Similarly, on a more religiously sensitive matter, the rabbinic literature records a conversation between Rabbi Judah the Prince, head of the Jewish community in the early third century, and Antoninus, a Roman sage, about when the soul enters a child. Rabbi Judah says, at birth. Antoninus says, at conception. The rabbi then astonishingly declares that Antoninus is right. Thereafter, when he repeats the teaching, the rabbi is careful to say, ‘Antoninus taught me this.’15 This was a religious attitude to science both open-minded and willing to learn.
Yet I remained puzzled about one of the most curious facts in the intellectual history of Judaism. The first chapter of Genesis with its momentous simplicity – ‘And God said let there be … and there was … and God saw that it was good’ – was described by Max Weber and more recently by Peter Berger as the origin of Western rationality.16 Unlike all the cosmological myths of the ancient world, there is no clash of the gods and their rivals, no cosmic battles like those of Tiamat and Marduk, Seth and Osiris, Kronos and Zeus. There is no myth at all. God speaks and the universe comes into being. The universe has been stripped of its overlay of mystery and caprice. It has been, in Weber’s famous word, ‘disenchanted’. Genesis 1 is the beginning of the end of the mythic imagination.
It made science possible. No longer was the universe seen as unpredictable. It was the work of a single, rational creative will. Nor was it – as were the gods of myth – at best indifferent, at worst actively hostile to human beings. Genesis spoke of a God who endowed humanity with his image. Evidently he wanted humans to be, in at least some respect, god-like. Had we the evidence of Genesis 1 alone, we could have predicted that the people who lived by this book would have become a nation of scientists.
The curious incident is that they did not. The Greeks did. Jews knew that they did. As we have seen, they admired their work and even coined a blessing over its practitioners. Yet neither in the biblical nor in the early rabbinic age did Jews evince a sustained, widespread, focused interest in science. It is as if from the outset Jews knew that science – what they called ‘wisdom’ – was one thing, and religion another. Science was about natural law, religion about moral law. Natural laws are laws that predict and explain, moral laws are laws that command or constrain. Science was about things, religion about people and their freely chosen acts. Having established the preconditions of science, Jews evinced no further interest in it at least until the Middle Ages.
Why then is Genesis 1 there? The most obvious reason is that it is not a myth but a polemic against myth. Unlike the gods of myth, God is not part of nature. He is the author of nature which he created by a free act of will. By conferring his image on humankind, God gives us freedom of the will. This generates the entire moral world of the Bible with its vision of the human person as a responsible, choosing moral agent. Rejecting myth, the Bible discovers freedom.
Second is the insistence on the goodness of the world. Seven times we read that ‘God saw that it was good’. This too was revolutionary. Most religions, ancient and modern, have contrasted this world and the next, Earth and heaven, the world of the senses and that of eternity, this life and the afterlife. Here is chaos, there is order. Here is suffering, there is its reward. To a quite remarkable degree the Hebrew Bible is reticent about life after death and never uses it to reconcile people with their condition on Earth. The religious drama takes place here. This world, this life, is where we meet God and either do or fail to do his will. The universe is good, but humans are free to do evil. This frames the entire religious drama of humankind.
Third is the orderliness of the universe. Gone is the mythic mindset of ever-threatening chaos. The narrative is tightly structured. For three days God creates domains – light and dark, sea and sky, sea and dry land. For the next three days he populates those domains with moving things: the sun, moon and stars, fish and birds, land animals and man. The seventh day, the day of rest, is holy: an enduring symbol of the world at peace with itself and its maker. The implication is clear. God creates order; it is man who creates chaos.
Equally radical is the fact that, since God created everything, he is God of everywhere. For the first time, God and religion are de-territorialised. There is no longer a god of this place and a god of that; a god of these people as opposed to those. Abrahamic universalism is born here. This will prove crucial in the book of Exodus when God intervenes to deliver one nation out of another, what we would call today an international intervention in defence of human rights. His authority extends, as it were, not only over the Promised Land but also over Egypt. God is the God of everyone, though not necessarily in the same way. Unlike Plato, the Hebrew Bible emphasises both the universal and the particular.
It is a worldview of extraordinary simplicity and power. The buzzing confusion of the polytheistic pantheon has disappeared and the entire universe has been cleared for the drama between the lone God and lonely humanity, who have, as it were, only each other for company. Nature has been demystified and demythologised. All Earthly power has been relativised, allowing for the desacralisation of kingship and the eventual secularisation of the political domain.
So Genesis 1, a text that might have been a prelude to science, turns out not to lead in that direction at all. Its frame of reference is moral and spiritual. It is about freedom and order and goodness. It is about a God who creates and makes a being, Homo sapiens, able to create; a God who is free and bestows on his most cherished creation the gift of freedom. Virtually everything that follows in the Bible is about this personal relationship between Creator and creation, at times tender, often tense. To be sure, from time to time the Hebrew Bible expresses wonder at the divine wisdom within creation – the wisdom tracked by science – but that is not where its interest lies.
