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

by Jonathan Sacks

  The German thunder … rolls slowly at first but it will come. And when you hear it roar, as it has never roared before in the history of the world, know that the German thunder has reached its target.9

  Although Heine’s views had nothing in common with Nietzsche’s, on this one point their judgement concurred. It would happen when Christian ethics lost their power, when people could no longer hear the divine ‘Thou shalt not’.

  To be sure, religion has done a great deal of harm. On that I am in complete agreement with the atheists. It is a point that must trouble every religious conscience, and it cannot be glossed over. But Europe has been through a nightmare in the twentieth century, a barbarism without precedent or parallel, and it happened not inadvertently, but in the very spirit of its most profound anti-religious thinker. Of course, Nietzsche was not a Nazi. He condemned antisemitism. He broke with Wagner because of the latter’s antisemitism. All this is true and important. But Nietzsche, together with Schopenhauer – who really was an antisemite – provided Nazism with its intellectual foundations. That may never be forgotten as long as human beings care for the future of humanity.

  We are unlikely to go down precisely that road again. There are other, less disastrous ways for civilisations to die. But die they do. Will and Ariel Durant, a husband-and-wife team of historians, spent forty years between 1935 and 1975 writing their massive and award-winning history of humankind, The Story of Civilization. They believed that ‘a great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within’, and in the fifth volume they wrote the following extraordinarily germane analysis of the civilisational dynamic that has played itself repeatedly:

  [A] certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a ‘conflict between science and religion’. Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and – after some hesitation – the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization.10

  The passage is all the more remarkable since Will Durant himself, who had at one stage contemplated entering the priesthood, lost his own religious faith.

  I fear for the future of the West if it loses its faith. You cannot defend Western freedom on the basis of moral relativism, the only morality left when we lose our mooring in a sacred ontology or a divine-human covenant. No secular morality withstood Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. No secular morality today has the force to withstand the sustained onslaught of ruthless religious extremism. Neither market economics nor liberal democracy has the power, in and of itself, to inspire people to make sacrifices for the common good. In the multicultural nation states of contemporary Europe, it is increasingly difficult to know whether there remains a compelling sense of the common good.

  The Judeo-Christian ethic is not the only way of structuring a society and ordering a life. But it is the only way that has succeeded in the long run in the West, the only way that has given rise autonomously to the scientific and industrial revolutions, parliamentary democracy and liberty of conscience, the only system that has combined strong individualism with a social conscience and a highly active civil society. We stand to lose much if that ethic is lost. We will lose our sense of human dignity, our distinctive politics of the common good, our morality of obligation and responsibility, our respect for marriage and parenthood as a covenantal bond, and our best hope for a meaningful life. Such will be my argument in the next five chapters.

  6

  Human Dignity

  What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him? Yet You have made him little lower than the angels, and have crowned him with glory and honour.

  Psalm 8

  This laboriously won self-contempt of man.

  Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals1

  Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

  Michel Foucault2

  Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) was one of the moving spirits of the Italian Renaissance. Born into an aristocratic family, he was a child prodigy, mastering Latin and Greek at an early age and winning the title of papal protonotary when he was only ten. Initially intending a career in the Church, he went to the University of Bologna to study law, but widened his interests to include philosophy, which he pursued at the universities of Ferrara and Padua.

  In 1486 he completed his monumental 900 Theses, Conclusiones philosophicae, cabalasticae et theologicae, on the entire range of human knowledge. To accompany them he wrote his Oration on the Dignity of Man, widely regarded as a manifesto of the Renaissance. In it he argued that the human person was the centre-piece of creation, the one being other than God himself who had no fixed nature. Endowed with freedom, he could rise higher than the angels or fall lower than the animals. This is how he imagines God addressing the first human:

  Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone … All other things have a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by our laws. You, with no limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of your nature. We have placed you at the world’s center so that you may survey everything else in the world. We have made you neither of heavenly nor of Earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.3

  Human dignity never received a higher expression. Pico’s Oration reminds us that Renaissance humanism was initially a religious humanism. Its heroes, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and their contemporaries, were enthralled by the possibilities of science and technology. They explored perception and rediscovered perspective. They studied techniques of construction and produced architectural masterpieces like Michelangelo’s design for St Peter’s, Rome. Da Vinci studied human anatomy and used it in his sketches and paintings. Fascinated by the possibilities of technology, his notebooks are full of inventions centuries ahead of their time, from submarines to flying machines. Yet they were also often deeply religious individuals and this is reflected in their work: in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and Ghiberti’s bronze doors for the Baptistry of the cathedral in Florence. They combined a passion for science and religion together and saw no conflict or contradiction between them.

