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

by Jonathan Sacks

  Again, unity in heaven creates diversity on Earth.

  Fourth, science and Genesis have now converged, in an utterly unexpected way, on the same metaphor. Life is linguistic. ‘And God said, Let there be … and there was.’ The Jewish mystics held that all life was the result of different permutations of the letters of God’s name. To be sure, this is mere metaphor. It is poetry, not science. But it is nonetheless remarkable that life has a structure no one expected prior to Crick’s and Watson’s discovery of DNA. It has hardware and software. The cell is an information-processing system. Was this even conceivable before the invention of the computer?

  Recall that Crick and Watson were working in Cambridge in the 1950s where, barely a decade before, Alan Turing had been setting out his pioneering thoughts on the possibility of an information-processing machine. Recall too that Francis Collins, leader of one of the two projects to decode the human genome, was moved by that experience to religious belief, and called the book he wrote The Language of God.18 That life is both intelligent and linguistic breathes new fire into the idea that the Source of life is both intelligent and a user of language, and that nature, no less than the Bible, is not a machine to be disassembled but a book to be decoded. It took the discovery of artificial intelligence to give us an insight into divine intelligence.

  Fifth, the interconnectedness of all life – the fact that plants, animals and humans have a common origin – helps us understand in new depth the Bible’s phrasing, ‘Let the Earth bring forth …’ and its generic name for Homo sapiens, Adam (from adamah, meaning ‘the Earth’). Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik took this as one of the central insights of Darwinian biology, echoing key biblical verses19:

  All flesh is grass. (Isaiah 40:6)

  Man has no pre-eminence over a beast: for all is mere breath. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. (Ecclesiastes 3:19–20)

  We are responsible for the preservation of nature and the animal kingdom, for we and they are part of the same continuum of life. Here is how the rabbis put it:

  When the Holy One created the first man, he took him and led him around all the trees of the Garden of Eden, and said to him: Behold my works, how beautiful, how splendid they are. All that I have created, I created for you. Take care that you do not become corrupt and thus destroy my world. For if you become corrupt, there will be no one after you to repair it.20

  The idea that in some sense the findings of science in the past two hundred years – whether in cosmology, quantum physics, the theory of relativity, Darwinian evolution, genetics and the mapping of the genome, or PET scans and the working of the brain – challenge our religious understanding of the universe is absurd.

  The Jewish theologians of the Middle Ages faced a far more serious challenge: the Aristotelian belief in the eternity of matter, which implied that one of the fundamentals of Abrahamic faith, that God created the universe, was false. All of them, not just the rationalist Moses Maimonides, but also the critic of rationalism, Judah Halevi, agreed that if Aristotle had proven his point, they would simply reinterpret Genesis 1. In chapter 3 I gave two examples – planetary motion and the ensoulment of the foetus – where the religious sages were happy to acknowledge that they were wrong and the Greeks right. As it happens, on the first the Greeks were wrong, and on the second we have no way of knowing. But they recognised that within its own domain science has its own integrity and that faith must be compatible with the facts as we know them. This itself follows from the conviction that the God of creation and the God of redemption are one.

  If an eternal universe was conceivable to the theologians of the Middle Ages, so should one 13.7 billion years old be to us. When a questioner troubled by Darwinism wrote to the famous Rabbi Abraham Kook, the rabbi replied (in 1905) by quoting an ancient rabbinic teaching that at the dawn of time, God ‘kept creating universes and destroying them until he created this one, and said, This one pleases me; those did not please me.’21 The idea that there were ages and extinct species before ours is one that should not trouble the theistic imagination.

  Of course it was not this that represented the fundamental challenge of Darwinism to Abrahamic faith. It was the fact that it seemed to prove, beyond doubt, that the emergence of life and the appearance of humanity were unscripted, unplanned, the result of blind processes iterated over billions of years. We are here as the result of a ‘purposeless and natural process’ that did not have us in mind.

  It is precisely here that the Bible tells a subtle story about stories in general, and what it is to see events as random on the one hand, designed on the other. Consider, as one example, the following episode from the Joseph narrative in Genesis. Joseph is envied and hated by his brothers. They resent the fact that their father loves him more than them. They are provoked by the sight of his many-coloured coat. They are angered by his dreams in which he sees them bowing down to him.

  In swift strokes as the story unfolds we sense their anger build to dangerous levels. Then comes the critical moment. The brothers are away from home, at Shechem, tending the flocks. Jacob sends Joseph to see how they are doing. We sense it will be a critical encounter, and so it is. The brothers see him at a distance, plan to kill him, and eventually sell him into slavery. Ironically, it is this act that begins the sequence of events that leads to Joseph’s dreams coming true.

