The Great Partnership

by Jonathan Sacks

  It was the Puritans, originally seen as religious zealots, who formulated the ideas and covenants that secured the most distinctively modern form of freedom: liberty of conscience. It was profoundly religious people who, as Alexis de Tocqueville discovered, took pride in the separation of church and state. Religious Christians like William Wilberforce led the fight against slavery. A religious Jew, Lewis Gompertz, created in 1824 the first animal welfare organisation, later known as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Islam, in Andalusia under the Umayyads, and in India under Akbar the Great, became a pioneer in religious tolerance.

  Religions work best when they are open and accountable to the world. When they develop into closed, totalising systems and sectarian modes of community, when they place great weight on the afterlife or divine intervention into history, expecting the end of time in the midst of time, then they can become profoundly dangerous, for there is then nothing to check their descent into fantasy, paranoia and violence.

  The answer is not no religion, which is impossible and undesirable since we are meaning-seeking animals, but the critical dialogue between religion and science, the necessary conversation between the twin hemispheres of our bicameral brain that alone can save us from danger and despair.

  14

  Why God?

  Among all my patients in the second half of life … there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life … and none of them had really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

  Carl Jung1

  If people lose their religion, nothing remains to keep them living in a society. They have no shield for their defence, no basis for their decisions, no foundation for their stability, and no form by which they exist in the world.

  Giambattista Vico2

  Moments of vital fusion between a living religion and a living culture are the creative events in history, in comparison with which all the external achievements in the political and economic orders are transitory and insignificant.

  Christopher Dawson3

  In January 2009 the British Humanist Association paid for an advertisement to be carried on the side of London buses. It read, ‘There’s probably no God.’ It was that advertisement which finally persuaded me to write this book, because it raised the greatest of all existential choices: How shall we live our lives? By probability? Or by possibility? What has transformed humanity has been our capacity to remain open to the unlikely, the improbable. Never has this been more true than in the scientific discoveries of the past century.

  Cosmology

  Take creation. For more than two thousand years, religious thinkers had to face the challenge of the prevailing view, that of Aristotle, that there was no creation because the universe had no beginning in time. Matter was eternal. Moses Maimonides in the twelfth century says something interesting about this. His immediate response is that, if Aristotle were right, he would simply reinterpret Genesis 1. He has no difficulty in stating that religious faith is compatible with scientific truth, even when it seems to deny an item of faith as fundamental as creation.4

  But he does not stop there. He says that in his view Aristotle has not proved the point. Maimonides was a huge admirer of Aristotle. He drew from his ideas in ethics, psychology and metaphysics. But he was critical enough to insist that just because a thinker is right about most things, he is not necessarily right about all. Maimonides remained unconvinced about the eternity of matter, and his scepticism was justified. In 1964, almost eight centuries after Maimonides wrote The Guide for the Perplexed, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson identified the cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe, the remaining trace of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, that finally proved that the universe did have an origin in time. Regardless of how it happened, there was an act of creation. Improbable but true.

  Alongside this came the discovery that the entire physical universe, from the largest galaxies to the smallest particles, is governed by six mathematical constants: the ratio of electromagnetic force to the gravitational force between two electrons; the structural constant that determines how various atoms are formed from hydrogen; the cosmological constant; the cosmic antigravity force; the value that determines how tightly clusters of galaxies are bound together; and the number of spatial dimensions in the universe. Had the value of any of these constants been different by a small, almost infinitesimal degree, there would have been no universe capable of giving rise to life. Matter would have expanded too fast to coalesce into stars, or the universe would have imploded after the initial explosion, and so on. This fine-tuning of the universe for life became known as the ‘anthropic principle’. It all seems too precise for it to have happened by mere chance.

  This led several scientists, among them Lord Rees and Stephen Hawking, to resolve the problem by predicating an infinite number of parallel universes, each instantiating a different value for the various constants. Our universe is improbable only if it is the only one there is. If there were an infinity of them, at least one would fit the necessary parameters, and it happens to be ours.

  This disposes of the improbability of the universe in which we live, but only by postulating another and higher improbability. For we have no reason to suppose that there are parallel universes, and we could never establish whether there were. If we could make contact with a parallel universe then, by definition, it would not be a parallel universe but part of our own, which simply turned out to be larger than we thought it was.

  The improbability is multiplied by those scientists who argue that the universe was self-creating: it spun itself into being out of nothing. Again this is eminently possible. It is what the birth of the universe would look like according to the Bible if the words ‘Let there be’ were edited out – if, as it were, we were watching the event with vision but no sound. But it shows that to explain the existence of a universe that precisely fits the given mathematical parameters without acknowledging the existence of a creator, we are forced to hypothesise the existence of an infinity of self-creating universes for which we have no evidence whatsoever. The rule of logic known as Ockham’s Razor – do not multiply unnecessary entities – would seem to favour a single unprovable God over an infinity of unprovable universes. Be that as it may, cosmology has become one of those areas in which the improbable has prevailed over previous conceptions of the probable.