  The Italian Renaissance was in part the rediscovery by Christian Europe of the classical tradition of ancient Greece and Rome, but there was another element that we can sense clearly in Pico’s words. For what they express is the standard Jewish reading of the creation of the first humans. There is no reference to original sin. T
he human person is in the image and likeness of God, never more so than when he uses his intelligence and understanding to fathom the universe. Our freedom and creativity are what connect us to the divine.

  How did Pico arrive at this interpretation, previously excluded from Christian theology as the Pelagian heresy? Almost certainly it was the result of his encounter, in Padua, with a Jewish scholar named Rabbi Elijah del Medigo, who taught him Hebrew and Aramaic, introduced him to the Babylonian Talmud and the classic Jewish Bible commentaries and even gave him tuition in Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.4 Such encounters happened rarely. Christians did not seek out Jewish scholarship. Jews for their part were reticent in teaching Christians. Both men eventually suffered for their friendship. Pico was accused of heresy and del Medigo regarded with suspicion by the Italian Jewish community.

  The Oration was a turning point in the history of the West, for it marked a break with that strand in Christian thought that owed as much to Plato as to Paul: the contrast between body and soul, flesh and spirit, the darkness of Earth and the radiance of heaven. The human person is tainted with sin. The human arena is marked by corruption. Only by divine grace can people achieve anything. We are fallen, frail, without the capacity to redeem ourselves; we are sinners all.

  That is not what Pico heard in the opening chapters of Genesis, and as a result he was able to develop a religious humanism that was to have an extraordinary influence on the artists of the Renaissance. The years that followed were the most creative in the long story of the complex interweaving of Athens and Jerusalem within the European soul. The Greek passion for beauty met the biblical sense of human possibility and the encounter led in art, architecture and literature to incandescent masterpieces of the mind, imperishable fragments of infinity. Pico understood that one of the driving themes of the Hebrew Bible is that it is precisely in our freedom that the human person most resembles God.

  The Fall

  Five hundred years later we encounter a quite different evaluation of the nature and dignity of humankind. Published in 1997 by members of the International Academy of Humanism, its signatories included Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, Richard Dawkins, the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, Kurt Vonnegut the novelist, and the philosopher W. V. Quine. The subject at hand was the permissibility or otherwise of research into human cloning. The signatories all supported such research, and explained why:

  What moral issues would human cloning raise? Some religions teach that human beings are fundamentally different from other mammals – that humans have been imbued with immortal souls by a deity, giving them a value that cannot be compared to that of other living things. Human nature is held to be unique and sacred … As far as the scientific enterprise can determine, Homo sapiens is a member of the animal kingdom. Human capabilities appear to differ in degree, not in kind, from those found among the higher animals. Humankind’s rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover … A view of human nature rooted in humanity’s mythical past ought not to be our primary criterion for making moral decisions about cloning.5

  We are, on this view, not distinctive at all. We are part of nature, nothing more. There is nothing corresponding to the soul, nor is there anything in the ‘rich repertoire’ of works of the human spirit to differentiate us in kind from other forms of life. Our hopes, dreams and ideals ‘arise from electrochemical brain processes’ – implying that this is all they are. Striking is the sheer loss of the sense of grandeur and possibility that drove Renaissance humanism. This loss of dignity is deeply embedded in popular science. We have become ‘the naked ape’, ‘a gene’s way of making another gene’, an organism among organisms, without freedom or virtue, neither sacred nor unique. Reviewing this history of the descent of man, it is hard not to feel that we have lost more than we have gained. For what does it profit humanity if it gains the world and yet loses its soul? How did it happen?

  It was a drama in several acts, extended over several centuries. First came Copernicus’s discovery that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. The sun did not revolve around man’s habitation; it was the Earth that circled the sun. In the fullness of time that initial paradigm shift was amplified many times over. Even the solar system is not the centre of the galaxy, and even the galaxy is only one of more than a hundred billion others. In space, the wide Earth turned out to be a speck of dust on the surface of infinity.