  Between Joseph setting out and his meeting up with the brothers, however, we read the following:

  When Joseph arrived at Shechem, a man found him wandering around in the fields and asked him, ‘What are you looking for?’

  He replied, ‘I’m looking for my brothers. Can you tell me where they are grazing their flocks?’

  ‘They have moved on from here,’ the man answered. ‘I heard them say, “Let’s go to Dothan.” ’ So Joseph went after his brothers and found them near Dothan. (Genesis 37:14–17)

  Joseph arrives at the place where the brothers are supposed to be and finds that they are not there. A stranger appears who is able to guide Joseph to them. This is an extraordinary piece of biblical prose. The Joseph story is one of the most tightly scripted in the whole of the Bible. Every detail is significant and we are told nothing we do not need to know. Why then are we told this utterly irrelevant detail that at first Joseph could not find his brothers and needed a stranger to point the way?

  The story of Joseph is carefully constructed to be read on at least two levels. On the one hand, it is a story of chance human interactions. It is a tale of parental favouritism and sibling rivalry. People speak, have emotions and make decisions that have consequences. It might have been otherwise.

  Read at another level, it is a story of divine providence in which the end is foretold at the beginning – one of the very few such stories in the Bible. The outcome is announced through the dreams. Joseph will become a leader. His brothers will bow down to him. As in a Greek tragedy, every act, whatever its intention, has the effect of leading towards the predestined end.

  On the one hand, the Joseph story can be read as pure chance. At the key moment, he might not have found his brothers. He might have wandered around looking for them and then returned home. The entire drama of Joseph’s fall and rise might never have happened.

  On the other hand, divine providence is active at every stage. That is what this curious detail of the unnamed stranger is there to signal. At just the right moment a man appears to set Joseph on his way for the fateful meeting with the brothers. Not surprisingly, Jewish tradition identified the stranger who meets Joseph when he is lost as an angel – an ‘angel who did not know he was an angel’, in the fine phrase of the thirteenth-century scholar Nahmanides.22

  In case we miss the point, the Bible later puts it explicitly in Joseph’s mouth. Many years later, by now the viceroy of Egypt, Joseph tells his brothers, ‘And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you … So then, it was not you who sent me here, but
God’ (Genesis 45:5–8).

  In case we still miss the point, Joseph repeats it in a second scene, years and chapters later: ‘You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives’ (Genesis 50:20).

  The Bible is making, here and elsewhere, a philosophical point of some delicacy and power. It is rejecting the Aristotelian principle of the law of contradiction: either p or not-p. It is rejecting what William Blake called ‘single vision’. It is telling us that there may be no unequivocal answer to the question, ‘Was event X a chance event, or was it intended by divine design?’ It may be both. From one perspective, the story of Joseph is a series of random events, driven by a series of human decisions that might have been otherwise. From another perspective, it is the working out of a providential pattern whose end was announced (in Joseph’s dreams) at the beginning.

  That is why a sentence like ‘Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind’ may be true and false in equal measure. Let us now give some substance to this proposition without invoking divine providence.

  It is often said that Darwin refuted a famous argument for the existence of God, the ‘argument from design’. Indeed, he believed this himself. Darwin did in fact refute something, but it was not the argument from design; it was one particular and faulty version of it.

  In 1802 William Paley published a book called Natural Theology that had wide circulation in Victorian Britain and exercised a deep influence on the young Charles Darwin in particular. In it, Paley offers an early nineteenth-century updating of one of the classic arguments (dating back to Cicero before the birth of Christianity) for the existence of God, the ‘argument from design’.

  Imagine, says Paley, that we are walking across a heath. In our path is a stone. Seeing it, we are not moved to ask who put it there or why. It is just there. But suppose in our path we see a watch. That could not have been there since the beginning of time. The fact that it is fashioned from many different materials, precisely engineered and put together with integrated complexity, tells us that it was designed. It is a thing made. It bears the evidence of deliberate construction. Therefore it had a designer. The universe, says Paley, is more like a watch than a stone. Therefore it too had a designer.

  The power of Darwin’s theory of the origin of species is that it shows, with great simplicity and elegance, how design might emerge without a designer, through the simple processes of variation and natural selection, repeated in generation after generation over huge expanses of time. Within any given life form, there will be variations. They will compete for the scarce resources necessary for their survival. Those best adapted to their environment will commandeer what they need to live long enough to breed a new generation. Those less well adapted may die. This will account for variations within a species, as different environments favour different adaptations. Over time, those variations may be great enough to constitute a new species. The dual operation of chance (genetic mutation) and necessity (the competition for scarce resources) will generate design without a designer. So, says Darwin in his Autobiographies:

  The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course in which the wind blows.23

  Darwin is careful to register a qualification. He says he has refuted the old argument of design in nature as given by Paley. Life turns out not to be like a watch after all. But who says that is the only way to design a system?

