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

by Jonathan Sacks

  Nietzsche1

  Science investigates, religion interprets … Religion and science are two hemispheres of human thought.

  Martin Luther King, Jr2

  Pray God us keep

  From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!

  William Blake3

  To cut straight to the chase, by the end of this chapter I hope to have persuaded you of a simple but fundamental proposition: Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.

  The difference between them is fundamental and irreducible. They represent two distinct activities of the mind. Neither is dispensable. Both, together, constitute a full expression of our humanity. They are as different and as necessary as the twin hemispheres of the brain. It is, in fact, from the hemispherical asymmetry of the brain that the entire drama of the mutual misunderstanding and conjoint creativity of religion and science derive.

  I want in this chapter to trace a set of intellectual journeys that will take us through a series of mental landscapes: different cognitive styles between East and West, gender differences in the way people think about moral dilemmas, a pioneering study of autism, and why people do not just construct arguments, they also tell stories. What makes these studies fascinating is that though they have different starting points, they all arrive at the same conclusion about the human mind, helping us understand why religion and science are so different. Taken together with the next chapter, they amount to a radical explanation of why that relationship has become so frayed, even adversarial, in modern times.

  However, I begin with what, for me, was the ‘eureka’ moment. It was a discovery of seemingly surpassing triviality, but it lit up a network of neural connections, some of which I describe in this chapter. It was the clue that decoded all else. This was the discovery: alphabets without vowels, like Hebrew and Arabic, are written from right to left; alphabets with vowels, like English, are written from left to right.4 Hardly, on the face of it, a discovery to change the world, but let’s suspend judgement and explain why.

  In languages where there are letters for vowels, words can be recognised and understood serially, one by one. There is limited ambiguity. But in languages like Hebrew where there are no letters for vowels, it is hard to tell, by looking at the letters on their own, what the word is and what it means. Take the English letters ‘h’ and ‘t’, for example. Those sounds could combine to make hat, hot, hit, hut, heat and hate. You can only tell which by context. So reading a text in Hebrew involves a fair degree of mental activity. What has come before? What might we expect the sentence to say? What makes sense in terms of the passage as a whole? Simply knowing how to read a word involves a considered judgement based on text and context as a whole.

  These different mental operations – serial processing and holistic understanding – use different parts of the brain. Specifically over the past hundred and fifty years, since Pierre Paul Broca discovered the location of language-processing skills in the left side of the brain, neuroscientists have come to understand the marked difference between the brain’s two hemispheres and how they process information. The left hemisphere tends to be linear, analytical, atomistic and mechanical. It breaks things down into their component parts and deals with them in a linear, sequential way. The right brain tends to be integrative and holistic. As in E. M. Forster’s phrase, it sees things steadily and sees them whole.5 It gives an overview of a situation while the left hemisphere focuses its attention on specific details.

  The right hemisphere is strong on empathy and emotion. It reads situations, atmosphere and moods. It is the locus of our social intelligence. It understands subtlety, nuance, ambiguity, irony and metaphor. It lives with the complexities the left brain tries to resolve by breaking them down into their component parts. The two hemispheres each control the opposite side of the body, so that someone who suffers a stroke in the left brain will find the right side of his body affected. Failure in the right brain will incapacitate the left.

  So a language with vowels, where the words can be understood one by one, can be processed by the left brain. We read these languages from left to right, moving our head to the right, thus engaging the left brain. Languages without vowels make demands on the context-understanding, integrative functions of the right brain, so we read them from right to left, moving our head leftwards and engaging the right brain.

  The Birth of the Alphabet

  There is a story behind the story: about the birth of the alphabet itself. Two inventions transformed the ancient world. The first was the invention of writing, in Mesopotamia more than five thousand years ago. The birth of writing was the birth of civilisation, because it enabled the growth of knowledge to become cumulative. Writing enables more information to be handed on from one generation to the next than can be encompassed in a single memory. Writing seems to have been invented independently seven times: in Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Indus Valley script, the Minoan script known as Linear B, Chinese ideograms, and among the Mayans and the Aztecs.

  Writing evolved from pictograms, simple drawings of what the symbols represent: an ox’s head, a donkey, an ear of barley. They became ideograms, more abstract symbols, then syllables, when people realised that words were not just names for things but also sounds. But even at that stage there were too many symbols to learn – some 900 in cuneiform, 700 in hieroglyphics – for literacy to be widespread. It remained the closely guarded skill of a literate elite. What broke open the doors of knowledge was the invention of the alphabet, the reduction of the symbol set to a small enough number to be learned in principle by anyone. The invention of the alphabet was the birth of the possibility of universal literacy and the beginning of the end of hierarchical societies.

