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

by Jonathan Sacks

  So it goes on through a whole range of differences. Given the choice between a job offering scope for personal initiative and one with strong teamsmanship, most Americans will opt for the former, Japanese for the latter. Ask Americans, ‘Tell me about yourself,’ and they will tell you about themselves. Chinese, Japanese or Koreans are more likely to talk about themselves in the context of relationships, family and friends. Americans think in terms of individual rights. Chinese find the concept hard to understand: they see the self as part of a larger whole. Americans think of resolving conflict by universal principles of justice. The Chinese prefer mediation by a middleman whose goal is not fairness but animosity reduction. A famous American reading primer begins, ‘See Dick run. See Dick play. See Dick run and play.’ The corresponding Chinese primer reads, ‘Big brother takes care of little brother. Big brother loves little brother. Little brother loves big brother.’ Westerners tend to think in terms of either/or, Chinese in terms of both/and: yin and yang, feminine and masculine, passive and active, interpenetrating forces that complete one another.

  As with Athens and Jerusalem, so with the West and East: there is more than one cognitive style, more than one way of seeing the world through the prism of the mind.

  A Different Voice

  There is also more than one way of thinking about morality. In the 1970s, at the time of ‘second wave feminism’, Carol Gilligan of Harvard produced a famous study, In a Different Voice, arguing that men and women used distinctive styles of moral reasoning. Men, she said, found their identity by separation, women by attachment. Men were more likely to feel threatened by intimacy, women by isolation. Men played competitive games in groups, regulated by rules. Women were less rule-oriented, formed smaller and closer groups, and had fewer resources for conflict resolution.14

  When it came to thinking about moral dilemmas, she found men more likely to analyse situations in terms of rights, women in terms of responsibilities. Men’s moral thinking tended to be formal and abstract, women’s contextual and based on telling stories. Men spoke about justice, women about relationships. Men valued detachment and achievement, women valued attachment and care. For men morality was primarily about the public world of social power, for women it was more about the private world of interpersonal connection. Men saw morality as a set of rules for the avoidance of violence. Women were more likely to think of it as a style of relationship based on empathy and compassion. For too long, Gilligan argued, the woman’s voice had been inaudible. The male stereotype had been taken as normative. We now had to listen to another, alternative voice:

  The concept of identity expands to include the experience of interconnection. The moral domain is similarly enlarged by the inclusion of responsibility and care in relationships. And the underlying epistemology shifts from the Greek ideal of knowledge as a correspondence between mind and form to the Biblical conception of knowing as a process of human relationship.15

  Again the contrast between ancient Greece and Israel. Gilligan’s thesis proved controversial.16 So has almost any study suggesting that gender differences are rooted in biology rather than culture. Despite this, Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate insists that there are such differences, and they are universal across cultures. In every society, men are more likely to compete violently, women to have more intimate social relationships. Women are ‘more sensitive to sounds and smells, have better depth perception, match shapes faster, and are much better at reading facial perceptions and body language’ than men. Men are more willing than women to take physical risks for the sake of status and attention. And so on.17

  One continuing controversy turns on the gender differences in relation to the sciences and the humanities. In the United States, despite the fact that half the students on science courses are women, they make up less than 20 per cent of the workforce in science and technology and only 9 per cent in engineering. Pinker cites a study that followed a group of mathematically precocious seventh graders. The boys and girls had the same exceptional mathematical abilities, but the girls told researchers that they were more interested in people, social values and humanitarian aims. The boys declared more interest in things, theoretical values and abstract intellectual inquiry. At college the girls tended to study humanities and the arts. The boys opted for maths and science. Despite a huge effort to attract more women into the sciences and engineering, vocationalist Linda Gottfredson concluded, ‘On average, women are more interested in dealing with people and men with things.’

  My interest here is not with gender differences, but with cognitive styles. Just as between East and West, so between women and men, there are substantive differences in thought styles and academic specialisation between those happier taking things apart, analysing them into their components and constructing theoretical systems, and those who think in terms of human relationships, attachments, empathy and emotional literacy.

  Simon Baron-Cohen on Autism

  It was just this difference that led Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of comedian Sasha) to formulate a new theory of autism.18 Three out of four autistic children are boys. Among those with high-functioning autism – those with normal or high IQ – or the related condition of Asperger’s syndrome, the ratio of males to females is higher still: more than ten to one. Autism is marked by features suggesting diminished right-hemisphere abilities. Autistic children lack the ability to empathise. They are low on social skills. They find it difficult to make eye contact, or they stare too long. They are often good at mechanical tasks, at mathematics or memorising lists or learning foreign words. They can be obsessional. But they do not read moods or understand irony or humour or ambiguity. They tend to treat people as objects and have difficulty in developing a first-person perspective and a self-image.