  One of the great influences on Darwin was the economist Thomas Malthus, and Malthus himself was a disciple of the first great economist Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith put forward a famous argument about the working of the market economy. The division of labour leads to economic growth. The more people specialise, the more they are able to produce, and through market exchange they are able to sell their goods and acquire what they need. The paradox is that this process, which benefits (almost) everyone, is driven throughout not by empathy and altruism but by the pursuit of personal gain. ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’24

  The system as a whole – the free market – has a property shared by none of its constituent parts, namely the men and women and their myriad transactions that make the system work. It results in the common good, but the people within the system intend only their private, individual good. Smith described this paradox in almost mystical terms: ‘by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention’.25

  By ‘invisible hand’ Smith meant that the system has a logic visible only when seen as a whole. Macro-economics is different from micro-economics. The result of many individuals seeking personal benefit is that collectively they produce general benefit, ‘the wealth of nations’. The ‘end’, the consequence and effect of the system, is no part of the ‘intention’ of the millions who take part in it. To them it is ‘invisible’.

  This is a general feature of systems. From ant colonies to cities, individuals come together to form highly structured patterns of behaviour without anyone or anything ordering the process. The name given to this process is ‘emergence’, and the result, ‘organised complexity’.26

  What makes emergence distinctive is that it works through a highly distributed, bottom-up intelligence rather than a top-down centrally imposed one. Ant colonies function because individual ants follow simple rules of pattern recognition, tracking the pheromone trails left by fellow ants. The result is a kind of collective intelligence represented by the colony as a whole.

  That is how natural selection works. Out of a seemingly blind process of life forms replicating and passing on their genes to the next generation, variants are produced. Natural selection operates, sifting out the best from the worst adapted, and out of this apparently blind process there emerges an evolving biodiversity that produces life forms of ever-increasing complexity until it arrives at us. Like the market economy with its billions of transactions, no one within the system intends the outcome, but it is not random. It was precisely to produce such an outcome that the system as a whole was designed.

  So powerful is natural selection that since the 1980s it has been used in computing to develop artificial intelligence. Inspired by Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene, David Jefferson and Chuck Taylor of UCLA devised a computer programme that reproduced itself with minor random changes as in natural reproduction, and then tested the resulting programmes against one another, jettisoning those that failed, keeping those that succeeded, letting them reproduce and so on.27 The result is a computer that designs its own programmes to solve problems by mimicking the process of natural selection.

  The implication of this is simple and momentous: You can design a system that works on Darwinian lines. There is nothing random or accidental about such a system, even though every component part of it seems to be functioning blindly. Out of a myriad local operations, none of which has the end point in mind, an order emerges at the level of the system as a whole.

  What might make us think of evolution as part of a larger system of order like the market economy? The answer, suggests the Cambridge biologist Simon Conway Morris, is convergence. Biological systems are not random. Often, by taking different routes, they arrive at similar destinations. So, for example, cephalopods like the octopus developed a camera eye very similar to that of vertebrates like the blue whale. The development of intelligence in different phyla shows similar convergence. The paths tak
en by different life forms have not been random. They are constrained by the conditions in which they function and the problems they have needed to solve. Life forms begin from different starting points and take different routes, but they land up at the same destination with very similar soft- and hardware.

  The direction of evolution is not open-ended. It tells a cumulative story of organisms of ever-growing complexity, able to thrive in different ecological niches, often in symbiotic relationship with other life forms. Steven J. Gould famously said that if the tape of evolution were replayed there is no guarantee that Homo sapiens would have emerged at all. Yet if convergence is a feature of evolution, then sooner or later something like Homo sapiens – a being with intelligence and self-consciousness – would have appeared. As Conway Morris himself puts it, ‘What we know of evolution suggests the exact reverse [of Steven J. Gould’s view]: convergence is ubiquitous and the constraints of life make the emergence of the various biological properties [e.g. intelligence] very probable if not inevitable.’28 In short, you can design a universe that will eventually give rise to something very much like Homo sapiens, even when the process is built of steps none of which has this outcome in mind.

  Darwinian biology does not entail the absence of design. What Darwin refuted was not the argument from design but Paley’s version of it. The natural universe is not like a watch. It is not mechanical, a predetermined arrangement of interlocking parts. But who thought the universe was like a watch to begin with? Not the theologians, but the natural scientists and philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Newton, Leibniz, Laplace and Auguste Comte. They believed that all physical phenomena were determined by, and could be predicted on the basis of, simple laws like those of Newton. What was wrong with Paley’s argument was not the theology but the science. Good science refutes bad science. It tells us nothing at all about God.