  The first alphabet, known as proto-Sinaitic, and dated to around 1800 BCE, was discovered by the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie in 1905. He found a series of markings carved into sandstone at Serabit el-Khadem in the Sinai desert, the site of what had been turquoise mines during the age of the pharaohs. Flinders Petrie surmised that the writing may have been the work of the Hebrew slaves who worked the mines, or even that they may have made the inscriptions on their way to the Promised Land. He himself, however, was unable to decipher them and failed to recognise that they were in fact alphabetic: that symbols no longer represented objects or syllables but the initial sound of the syllable, so that, for example, the symbol for ‘box’ meant simply the sound ‘b’. Not until 1916 did British Egyptologist Alan Gardiner make that discovery. There was another major find in the 1990s, at Wadi el-Hol, thirty miles north-west of Luxor, by American archaeologist John Darnell. Here too there were inscriptions carved into rock, similar to, though not identical with, those at Serabit, and of roughly the same date or slightly older.

  The alphabet has the distinction of being invented only once. All others are direct or indirect descendants of that first system, used by the people of what today is the land of Israel: the Hebrews and perhaps other migrant workers, the Canaanites, Phoenicians and so on. The word ‘alphabet’ itself signals this: it derives from the first two letters of the Hebrew script, aleph and bet. The early alphabets, like Hebrew still today, had no letters for vowels. They came to be written from right to left.6

  The Semitic script was brought by the Phoenicians to the Greeks at some time around the tenth century BCE. The first four letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha, beta, gamma, delta, precisely mirror the Hebrew aleph, bet, gimmel, dalet. But in the move to Greece the alphabet acquired letters to signal vowel sounds as well as consonants. Something fascinating then happened to the way Greek was written. Originally, exactly like the Canaanite-Semitic script, it was written right to left. Then, between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE, it evolved into a strange form of continuous writing, beginning from right to left, then, on reaching the end of the line, turning round and coming back, left to right, and so on. The Greeks called this boustrophedon, ‘as an ox ploughs’. Eventually, in the fi
fth century, it settled into the new mode, left to right, where it has stayed ever since.

  Something else of vast consequence was happening while this was taking place: the emergence of the first philosophers and scientists, the first people to think systematically about nature, matter, substance, the ‘element and principle of things’, and the relationship between what changes and what stays the same. Science began with Thales in the sixth century BCE, who saw water as the fundamental element. Then came Anaximander, Thales’ pupil, who argued that all things derive from and ultimately return to ‘the boundless’; Heraclitus, who saw nature as constant flux; Pythagoras, the mystic, who saw the universe in terms of mathematical harmony and the music of the spheres; Parmenides, who believed that reality was eternal and unchanging, so that the ever-changing world of the senses is unreal; and Democritus, who believed that the universe was composed of elementary particles he called atoms.

  The same period saw the birth of philosophy – the search for the true, the good and the beautiful – which saw its supreme flowering, in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, in the great triumvirate of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. With Plato in particular a development took place that would shape the direction of Western thought from that day to this: a preference for the universal over the particular, the timeless over the time-bound, the abstract over the concrete particular, and the impersonal as opposed to the personal. In Plato, even love ceases to be personal. The beloved is only the starting point from which the lover passes on to contemplation of eternal beauty.

  It is impossible to overstate the significance of all this for the development of Western civilisation. We owe virtually all our abstract concepts to the Greeks. The Hebrew Bible knows nothing of such ideas. There is a creation narrative – in fact, more than one – but there is no theoretical discussion of what the basic elements of the universe are. There is an enthralling story about the birth of monarchy in Israel, but no discussion, such as is to be found in Plato and Aristotle, about the relative merits of monarchy as opposed to aristocracy or democracy. When the Hebrew Bible wants to explain something, it does not articulate a theory. It tells a story. The birth of monarchy, for example, comes with sharp portraits of the people involved – Samuel, Saul and David. That is where its interest lies. There is deep ambivalence throughout the Hebrew Bible about monarchy – is it commanded, permitted, or only reluctantly conceded? – but nowhere is this given systematic expression. There is a hint here, a nuance there. The entire subject is dealt with from multiple perspectives, at a level of subtlety and ambiguity closer to great literature than either philosophy or political science.

  Could it be that this difference between the two cultures has something to do with the way their respective alphabets are written? Greece, at the time the alphabet was changing from right-left to left-right, became the world’s first, and greatest, left-brain civilisation. It was not only a left-brain culture. There was greatness, too, in the more right-brain fields of art, architecture and drama. But the conceptualisation and abstraction, the analysis of matter into its atomic parts, the Platonic devaluation of the personal and particular: all this comes with the unmistakable signature of the left hemisphere. The fact that this was happening at the same time, in the same place, as the emergence of the world’s first fully vowelled, left-right alphabet cannot be merely coincidental.