  The Argument from Life

  So has biology. Among the more than a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars, only one planet thus far known to us, Earth, seems finely tuned for the emergence of life. And by what intermediate stages did non-life become life? There is a monumental gap between inanimate matter and the most primitive life form, bacteria, the simplest of which, mycoplasma, contains 470 genes. How did inert matter become living, self-reproducing life, and within a relatively short space of time? So puzzling was this that Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA and a convinced atheist, was forced to conclude that life did not originate on Earth at all. It came to Earth from Mars. Since no trace of life has yet been found on Mars, this too sounds like replacing one improbability with another.

  How did life become sentient? And how did sentience grow to become self-consciousness, that strange gift, known only to Homo sapiens, that allows us to ask the question ‘Why?’ So many improbabilities had to happen that Stephen J. Gould was forced to the conclusion that if the process of evolution were run again from the beginning, it is doubtful whether Homo sapiens would ever have emerged.

  You do not have to be religious to have a sense of awe at the sheer improbability of things. James Le Fanu, in Why Us?, argues that we are about to undergo a paradigm shift in scientific understanding. The complexities of the genome, the emergence of the first multicellular life forms, the origins of Homo sapiens and our prodigiously enlarged brain: all these and more are too subtle to be accounted for on reductive, materialist, Darwinian science.

  Particularly unexpec
ted was the result of the decoding of the human genome. It was anticipated that at least 100,000 genes would be found, allowing us to explain what made humans human, and establishing a one-to-one correlation between specific genes and physical attributes. Improbably, there turned out to be a mere 26,000 – not much more than the blind, millimetre-long roundworm C. Elegans that has 19,100.

  Still more improbably, ‘master’ genes that orchestrate the building of complex life forms turn out to be the same across different species. The same genes that cause a fly to be a fly cause a mouse to be a mouse. A single gene, Pax 6, that in a mouse gives rise to a camera-type eye, when inserted into a fly embryo produces the compound eye characteristic of a fly. Far from being ‘selfish’, genes turn out to be ensemble players capable in mysterious ways of knowing contextually where they are and of what larger entity they are a part. Stephen J. Gould said that the significance of these results ‘lies not in the discovery of something previously unknown – but in their explicitly unexpected character’.5 Improbability again.

  Nor are we any nearer an understanding of why the evolution of life as a biological phenomenon should give rise to an organism capable of self-consciousness, of thinking, reflecting, remembering, of asking the question ‘Why?’ This is perhaps the most improbable phenomenon of all, yet it is also the most consequential. Without that ‘thinking and contemplating entity, man’, wrote Diderot, the universe would be ‘changed into a vast solitude, a phenomenon taking place obscurely, unobserved’.6 In Homo sapiens, for the first time the universe became self-aware.

  Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin have argued that the higher states of consciousness are to human life what a spandrel is to a cathedral: an accidental by-product, a decorative motif. Can we prove otherwise? No. But we can say with some certainty that this is a very odd way of understanding the human condition. Human self-consciousness lies at the heart of all art, metaphysics, poetry; of all science, mathematics and cosmology; of everything that makes humanity different, distinct, unique. The least significant fact about Homo sapiens is that we have evolved to survive. So has everything else that lives. All that lives, said Spinoza, has a conatus, a will to live. What makes us different is that we are the meaning-seeking, culture-creating animal. That is constitutive of our humanity. To think of self-consciousness as a spandrel is as tone deaf as to think about a cathedral as a building to keep out the rain. A cathedral is a building constructed ad majorem Dei gloriam, ‘for the greater glory of God’. Ignore that, and you will not understand what a cathedral is. Why should humanity be different?

  Equally unexpected, and a direct consequence of the discovery of DNA, is the finding that virtually all life from the most primitive bacterium to us has a single source, DNA itself. Every living thing shares the same genetic script, what Francis Collins – head of the project to map the human genome – called ‘the language of God’. Collins is just one of several distinguished scientists to have arrived at a religious conclusion, having embarked on a scientific journey. We now know the truth of a proposition that, though it proves no theological truth, nonetheless has deeply spiritual resonance, namely that unity begets diversity. The many derive from the One.

  Nor does unity end there. Sustained reflection on the Earth’s ecology has made us aware that life in all its almost unimaginable diversity is interlinked. Not only is all humanity part of a single fate – John Donne’s ‘any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind’. So too is all of nature. Life is a series of interlinked systems in which each plays a part in the whole, and the loss of a single species may affect many others. Again, the many point to the One.