I have told this second story to show that there was an alternative to the synthesis that eventually emerged in Christianity, namely the way taken by the Judaism of the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic sages. It saw science as an autonomous activity with its own dignity. It was the wisdom of the Greeks, not the gift of the Jews. Science reveals the wisdom of God in creation, and wisdom is itself the gift God gave humanity when he made us in his image and likeness, which Rashi, the classic Jewish commentator, reads as ‘with the capacity to understand and discern’.
But there is a difference between wisdom and Torah.17 Wisdom tells us how the world is. Torah tells us how the world ought to be. Wisdom is about nature. Torah is about will. It is about human freedom and choice and the way we are called on to behave. Wisdom is about the world God makes. Torah is about the world God calls on us to make, honouring others as bearers of God’s image, exercising our freedom in such a way as not to rob others of theirs.
The difference between the two is freedom. The natural universe is as it is because that is how it is. The planets are not free in their movements. Chemical elements do not choose which way to combine. Genes do not make decisions. But we are free; we do choose; we do make decisions. If the movements of the planets fail to obey Aristotle’s law of circular motion, that is not because they are disobedient but because Aristotle’s law is wrong. But if human beings fail to obey the laws against murder, robbery or theft, that is not because there is something wrong with the laws but because there is something wrong with us.18 Moral laws are not scientific laws. They belong to a different world, the human world, the world of freedom, God’s most fraught and fateful gift. The Hebrew Bible is entirely about this drama of human freedom. Hence the possibility of admiring science as wisdom while at the same time seeing it as a separate discipline best left to scientists.
The third story is simply told. We still do not know what it was about the seventeenth century that led to the rise of experimental science. Some claim it was religion: Protestantism in general or Calvinism in particular. Others claim it was the waning of religion. Some say it was an attempt to repair the Fall of man, who had been exiled from Eden for wrongly eating of the tree of knowledge. Some say it was the attempt to build an Earthly paradi
se by the use of purely secular reason.19 Stephen Toulmin has argued, convincingly in my view, that it was the impact of the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that led figures like Descartes and Newton to seek certainty on the basis of a structure of knowledge that did not rest on dogmatic foundations.20
One way or another, first science, then philosophy, declared their independence from theology and the great arch stretching from Jerusalem to Athens began to crumble. First came the seventeenth-century realisation that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. Then came the development of a mechanistic science that sought explanations in terms of prior causes, not ultimate purposes.
Then came the eighteenth-century philosophical assault, by Hume and Kant, on the philosophical arguments for the existence of God. Hume pointed up the weakness of the argument from design. Kant refuted the ontological argument.
Then came the nineteenth century and Darwin. This was, on the face of it, the most crushing blow of all, because it seemed to show that the entire emergence of life was the result of a process that was blind.
We think of these as shaking the religious worldview of the Bible, but in fact they were something else entirely. For it was the Greeks who saw the Earth as the centre of the celestial spheres. It was Aristotle who saw purposes as causes. It was Cicero who formulated the argument from design. It was the Athenian philosophers who believed that there are philosophical proofs for the existence of God.
The Hebrew Bible never thought in these terms. The heavens proclaim the glory of God; they do not prove the existence of God. All that breathes praises its Creator; it does not furnish philosophical verification of a Creator. In the Bible, people talk to God, not about God. The Hebrew word da’at, usually translated as ‘knowledge’, does not mean knowledge at all in the Greek sense, as a form of cognition. It means intimacy, relationship, the touch of soul and soul. God, for the Bible, is not to be found in nature for God transcends nature, as do we whenever we exercise our freedom. In Hebrew the word for universe, olam, is semantically related to the word ‘hidden’, ne’elam. God is present in nature but in a hidden way.
So the shaking of the foundations that took place between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries was, in reality, the undermining and eclipse of the Greek rationalist tradition, not of the Judaic basis of faith itself, which, while respecting and honouring science as a form of divine wisdom, never allied itself to one particular scientific tradition and specifically distanced itself from certain aspects of Greek culture.
That means that the original basis of Abrahamic monotheism remains, whatever the state of science. For religious knowledge as understood by the Hebrew Bible is not to be construed on the model of philosophy and science, both left-brain activities. God is to be found in relationship, and in the meanings we construct when, out of our experience of the presence of God in our lives, we create bonds of loyalty and mutual responsibility known as covenants. People have sought in the religious life the kind of certainty that belongs to philosophy and science. But it is not to be found. Between God and man there is moral loyalty, not scientific certainty.
Construe knowledge on the basis of science and, with the best will in the world, you will discover at best only one aspect of God, the aspect the Hebrew Bible calls Elokim, the impersonal God of creation as opposed to the personal God of revelation.21 This is Spinoza’s and Einstein’s God, and they were indeed two profoundly religious individuals – Novalis called Spinoza a ‘God-intoxicated man’. They could see God in the universe, and find awe at the universe’s complexity and law-governed order. What they could not conceive was God as the consecration of the personal, the Divinity that underwrites our humanity.