  The way we record and transmit information has a huge impact on cognitive styles. As I write, books are being published on the way the Internet, Google, Facebook and Twitter are changing the ways in which we think, with such phrases as ‘information overload’, ‘cognitive surplus’, ‘attention deficit’ and so on.7 When information technology changes, so does the way we think. As Walter J. Ong put it, speaking about the transition from an oral to a literate culture, ‘Writing restructures consciousness.’8

  Here is one piece of evidence. The rabbis of the first to third centuries certainly knew, at least in a rudimentary way, about Greek philosophy and science. Israel had been under Greek rule from the days of Alexander the Great to the Maccabees’ revolt against Antiochus IV in the second century BCE. Its circumambient culture was Hellenistic. Yet Jews continued to write and read from right to left, and think in right-brained ways. Here, for example, is the opening of the first great text of the rabbinic age, the Mishnah, a code of Jewish law. Its subject is prayer, and it opens with these words:

  From what time does one recite the Shema [a central Jewish prayer] in the evening? From the time when the priests go in to eat of their heave-offering until the end of the first watch – so says Rabbi Eliezer. The Sages say: Until midnight. Rabban Gamliel says: Until the column of dawn rises. It once happened that [Rabban Gamliel’s] sons came from a house of feasting. They said to [their father]: ‘We have not recited the Shema.’ He said to them: ‘If the column of dawn has not yet risen, then you are obligated to recite it.’9

  Note what is missing. There is no discussion of what prayer is, or why we pray. There are no general principles of any kind. Instead the Mishnah begins in the middle, with one particular prayer, the night-time Shema. Nor, despite the fact that this is a law code, are we given a law. Instead we find three different views as to what the law is, with no statement as to which of the three is correct or normative. This is then followed by an anecdote, which places the third opinion in the context of an actual event in the life of the person who advocated it. Decoding this Mishnah is like reading a word in an alphabet without vowels. You need to have considerable background and contextual knowledge before you can even begin to understand what is being said.

  Setting aside all the qualifications and nuances, Greece and Israel in antiquity offer us the sharpest possible contrast between a strongly left-brain and a strongly right-brain culture. They were both widely literate societies, with a high regard for study and discipleship. They both valued the academy and the sage. In many respects they had the same set of priorities, with education and the pursuit of wisdom at the top. But their cognitive styles were different, just as their alphabets were written in opposite directions. They valued different things. The Greeks worshipped human reason, the Jews, divine revelation. The Greeks gave the West its philosophy and science. The Jews, obliquely, gave it its prophets and religious faith.

  But I now want to survey some quite different landscapes to illustrate the difference between left- and right-brain thinking. Note that no value judgement is implied. To ask which is the more important, the right or left hemisphere, is like asking which is the more important, the right or left ventricle of the heart. We need them both. The fact that left/right brain asymmetry is a feature of human biology, as it is of some other animal species, suggests that it confers a vital adaptive advantage. Nor is the dichotomy meant to be taken literally. We know, from the earliest experiments using PET scans in the 1980s, that even a simple activity of the brain, like associating the word ‘chair’ with ‘sit’, involves both left and right brain. We have also come to understand the astonishing plasticity of the brain.10 Children who have lost an entire hemisphere are often able to lead a fully normal life, with only minor impairments affecting peripheral vision and fine motor skills.11

  So think of ‘right’ and ‘left’ not as precise neuroscientific descriptions, but merely as metaphors for different modes of engagement with the world.

  East and West

  One of the more unexpected pleasures of my undergraduate years was the presence in our college of a large number of Chinese scholars, at a time when links between China and the West were tenuous and few. The reason they were there was that the Master, Dr Joseph Needham, a brilliant biochemist, had become the world’s leading authority on Chinese science and civilisation. Needham was struck by the extraordinary technical achievements of the Chinese – they had developed ink, paper, printing, porcelain manufacture, the compass, gunpowder and many other technologies long before the West, yet they had failed to develop a scientific revolution along Western lines. Needham’s view was that it had something to do wit
h the differences between thought patterns in China (Taoism, Confucianism) and the West. Europe lived with the heritage of Democritus and his successors who believed the physical universe was made up of atoms, and who thought in terms of analysis of substances into their smallest component parts. For the Chinese, by contrast, ‘Their universe was a continuous medium or matrix within which interactions of things took place, not by the clash of atoms, but by radiating influences.’12

  Many years later, University of Michigan psychologist Richard E. Nisbett was struck by a similar realisation as the result of a conversation with one of his students from China. ‘The difference between you and me’, said the student, ‘is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it’s a line.’ The Chinese, he continued, ‘believe in constant change, but with things always moving back to some prior state. They pay attention to a wide range of events; they search for relationships between things; and they think you can’t understand the part without understanding the whole. Westerners live in a simpler, more deterministic world; they focus on salient objects or people instead of the larger picture; and they think they can control events because they know the rules that govern the behaviour of objects.’13

  This stark contrast led Nisbett to a series of studies on the differences between Western and Eastern patterns of cognition, described in his book The Geography of Thought. The differences are many and striking. Shown a picture of fish in a tank, complete with plants, rocks and bubbles, American and Japanese students all mentioned seeing the fish, but the Japanese made 60 per cent more references to the background objects. Shown three objects, a chicken, a cow and a clump of grass, and asked ‘Which two go together?’ American children chose the chicken and the cow – both members of the same class, animal. Chinese children chose the cow and the grass – where there are cows there is grass. Researchers found that American children learn nouns faster than verbs, but that South Asian children learn verbs faster than nouns. Nouns are about classification. Verbs are about relationships.