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

by Jonathan Sacks

  What might make us think that this is the way God designed the universe? Because that is the way the Bible portrays him acting in relation to humans. The early experiments fail. God gives Adam and Eve paradise, but they sin. God tries to warn Cain against violence, but Cain does not listen. Seeing a world ‘full of violence’, God brings a flood, saves Noah and begins again, allowing him things, like eating meat, he forbade to the first humans. Again the plan fails. Noah gets drunk. Humanity starts building Babel.

  God tries again, this time with a single human, Abraham. This too does not achieve the intended result. Within three generations Jacob’s children are selling one of their brothers into slavery. God then exposes their descendants to slavery so that they will learn what it feels like and thus be motivated to create a society of freedom. Liberating them, God then gives them a command, the Sabbath, on which even slaves are free, so that they will eventually learn that no human should enslave another. Even this takes more than three thousand years.

  The complex interaction between God and humanity in the Bible is more in the spirit of Darwinian evolution than in that of the God of Plato or Aristotle, the unmoved mover contemplating the unchanging, abstract forms of things. God, like evolution, operates in and through time. Humans act, God reacts, humans respond to divine response, and so on in ways that are often surprising and unpredictable. How this dovetails with Divine foreknowledge is a classic problem in Jewish theology (in the Middle Ages, Gersonides thought that God’s foreknowledge was limited by human freedom, Crescas that human freedom was limited by God’s foreknowledge, and Maimonides that human and divine knowledge were so unalike that we can know only that we will never know how God knows).29 God, like evolution, is oriented to a not-yet-realised future: hence his name, ‘I will be what I will be’, which might equally serve as a Darwinian definition of life itself. God, like evolution, works on the basis of convergence, that distant vision of an end of days in which nation will no longer lift up sword against nation and the world will be in a state of shalom, the integrated diversity that constitutes peace.

  What Darwinian science represents is not the refutation of the God of Abraham but the final overthrow of Aristotelian science, the idea that purposes are unequivocally discernible within nature. The Bible tells us, as in the narrative of Joseph, that at one level the story of life may seem like an entirely random sequence of events. There is nothing obvious about divine design. It is oblique, subtle and sometimes non-linear. It needs much intelligence and depth to perceive it, and it is arrived at not by the left-brain process of analysing microscopic detail, but by the right-brain capacity to step back and see the picture as a whole.

  Why would a Creator choose to operate this way, allowing species and eventually humankind to emerge obliquely rather than directly? For the same reason that the planned economies of the Soviet Union and Communist China failed and the market economies of the West succeeded. A planned economy fails to liberate energies. It does not grant freedom. It does not generate creativity. It is predictable, ungenerous, dictatorial, precisely the things the God of Abraham is not.

  Darwinian evolution precisely fits the model I argued for in chapter 1, in the case of Abrahamic monotheism and the meaningfulness of life. The meaning of the system lies outside the system. That, I argued there, applied to systems in general and to the universe as a whole. Any system is made up of rules that govern events within the system. Those rules explain how the system works, but not why it was created or evolved. That is why Darwinism fulfils an important function for Abrahamic monotheism. It tells us that God, having created the conditions for life, transcends life as he transcends the universe. The idea that we should look for God in nature is essentially pagan and constitutes a pagan residue even within the great Aristotle himself. Faith says, all that breathes praises God. It does not say, all that breathes proves the existence of God.

  The Hebrew Bible is simply uninterested in Homo sapiens the biological species. It is even relatively uninterested in Homo faber, the tool-making, environment-changing life-form. It passes over, in short order, Jabal, ‘father of those who live in tents and raise livestock’, Jubal, the first to ‘play the harp and flute’, and Tubal-Cain who ‘forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron’. It is interested exclusively in Homo religiosus, the first humans to hear and respond to the Divine voice.

