The fate of this faith has been, by any standards, remarkable. Abraham performed no miracles, commanded no armies, ruled no kingdom, gathered no mass of disciples and made no spectacular prophecies. Yet there can be no serious doubt that he is the most influential person who ever lived, counted today, as he is, as the spiritual grandfather of more than half of the six billion people on the face of the planet.
His immediate descendants, the children of Israel, known today as Jews, are a tiny people numbering less than a fifth of a per cent of the population of the world. Yet they outlived the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, the medieval empires of Christianity and Islam, and the regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, all of which opposed Jews, Judaism or both, and all of which seemed impregnable in their day. They disappeared. The Jewish people live.
It is no less remarkable that the small, persecuted sect known as the Christians, who also saw themselves as children of Abraham, would one day become the largest movement of any kind in the history of the world, still growing today two centuries after almost every self-respecting European intellectual predicted their faith’s imminent demise.
As for Islam, it spread faster and wider than any religious movement in the lifetime of its founder, and endowed the world with imperishable masterpieces of philosophy and poetry, architecture and art, as well as a faith seemingly immune to secularisation or decay.
All other civilisations rise and fall. The faith of Abraham survives.
If neo-Darwinism is true and reproductive success a measure of inclusive fitness, then every neo-Darwinian should abandon atheism immediately and become a religious believer, because no genes have spread more widely than those of Abraham, and no memes more extensively than that of monotheism. But then, as Emerson said, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
What made Abrahamic monotheism unique is that it endowed life with meaning. That is a point rarely and barely understood, but it is the quintessential argument of this book. We make a great mistake if we think of monotheism as a linear development from polytheism, as if people first worshipped many gods, then reduced them to one. Monotheism is something else entirely. The meaning of a system lies outside the system. Therefore the meaning of the universe lies outside the universe. Monotheism, by discovering the transcendental God, the God who stands outside the universe and creates it, made it possible for the first time to believe that life has a meaning, not just a mythic or scientific explanation.
Monotheism, by giving life a meaning, redeemed it from tragedy. The Greeks understood tragedy better than any other civilisation before or since. Ancient Israel, though it suffered much, had no sense of tragedy. It did not even have a word for it. Monotheism is the principled defeat of tragedy in the name of hope. A world without religious faith is a world without sustainable grounds for hope. It may have optimism, but that is something else, and something shallower, altogether.3
A note about the theological position I adopt in this book: Judaism is a conversation scored for many voices. It is, in fact, a sustained ‘argument for the sake of heaven’. There are many different Jewish views on the subjects I touch on in the pages that follow. My own views have long been influenced by the Jewish philosophical tradition of the Middle Ages – such figures as Saadia Gaon, Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides – as well as their modern successors: Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch, Abraham Kook and Joseph Soloveitchik. My own teacher, Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, and an earlier Chief Rabbi, J. H. Hertz, have also been decisive influences. Common to all of them is an openness to science, a commitment to engagement with the wider culture of the age, and a belief that faith is enhanced, not compromised, by a willingness honestly to confront the intellectual challenges of the age. For those interested in Jewish teachings on some of the issues touched on in this book, I have added an appendix of Judaic sources on science, creation, evolution and the age of the universe.
A note about style: often in this book I will be drawing sharp contrasts, between science and religion, left- and right-brain activity, ancient Greece and ancient Israel, hope cultures and tragic cultures and so on. These are a philosopher’s stock-in-trade. It is a way of clarifying alternatives by emphasising extreme opposites, ‘ideal types’. We all know reality is never that simple. To give one example I will not be using, anthropologists distinguish between shame cultures and guilt cultures. Now, doubtless we have sometimes felt guilt and sometimes shame. They are different, but there is no reason why they cannot coexist. But the distinction remains helpful. There really is a difference between the two types of society and how they think about wrongdoing.
So it is, for example, with tragedy and hope. Most of us recognise tragedy, and most of us have experienced hope. But a culture that sees the universe as blind and indifferent to humanity generates a literature of tragedy, and a culture that believes in a God of love, forgiveness and redemption produces a literature of hope. There was no Sophocles in ancient Israel. There was no Isaiah in ancient Greece.
Throughout the book, it may sometimes sound as if I am setting up an either/or contrast. In actuality I embrace both sides of the dichotomies I mention: science and religion, philosophy and prophecy, Athens and Jerusalem, left brain and right brain. This too is part of Abrahamic spirituality. People have often noticed, yet it remains a very odd fact indeed, that there is not one account of creation at the beginning of Genesis, but two, side by side, one from the point of view of the cosmos, the other from a human perspective. Literary critics, tone deaf to the music of the Bible, explain this as the joining of two separate documents. They fail to understand that the Bible does not operate on the principles of Aristotelian logic with its either/or, true-or-false dichotomies. It sees the capacity to grasp multiple perspectives as essential to understanding the human condition. So always, in the chapters that follow, read not either/or but both/and.