Elokim, the God of creation whose signature we can read in the natural world, is common ground between the God of Aristotle and the God of Abraham. These two great conceptions came together for almost seventeen centuries in Christianity and for a short period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries in Islam (Averroes) and Judaism (Maimonides). But since the seventeenth century science and religion have gone their separate ways and the old synthesis no longer seems to hold.
But most of the Bible is about another face of God, the one turned to us in love, known in the Bible by the four-letter name that, because of its holiness, Jews call Hashem, ‘the name’. This aspect of God is found in relationship, in the face of the human other that carries the trace of the divine Other. We should look for the divine presence in compassion, generosity, kindness, understanding, forgiveness, the opening of soul to soul. We create space for God by feeding the hungry, healing the sick, housing the homeless and fighting for justice. God lives in the right hemisphere of the brain, in empathy and interpersonal understanding, in relationships etched with the charisma of grace, not subject and object, command and control, dominance and submission.
Faith is a relationship in which we become God’s partners in the work of love. The phrase sounds absurd. How can an omniscient, omnipotent God need a partner? There is, surely, nothing he cannot do on his own. But this is a left-brain question. The right-brain answer is that there is one thing God cannot do on his own, namely have a relationship. God on his own cannot live within the free human heart. Faith is a relationship of intersubjectivity, the meeting point of our subjectivity with the subjectivity, the inwardness, of God. God is the personal reality of otherness. Religion is the redemption of solitude.
Faith is not a form of ‘knowing’ in the sense in which that word is used in science and philosophy. It is, in the Bible, a mode of listening. The supreme expression of Jewish faith, usually translated as ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one’ (Deuteronomy 6:4), really means ‘Listen, O Israel’.22 Listening is an existential act of encounter, a way of hearing the person beneath the words, the music beneath the noise. Freud, who disliked religion and abandoned his Judaism, was nonetheless Jewish enough to invent, in psychoanalysis, the ‘listening cure’: listening as the healing of the soul.23
It may be that we are already embarked on a fourth story. Again, for me it began with an episode in Cambridge. I had been taking part in a debate on religion and science. This was just before the appearance of the string of books by the new atheists, and at the time I thought the subject was so passé that I assumed only a handful of people would turn up. To my surprise I discovered that the organisers had taken the largest auditorium in the university, and it was filled to overflowing.
My opponent, the professor of the history of science, the late Peter Lipton, was generous and broad-minded. We found ourselves agreeing on almost everything – so much so that the chair of the proceedings, Lord Robert Winston, Britain’s most famous television scientist and a deeply religious Jew, said after about half an hour, ‘In that case, I’m going to disagree with both of you.’ It was a good-natured and open conversation and left most of us feeling that religion and science, far from being opposed, were on the same side of the table, using their distinctive methods to help us better understand humanity, nature and our place in the scheme of things.
As we were leaving, a stranger came up to me, gentle and unassuming, and said, ‘I’ve just written a book that I think you might find interesting. If I may, I’ll send it to you.’ I thanked him and some days later the book arrived. It was called Just Six Numbers, and with a shock of recognition I realised who the stranger was: Sir Martin, now Lord, Rees, Astronomer Royal, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and President of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest and most famous scientific association. Sir Martin was, in other words, Britain’s most distinguished scientist.
The thesis of the book was that there are six mathematical constants that determine the physical shape of the universe. Had any one of them been even slightly different, the universe as we know it would not exist. Nor would life. It was my first glimpse into the new cosmology and the string of recent discoveries of how improbable our existence actually is. James Le Fanu, in his 2009 book Why Us?, adds to this a slew of new findi
ngs in neuroscience and genetics to suggest that we are on the brink of a paradigm shift that will overturn the scientific materialism of the past two centuries:
The new paradigm must also lead to a renewed interest in and sympathy for religion in its broadest sense, as a means of expressing wonder at the ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’ of the natural world. It is not the least of the ironies of the New Genetics and the Decade of the Brain that they have vindicated the two main impetuses to religious belief – the non-material reality of the human soul and the beauty and diversity of the living world – while confounding the principle tenets of materialism: that Darwin’s ‘reason for everything’ explains the natural world and our origins, and that life can be ‘reduced’ to the chemical genes, the mind to the physical brain.24
There may be, in other words, a new synthesis in the making. It will be very unlike the Greek thought-world of the medieval scholastics with its emphasis on changelessness and harmony. Instead it will speak about the emergence of order, the distribution of intelligence and information processing, the nature of self-organising complexity, the way individuals display a collective intelligence that is a property of groups, not just the individuals that comprise them, the dynamic of evolving systems and what leads some to equilibrium, others to chaos. Out of this will emerge new metaphors of nature and humanity, flourishing and completeness. Right-brain thinking may reappear, even in the world of science, after its eclipse since the seventeenth century. Right and left may be in closer alignment than they have been. I say more on the new science in chapters 11 and 14.
The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning Page 8