  What applied to space applied to time also. Newton, in the seventeenth century, could still believe that the Earth was some six thousand years old, spending a fair proportion of his time trying to work out the exact date of its birth. Yet as rock strata began to be understood, and fossils were found, the birth had to be pushed back further and further, to hundreds of thousands of years, then to millions, then to 4.54 billion, in a universe 13.7 billion years old.

  If so, then the opening chapters of the Bible could not be read literally. The universe was not created in six days. The entire history of humanity was an eyelid’s blink in eternity, if that. The universe had managed to survive for billions of years without Homo sapiens. How then could we claim to be the ultimate purpose of creation?

  Then came Spinoza, who taught us that to the extent that we are physical beings we are subject to physical laws, all of which have the character of necessity. Therefore freedom – the single greatest gift of God to humanity, separating us from the animals – is an illusion. There is, in fact, only one form of freedom: the consciousness of necessity. The philosopher grows wise by knowing that things could not have been otherwise.

  Spinoza set the stage for a whole series of determinists of different kinds, each finding the course of history in some other shaping force, but all agreed that we are what we are because we could not be otherwise than we are, and that all thoughts to the contrary are mere illusion.

  Marx argued that the whole of human history was shaped by economic forces, and by the desire of a dominant class to maintain hegemony. Religion, which taught otherwise, was itself the tool of the ruling classes, used by them to teach the poor to accept their fate as the will of God, and to live with suffering in this world in the hope, even promise, of reward in the world to come.

  Then came Darwin, with the shocking revelation that human beings were not even sui generis, a class on their own. Not only were they not the image of God, they were just one branch of the primates, close cousins to the apes and chimpanzees. There might be differences of degree between humans and others, but not of kind. Other animals, said Darwin, felt feelings, used language, even had self-consciousness.

  Then came Freud with the revelation of a subterranean channel of dark instinctual drives running beneath the surface of our minds. We are driven by Eros and Thanatos, the sex instinct and the death instinct. We want to murder our father and marry our mother. In fact, this was the source of religion itself. Long ago the younger males of the tribe gathered together to murder their father, the alpha male. Having done the deed, they then experienced overwhelming remorse – the return of the repressed – and that is what God and the voice of conscience are.6 Religion, said Freud, is the obsessional neurosis of humankind.7

  Finally – at least thus far – came the neo-Darwinians with their assault on one thing humans could still pride themselves on, their altruism, their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others. Not so, argued the sociobiologists. The human person is, after all, just a gene’s way of making another gene. Whatever stories we tell ourselves, our apparently altruistic acts are only ways of ensuring our genetic survival into the next generation. We only really help kin and in precise proportion as they share our genes. ‘Scratch an altruist,’ said Michael Ghiselin, ‘and watch a hypocrite bleed.’8

  Nor was this all. What riveted the neo-Darwinians was the implication that evolution proceeded by mere chance, random genetic mutation, which produced the variety on which natural selection co
uld work. Stephen J. Gould drew the conclusion that if the tape of evolution were to be replayed there would be no certainty that Homo sapiens would emerge.9 So not only were human beings not made by an act of special divine creation, their very existence was pure accident.

  So we are nothing, our planet is insignificant, our existence a mere caesura in time. Our noblest thoughts conceal base intentions. There is no freedom, just necessity. There is no truth, just hegemonic narrative. There is no moral beauty, just a sordid struggle to survive. It is all very much like Hamlet on a bad hair day: ‘To me, what is this quintessence of dust?’10

  There is something surpassingly odd about this. During the entire period that this drama of disillusionment was being enacted, human powers of understanding, explanation and control were expanding beyond all previous imaginings and at an ever faster rate. How is it that the higher human achievements become, the lower the human self-image sinks?

  As always, the most insightful observer was Nietzsche:

  Has not man’s self-deprecation, his will to self-deprecation, been unstoppably on the increase since Copernicus? Gone, alas, is his faith in his dignity, uniqueness, irreplaceableness in the rank ordering of beings, – he has become animal, literally, unqualifiedly and unreservedly an animal, man who in his earlier faiths was almost God (‘child of God’, ‘man of God’) … since Copernicus, man seems to have been on a downward path, – now he seems to be rolling faster and faster away from the centre – where to? into nothingness? into ‘piercing sensation of his nothingness’?11