* * *
The final chapter of the book sets out my personal credo, my answer to the question, ‘Why believe?’ It was prompted by the advertisement, paid for by the British Humanist Association, that for a while in 2009 decorated the sides of London buses: ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ I hope the British Humanists will not take it amiss if I confess that this is not the most profound utterance yet devised by the wit of man. It reminds me of the remark I once heard from an Oxford don about one of his colleagues: ‘On the surface, he’s profound, but deep down, he’s superficial.’ Of course you cannot prove the existence of God. This entire book is an attempt to show why the attempt to do so is misconceived, the result of an accident in the cultural history of the West. But to take probability as a guide to truth, and ‘stop worrying’ as a route to happiness, is to dumb down beyond the point of acceptability two of the most serious questions ever framed by reflective minds. So, if you want to know why it makes sense to believe in God, turn to chapter 14.
Atheism deserves better than the new atheists, whose methodology consists in criticising religion without understanding it, quoting texts without contexts, taking exceptions as the rule, confusing folk belief with reflective theology, abusing, mocking, ridiculing, caricaturing and demonising religious faith and holding it responsible for the great crimes against humanity. Religion has done harm; I acknowledge that candidly in chapter 13. But the cure of bad religion is good religion, not no religion, just as the cure of bad science is good science, not the abandonment of science.
The new atheists do no one a service by their intellectual inability to understand why it should be that some people lift their eyes beyond the visible horizon or strive to articulate an inexpressible sense of wonder; why some search for meaning despite the eternal silences of infinite space and the apparently random injustices of history; why some stake their lives on the belief that the ultimate reality at the heart of the universe is not blind to our existence, deaf to our prayers and indifferent to our fate; why some find trust and security and strength in the sensed, invisible presence of a vast a
nd indefinable love. A great Jewish mystic, the Baal Shem Tov, compared such atheists to a deaf man who for the first time comes on a violinist playing in the town square while the townspeople, moved by the lilt and rhythm of his playing, dance in joy. Unable to hear the music, he concludes that they are all mad.
Perhaps I am critical of the new atheists because I had the privilege of knowing and learning from deeper minds than these, and I end this introduction with two personal stories to show that there can be another way.
I had no initial intention of becoming a rabbi, or indeed of pursuing religious studies at all (I explain what changed my mind in chapter 4). I went to university to study philosophy. My doctoral supervisor, the late Sir Bernard Williams, described by The Times in his obituary as ‘the most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time’, was also a convinced atheist. But he never once ridiculed my faith; he was respectful of it. All he asked was that I be coherent and lucid.
He stated his own credo at the end of one of his finest works, Shame and Necessity:
We know that the world was not made for us, or we for the world, that our history tells no purposive story, and that there is no position outside the world or outside history from which we might hope to authenticate our activities.4
Williams was a Nietzschean who believed that not only was there no religious truth, there was no metaphysical truth either. I shared his admiration for Nietzsche, though I drew the opposite conclusion – not that Nietzsche was right, but that he, more deeply than anyone else, framed the alternative: either faith or the will to power that leads ultimately to nihilism. Williams’s was a bleak view of the human condition but a wholly tenable one. His own view of the meaning of a life he expressed at the end of that work in the form of one of Pindar’s Odes:
Take to heart what may be learned from Oedipus:
If someone with a sharp axe
Hacks off the boughs of a great oak tree,
And spoils its handsome shape;
Although its fruit has failed, yet it can give an account of itself
If it comes later to a winter fire,
Or if it rests on the pillars of some palace
And does a sad task among foreign walls,
When there is nothing left in the place it came from.5
I understood that vision, yet in the end I could not share his belief that it is somehow more honest to despair than to trust, to see existence as an accident rather than as invested with a meaning we strive to discover. Sir Bernard loved ancient Greece; I loved biblical Israel. Greece gave the world tragedy; Israel taught it hope. A people, a person, who has faith is one who, even in the darkest night of the soul, can never ultimately lose hope.
The only time he ever challenged me about my faith was when he asked, ‘Don’t you believe there is an obligation to live within one’s time?’ It was a fascinating question, typical of his profundity. My honest answer was, ‘No.’ I agreed with T. S. Eliot, that living solely within one’s time is a form of provincialism.6 We must live, not in the past but with it and its wisdom. I think that in later years Williams came to the same conclusion, because in Shame and Necessity he wrote that ‘in important ways, we are, in our ethical situation, more like human beings in antiquity than any Western people have been in the meantime’.7 He too eventually turned for guidance to the past. Despite our differences I learned much from him, including the meaning of faith itself. I explain this in chapter 4.
The other great sceptic to whom I became close, towards the end of his life, was Sir Isaiah Berlin. I have told the story before, but it is worth repeating, that when we first met he said, ‘Chief Rabbi, whatever you do, don’t talk to me about religion. When it comes to God, I’m tone deaf!’ He added, ‘What I don’t understand about you is how, after studying philosophy at Cambridge and Oxford, you can still believe!’