  Ecclesiastes says that biologically, ‘Man has no pre-eminence over the animals.’ We are creatures of Earth, physical beings with physical drives. We live, we eat, we sleep, we reproduce, we age and die. But humans remain unique. We are culture-producing animals. There are other social animals, but none that produce – except at the most rudimentary level – cultures, symbols, systems of meaning. It is this that gives us our unique adaptability. Other animals are genetically conditioned to act in certain ways under certain conditions. We have something more powerful than genetically encoded instinct. We are culture-producing, information-sharing, meaning-learning animals. Nature built us for culture.30

  No animal painted the bonobo equivalent of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. No animal said, ‘To be or not to be.’ No animal philosophised that he or she might be nothing more than a hairy human. No animal was even an atheist, as far as I know. We may share many of our genes with the primates, as we do with fruit flies, bananas and yeast. The stones of an ancient cottage have mineral similarities to those out of which Chartres Cathedral was built. But there the resemblance ends.

  The Bible is interested not in physis, but in nomos: not in the laws that govern nature, but in the moral laws that should govern humankind. The Greek translation of Torah, the Jewish name for the Mosaic books, is Nomos, ‘law’. Hence the Bible does not begin with the birth of Homo sapiens, a biological species, hundreds of thousands of years ago, but much later, with the discovery of monotheism some six thousand years ago. The critical moment seems to have been the dawn of individual self-consciousness.

  Bruno Snell argues, in The Discovery of the Mind, that the Greeks discovered the human person as a person sometime between Homer and Aristophanes, that is, between the ninth and fifth centuries BCE.31 The Bible dates it several thousand years earlier, at the dawn of civilisation. Adam and Eve are typological representations of the first monotheists. Finding God singular and alone, they found the human person singular and alone.

  Because virtually all human activity is culturally mediated, and because humans are the only culture-producing animals (if we exclude such modest behaviours as chimpanzees learning how to wash potatoes), it follows that the biological similarities between humans and animals are irrelevant to most of human behaviour. The comparisons are interesting, but what makes humans human is the way basic drives – eating, reproducing, hierarchies of dominance – are transformed by culture into elaborately choreographed minuets that are forms of enacted meaning.

  Evolutionary psychology tells us that we may have genetically encoded instincts, some of which date back to our pre-human history, our ‘reptile brain’. Religious thinkers knew this long ago. The Jewish mystics spoke about our ‘animal soul’ which has to be overcome by our ‘godly soul’. Even the most committed scientific materialists concede that genetically encoded instinct has nothing to do with ethics. Richard Dawkins himself says in The Selfish Gene, ‘We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth … We alone on Earth can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’32 Steven Pinker writes that we can act against genetic predisposition, ‘and if my genes don’t like it they can go jump in the lake’.33 Katharine Hepburn said it best. ‘Nature’, she says majestically to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, ‘is what we are put in this world to rise above.’

  The biblical story begins at that moment at which humans developed sufficient self-consciousness to become aware of themselves as deliberating, choosing, free and responsible moral agents, the point at which they were first able to understand that ‘nature is what we were put on Earth to rise above’. The Bible is interested not in Homo sapiens the
biological species, but in the moral animal who, communing with the source of his and all being, discovers for the first time that although, like everything that lives, we have desires, like nothing else that lives, we are able to pass judgement on our desires. That is when humans first heard the voice of God.

  The story told by modern cosmology and Darwinian biology is wondrous almost beyond belief. It tells of a universe astonishingly precisely calibrated for the emergence, first of stars, then of second-, third- and fourth-generation stars, then of the formation of planets, one of which met exactly the conditions for the possibility of life. Then, in a way that still remains utterly mysterious, life emerged and evolved, through billions of years, yielding self-organising systems of ever-increasing complexity, until finally one life form appeared, capable of standing outside its biological drives for long enough to become self-conscious of itself and the sheer improbability of its own existence, and sensing in all of this a vast intelligence that set it in motion, and a caring presence that brought it into being in love. It took 13.7 billion years before the first human turned his or her thoughts beyond the physical universe and, searching for God, found God searching for us.