  The sheer improbability of the scientific discoveries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is overwhelming. In 1894, Albert A. Michelson, the German-born American physicist, said, ‘The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.’ In 1900, speaking to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Lord Kelvin said, ‘There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’ The long list of failed predictions should tell us to expect the unexpected. We are the unpredictable animal navigating our way through a universe that, from quantum physics to black holes to the Higgs boson, is stranger than any nineteenth-century scientist could have dreamed.

  Everything interesting in life, the universe and the whole shebang is improbable, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb reminds us in The Black Swan, subtitled ‘The Impact of the Highly Improbable’.7 The book’s title is drawn from the fact that people were convinced that, since no one had ever seen a black swan, they did not exist – until someone discovered Australia.

  My favourite improbability is the fact that the man who invented probability theory, a brilliant young mathematician called Blaise Pascal, decided at the age of thirty to give up mathematics and science and devote the rest of his life to the exploration of religious faith.

  None of this is intended as proof of the existence of God. The Bible itself satirises the Egyptian magicians who, unable to reproduce the plague of lice, declare, ‘It is the finger of God’ (Exodus 8:19). So much for the ‘God of the gaps’ – invoking God to explain the not-yet-scientifically-explicable. That is the way of the Egyptians, not the faith of Abraham. Science gives us a sense of wonder. It does not disclose the source and origin of that wonder. Maimonides said that science, by disclosing the vastness of the universe and the smallness of humankind, leads to the love and awe of God.8 He did not say it leads to belief in God.

  Contemplation of the natural universe is an intimation, no more and no less, of the presence of a vast intelligence at work in the universe, an intelligence capable of constantly surprising us, showing us that the more we know, the more we know we do not know, yet still beckoning us onwards to a point beyond the visible horizon.

  The Argument from History

  Thus science. What of history? How probable is it that one man who performed no miracles, uttered no prophecies, had no legion of disciples and wielded no power – Abraham – would become the most influential figure who ever lived, with more than half of the six billion people alive today tracing their spiritual descent from him? How probable is it that a tiny people, the children of Israel, known today as Jews, numbering less than a fifth of a per cent of the population of the world, would outlive every empire that sought its destruction? Or that a small, persecuted sect known as the Christians would one day become the largest movement of any kind in the world?

  Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) was a Russian Marxist who broke with the movement after the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. He became an unconventional Christian – he had been charged with blasphemy for criticising the Russian Orthodox Church in 1913 – and went into exile, eventually settling in Paris. In The Meaning of History, he tells us why he abandoned Marxism:

  I remember how the materialist interpretation of history, when I attempted in my youth to verify it by applying it to the destinies of peoples, broke down in the case of the Jews, where destiny seemed absolutely inexplicable from the materialistic standpoint … Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination, transcending the processes of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history. The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history: all these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny.9

  Consider this one fact. The Bible records a series of promises by God to Abraham: that he would become a great nation, as many as the stars of the sky or the sand on the sea shore, culminating in the prophecy that he would become ‘the father of many nations’. Yet in Deuteronomy 7:7, Moses makes a statement that seems flatly to contradict this: �
��The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you are the fewest of all peoples.’

  There seems no way of reconciling these two statements, none at any rate that could have been true at the time of the canonisation of the Mosaic books. Yet in the twenty-first century we can give precise meaning to these two prophecies. More than half of the six billion people alive today claim descent, literal or metaphorical, from Abraham, among them 2.2 billion Christians and 1.3 billion Muslims. Abraham did become ‘the father of many nations’. Yet Jews – those whose faith is defined by the law of Moses – remain, at 13 million, ‘the fewest of all peoples’. As the late Milton Himmelfarb once remarked, the total population of world Jewry is the size of the statistical error in the Chinese census.

  Somehow the prophets of Israel, a small, vulnerable nation surrounded by large empires, were convinced that it would be eternal. ‘This is what the Lord says, he who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night … “Only if these decrees vanish from my sight,” declares the Lord, “will Israel ever cease being a nation before me” ’ (Jeremiah 31:35–6). They were certain that their message of monotheism would eventually transform the imagination of humankind. There was nothing to justify that certainty then, still less after a thousand years of persecution, pogroms and the Final Solution. Yet improbably, Jews and Judaism survived.

  King Frederick the Great once asked his physician, Zimmermann of Brugg-in-Aargau, ‘Zimmermann, can you name me a single proof of the existence of God?’

  The physician replied, ‘Your majesty, the Jews.’

  The Argument from Entropy