  Baron-Cohen’s theory is that autism is a condition of hyper-maleness. His thesis is that ‘The female brain is predominantly hardwired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hardwired for understanding and building systems.’ This theory was first advanced by Hans Asperger in 1944, but his work was not translated into English until 1991. Asperger’s and Baron-Cohen’s theory is that empathisers and systematisers have sharply different skills. Empathisers relate to people, systematisers to things. Empathisers have emotional intelligence; they read people’s feelings. Systematisers have a more detached, scientific intelligence; they are fascinated by how things work. Almost all of us have both skills. On average women score higher than men on empathy, men higher than women on systematising, but there are many exceptions. Baron-Cohen’s point is that autism is an extreme case of a high-systematising, low-empathising mind.

  It is striking how closely this theory fits Carol Gilligan’s on moral reasoning, and Pinker’s on vocational preferences. Again my interest here is not with gender, but with the further evidence autism provides of the sharp difference between a people-centred and a systems-centred intelligence.

  Jerome Bruner on Narrative

  Jerome Bruner is an American cognitive psychologist and education theorist who in the late 1950s was part of a movement to bring the human, inward, reflective dimension back into psychology. At that time, in an effort to establish its credentials as a science, psychologists had tended to bypass the inner workings of the mind, focusing instead on observable behaviour, stimulus-response patterns, or even, under the impact of the development of computing, on ‘information processing’. All these things, though, miss out on the central feature of the mind, the way it strives to make sense of the world. The key acts of the mind – believing, desiring, intending, choosing – have to do with the way the individual seeks to interact with the world. A focus on outward behaviour misses out on the intentionality, the what-you-are-aiming-at, of action. The task Bruner and his colleagues set was ‘to establish meaning as the central concept of psychology’, and to understand human beings as ‘meaning-making’ animals.19

  Central to Bruner’s theory, set out in his book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, is the difference between two
types of mental construction: argument and narrative. You can put forward a case, or you can tell a story. They are different in their methods, their inner logic and their aim. Argument appeals to verifiable truth, story appeals to verisimilitude, lifelikeness. Argument comes together with theory, analysis, logical coherence and empirical testing. Narrative speaks to the imagination and the emotions. It lends drama to believable human situations. It celebrates what James Joyce called epiphanies of the ordinary. Argument is about the universals of logic and science. Narrative is about the particularities of human experience. You can test an argument. You cannot test a story, but it can still convey powerful and revelatory truths.20

  Bruner’s point is that narrative is central to the construction of meaning, and meaning is what makes the human condition human. No computer needs to be persuaded of its purpose in life before it does what it is supposed to do. Genes do not need training in selfishness. No virus needs a coach. We do not have to enter their mindset to understand what they do and how they do it, because they do not have a mindset to enter. But humans do. We act in the present because of things we did or that happened to us in the past, and in order to realise a sought-for future. Even minimally to explain what we are doing is already to tell a story. Take three people eating salad in a restaurant, one because he needs to lose weight, the second because she’s a principled vegetarian, the third because of religious dietary laws. These are three outwardly similar acts, but they belong to different stories and they have different meanings for the people involved.

  There is a fundamental difference between behaviour and action. Behaviour is a physical movement, like raising a hand. An action is a movement with a purpose and an intention. I can raise my hand to ask a question, hail a taxi, demonstrate support or wave to a friend: same behaviour, different actions. Behaviour can be studied – is best studied – with scientific detachment, but action, to be understood, needs empathy, identification, a sense of how the agent sees herself and the world.

  The difference between behaviour and action points to something else besides. The crucial differentiation between humans and all other animals is that we make meanings, and the name we give to collective systems of meanings is culture.21 To understand human action, we need to be able to differentiate between nature and culture, and thus between the natural sciences and the humanities. Systems explain nature. Stories help us understand human nature.

  Conclusion

  What I hope these four stories do is to show us how, whether it registers in the form of cognitive differences between East and West, different reasoning styles between women and men, the nature of autism, or the difference between systems and stories, we are faced with a fundamental duality in the way we, as humans, relate to the world. This is rooted in biology, in the assymetrical functioning of the right and left cerebral hemispheres, and mediated through culture – through philosophy and the sciences on the one hand, through narrative, the arts and religion on the other.

