwise. Faith does, and thereby gives us the will and courage to transform the world.

  The third charge made by the new atheists is, however, both true and of the utmost gravity. Religion has done harm as well as good. At various times in history people have hated in the name of the God of love, practised cruelty in the name of the God of compassion, waged war in the name of the God of peace and killed in the name of the God of life. This is a shattering fact and one about which nothing less than total honesty will do.

  We need to understand why religion goes wrong. That is what I try to do in chapter 13. Sometimes it happens because monotheism lapses into dualism. Sometimes it is because religious people attempt to bring about the end of time in the midst of time. They engage in the politics of the apocalypse, which always results in tragedy, always self-inflicted and often against fellow members of the faith. Most often it happens because religion becomes what it should never become: the will to power. The religion of Abraham, which will be my subject in this book, is a protest against the will to power.

  We need both religion and science. Albert Einstein said it most famously: ‘Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.’1 It is my argument that religion and science are to human life what the right and left hemispheres are to the brain. They perfo
rm different functions and if one is damaged, or if the connections between them are broken, the result is dysfunction. The brain is highly plastic and in some cases there can be almost miraculous recovery.2 But no one would wish on anyone the need for such recovery.

  Science is about explanation. Religion is about meaning. Science analyses, religion integrates. Science breaks things down to their component parts. Religion binds people together in relationships of trust. Science tells us what is. Religion tells us what ought to be. Science describes. Religion beckons, summons, calls. Science sees objects. Religion speaks to us as subjects. Science practises detachment. Religion is the art of attachment, self to self, soul to soul. Science sees the underlying order of the physical world. Religion hears the music beneath the noise. Science is the conquest of ignorance. Religion is the redemption of solitude.

  We need scientific explanation to understand nature. We need meaning to understand human behaviour and culture. Meaning is what humans seek because they are not simply part of nature. We are self-conscious. We have imaginations that allow us to envisage worlds that have never been, and to begin to create them. Like all else that lives, we have desires. Unlike anything else that lives, we can pass judgement on those desires and decide not to pursue them. We are free.

  All of this, science finds hard to explain. It can track mental activity from the outside. It can tell us which bits of the brain are activated when we do this or that. What it cannot do is track it on the inside. For that we use empathy. Sometimes we use poetry and song, and rituals that bind us together, and stories that gather us into a set of shared meanings. All of this is part of religion, the space where self meets other and we relate as persons in a world of persons, free agents in a world of freedom. That is where we meet God, the Personhood of personhood, who stands to the natural universe as we, free agents, stand to our bodies. God is the soul of being in whose freedom we discover freedom, in whose love we discover love, and in whose forgiveness we learn to forgive.