‘If it helps,’ I replied, ‘think of me as a lapsed heretic.’
‘Quite understand, dear boy, quite understand.’
In November 1997, I phoned his home. I had recently published a book on political philosophy which gave a somewhat different account of the nature of a free society than he had done in his own writings. I wanted to know his opinion. He had asked me to send him the book, which I did, but I heard no more, which is why I was phoning him. His wife, Lady Aline, answered the phone and with surprise said, ‘Chief Rabbi – Isaiah has just been talking about you.’
‘In what context?’ I asked.
‘He’s just asked you to officiate at his funeral.’
I urged her not to let him think such dark thoughts, but clearly he knew. A few days later he died, and I officiated at the funeral.
His biographer Michael Ignatieff once asked me why Isaiah wanted a religious funeral, given that he was a secular Jew. I replied that he may not have been a believing Jew but he was a loyal Jew. In fact, I said, the Hebrew word emunah, usually translated as ‘faith’, probably means ‘loyalty’. I later came across a very significant remark of Isaiah’s that has a bearing on some of today’s atheists:
I am not religious, but I place a high value on the religious experience of believers … I think that those who do not understand what it is to be religious, do not understand what human beings live by. That is why dry atheists seem to me blind and deaf to some forms of profound human experience, perhaps the inner life: It is like being aesthetically blind.8
Since then I have continued to have cherished friendships and public conversations with notable sceptics like the novelists Amos Oz and Howard Jacobson, the philosopher Alain de Botton, and the Harvard neuroscientist Steven Pinker (my conversation with Pinker figures in the recent novel by his wife Rebecca Goldstein, entitled 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, subtitled A Work of Fiction).
The possibility of genuine dialogue between believers and sceptics shows why the anger and vituperation of the new atheists really does not help. It does not even help the cause of atheism. People who are confident in their beliefs feel no need to pillory or caricature their opponents. We need a genuine, open, serious, respectful conversation between scientists and religious believers if we are to integrate their different but conjointly necessary perspectives. We need it the way an individual needs to integrate the two hemispheres of the brain. That is a major theme of the book.
When he last visited us, I asked Steven Pinker whether an atheist could use a prayer book. ‘Of course,’ he said, so I gave him a copy of one I had just newly translated. I did not pursue the subject further but I guess, if I had asked, that he would have told me the story of Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist and inventor of complementarity theory.
A fellow scientist visited Bohr at his home and saw to his amazement that Bohr had fixed a horseshoe over the door for luck. ‘Surely, Niels, you don’t believe in that?’
‘Of course not,’ Bohr replied. ‘But you see – the thing is that it works whether you believe in it or not.’
Religion is not a horseshoe, and it is not about luck, but one thing many Jews know – and I think Isaiah Berlin was one of them – is that it works whether you believe in it or not. Love, trust, family, community, giving as integral to living, study as a sacred task, argument as a sacred duty, forgiveness, atonement, gratitude, prayer: these things work whether you believe in them or not. The Jewish way is first to live God, then to ask questions about him.
Faith begins with the search for meaning, because it is the discovery of meaning that creates human freedom and dignity. Finding God’s freedom, we discover our own.
PART ONE
God and the Search for Meaning
1
The Meaning-Seeking Animal
To know an answer to the question, ‘What is the meaning of human life?’ means to be religious.
Albert Einstein1
The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.
Sigmund Freud2
To believe in God means to understand the question about the meaning of li
fe.
To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.
To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.
Ludwig Wittgenstein3
When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
Tom Stoppard4
Two Stories
The first: In the beginning, some 13.7 billion years ago, there was an unimaginably vast explosion of energy, out of which the universe emerged for no reason whatsoever. In the course of time stars coalesced, then planets, then, 4.54 billion years ago, one particular planet capable of supporting life. Seven hundred million years later, inanimate matter became animate. Cells began to reproduce. Life forms began to appear, first simple, then of ever-increasing complexity. Some of these survived; others disappeared. Eventually a life form came into being capable of complex patterns of speech, among them the future tense and the ability to ask questions. For the first time something in the universe became capable of knowing that the universe existed, that it might not have done, and of asking, ‘Why is it here? Why are we here?’
The formation of the universe involved massive improbabilities. Had a single one of the mathematical constants that determined the shape of the universe been slightly different – even by the order of one in a million – there would have been no stars, no planets, no life. Had the evolution of life been slightly different, had the dinosaurs not become extinct, for example, there would have been no Homo sapiens, no self-conscious being and no civilisation. But all of this was accidental, blind, mere chance. It happened. No one intended it to happen. There was no one to intend it to happen, and there is no meaning to the fact that it happened. The universe was. One day it will cease to be. To the question, ‘Why are we here?’ the answer is silence.
The Great Partnership Page 2