  There are truths we can express in systems, but others we can only tell through story. There is the kind of knowledge for which we need detachment, but another kind of knowledge we can only achieve through attachment – through empathy and identification with an other. There are truths that apply at all times and places, but there are others that are context-specific. There are truths we can tell in prose, but others for which only poetry is adequate. In her book Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum explains why judges should read novels. Only through the exercise of imaginative identification can judges balance the universality of law with a human understanding of this unique individual standing in the dock.22

  One of the most powerful scientific ideas of the twentieth century was Niels Bohr’s complementarity theory, designed to resolve one of the paradoxes of particle physics. Light cannot be both a wave and a particle, yet it behaves like both, now one, now the other. Bohr explains that the idea came to him when his son had been found guilty of a petty theft. He tried to see his son, first from the perspective of a judge, then from that of a father. He could do both, but not both at the same time. The point has been illustrated many times since, in such simple examples as the figure that, seen one way, looks like a duck and, seen another way, looks like a rabbit. We seem to be able to switch from one form of pattern recognition to another, one frame to another. It is just that we cannot see both ways simultaneously.

  Complementarity theory is as true of the human mind as it is of subatomic particles. We are creative, but we are also creations. We are subjects and objects. We act and are acted on. We seek independence but also interdependence. We can switch from first- to third-person perspectives, from the observing ‘I’ to the observed ‘Me’. We are capable of seeing a garden from the perspective of an estate agent, a horticulturalist and an impressionist painter. There is more than one way of looking at our place in the universe.

  There are, of course, people incapable of complementarity: the boss who behaves at home the way he does at the office, the zealot who can only exist at the level of indignation, the academic who has no small talk, the driven success-seeker who can never relax, the petty dictator who feels the need to dominate every encounter, the religious fundamentalist who has no time for science, and the secular fundamentalist who can see nothing positive in religion.

  What I have tried to show in this chapter is the profound difference between two modes of thinking, of which science and religion are the supreme exemplars. Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. This fundamental difference, between atomisation and integration, explanation and interpretation, between separation and detachment on the one hand, connection and attachment on the other, goes deep into who we are and how we think. Ultimately it is the difference between impersonal and personal knowledge, between understanding things and understanding people.23

  A civilisation that had space for science but not religion might achieve technological prowess. But it would not respect people in their specificity and particularity. It would quickly become inhuman and inhumane. Think of the French Revolution, Stalinist Russia and Communist China, and you need no further proof. The world of science is an arena of causes and effects. The world of people in their glory and frailty is a domain of hopes, fears, dreams, anxieties, intentions and aspirations, all of them set within frameworks of meaning through which we discover, if we are fortunate, our purpose in life, that which we are called on – by God, by nature, by the still small voice – to do.

  I began this chapter with a sharp contrast between the Greece of the philosophers and the Judaism of the Bible and the post-biblical sages. I suggested, speculatively, that it might be related to the difference between the Greek and Hebrew languages in their written forms. Could it be that a simple contrast between left-to-right and right-to-left might account for the vast difference between these two cultures? It would be strange to find that so much turned on so slight a detail.

  Yet the story I am about to tell in the next chapter is stranger still by far, because it tells of how a right-brain spirituality was introduced to the West in a left-brain language, leading to a unique synthesis between the worlds of Athens and Jerusalem that survived for seventeen centuries, and then began to crumble. It sheds new light on the relationship between religion and science, showing us that there is more than one way it can be construed. But it begins with the too-little-reflected-on story of how the West received its religion in translation.

  3

  Diverging Paths

  Be indulgent in cases where, despite our diligent labour in translating, we may seem to have rendered some phrases imperfectly. For what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense when translated into another language. Not only this book, but even the Law itself, the Prophecies, and the rest of the books differ not a little when read in the original.

  Prologue to Ecclesiasticus

  Translating from one language to another … is like looking at Flemish tapestries from
the wrong side.

  Cervantes1

  In entering the Greek world, Plato’s turf, the early Christians mixed biblical ideas into a Greek framework that often distorted their original meaning.

  Harvey Cox2

  I want in this chapter to tell three stories, one about the birth of Christianity, a second about a curious incident in the history of Judaism, a third about the wrestling match between science and religion since the seventeenth century. The issues they touch on are vast and I can only deal with them in the broadest of brushstrokes. Almost every sentence of this chapter needs qualification and nuance. But the stories are so strange and their significance so little appreciated that they helped me, as I hope they will help you, understand how people came to think that you can prove or disprove the existence of God by a combination of science and philosophy.

  The first is the strangest of them all, a fortuitous, unpredictable event that has influenced the entire trajectory of Western civilisation for close to two thousand years and has had a profound bearing on our understanding of the relationship between religion and science.

  The West owes its development to two cultures, ancient Greece and ancient Israel, Hellenism and Hebraism, the heritages respectively of Athens and Jerusalem. The difference between them was one of the great tropes of nineteenth-century cultural analysis. Herder and Heine wrote about it in Germany, Renan in France and Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, in England.3 They were the first two cultures to make the break with myth, but they did so in different ways, the Greeks by philosophy and reason, the Jews by monotheism and revelation.