  How it happened, we will never know for sure. But it suggests a story of almost infinite divine patience consistent with everything we know from the Bible yet on a scale only mystics hitherto imagined. So I am not surprised that the rabbis formulated a blessing to be said over scientists, for it remains the most unlikely and beautiful story ever told.

  12

  The Problem of Evil

  The Bible is not the best book for putting us at ease with the world.

  Herbert N. Schneidau1

  A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice.

  Reinhold Niebuhr2

  How can God allow unjust suffering in the world? How can he allow his creatures to use, abuse, manipulate, dominate, injure and kill one another? How can he allow an Earthquake, a flood, a drought, a famine to cause thousands, even millions, of deaths? How can he allow one innocent child to die?

  No question so lacerates the heart of faith as does this. How, if God is good, is there so much evil in the world?

  After the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 that killed 230,000 people and left more than a million homeless, I went to visit one young woman who had been in Thailand at the time and only narrowly escaped. She was in a state of extreme anguish. This was her story. She was in her hotel room when the wave struck. She was able to swim through the window, but then she found the surface of the water blocked with debris. She could only raise an arm above the surface and wave for help.

  A local Thai man saw her waving, swam over to her and brought her to safety. Without this she would have died. Hours later, when the water had receded, she saw among the wreckage the dead body of the man who had rescued her. ‘How’, she asked me, ‘could God have allowed him to die? He saved my life. Of all people, he should have earned the right to live.’

  This question, or something like it, causes more people to lose faith than any other. There is none deeper. To fail to take it seriously is to fail to be serious at all. It is the question of questions, and it calls for nothing less than total honesty.

  To give it its most famous philosophical expression: either God cannot prevent evil, or he can but chooses not to. If he cannot, then he is not all-powerful. If he can but chooses not to, then he is not all-good. How does a good God permit evil to deface and defile his creation?

  No sooner have we asked the question than we realise something strange about the Bible. The later response of theologians, long after the biblical canon was closed, is familiar to us. We cannot fathom the workings of providence. If we could understand God, we would be God. Who are we to know what is for the best sub specie aeternitatis, from the perspective of eternity? What we cannot understand we must accept.

  It is this view that we do not find in the Bible. Instead we find Moses saying to God, ‘Why have you done evil to this people? Why did you send me?’ (Exodus 5:22).

  Here is Jeremiah, challenging God:

  You are always righteous, O Lord,

  when I bring a case before you.

  Yet I would speak with you about your justice:

  Why does the way of the wicked prosper?

  Why do all the faithless live at ease?

  (Jeremiah 12:1)

  And here is Habakkuk:

  How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not save?

  Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong?

  Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds.

  Therefore the law is paralysed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.

  (Habakkuk 1:2–4)

  Far from attempting to minimise the problem, the Bible maximises it, seemingly at every opportunity. The people who challenge divine justice are not heretics, sceptics, deniers of the faith. They are the supreme heroes of the faith: Moses and the prophets, the people who carry God’s word to the world. This cries out for explanation.

  So does the book of Job. The book sets up the following scenario. Satan – not in Judaism an evil force, simply the prosecuting attorney – challenges God on the faith he had in creating humanity. Show me one person who is truly righteous, he says. Job, God answers. Job is righteous, Satan replies, because you never tested him. He has all he wants: a happy marriage, children, wealth. It is easy for him to believe. He has no reason not to believe. But take away his good fortune and you will see that he no longer believes.

  In swift, successive blows, Job loses everything. His wealth. His children. His wife loses faith. ‘Curse God and die,’ she says. Job replies, in words Jews have used ever since, ‘God has given. God has taken away. May the name of God be blessed.’ There is a momentous acceptance in those words, and logically the book should have ended there.

  But it does not. Satan challenges God again and persuades him to send Job one more affliction. It is a relatively minor one, but this time Job breaks and curses the day he was born. From then to almost the end of the book, for more than thirty chapters, Job challenges God to show him how and why he deserves his fate.

  His three companions – later they are joined by a fourth, younger and surer of himself – give Job the conventional answers. God is just. Therefore if Job has suffered, he must have sinned. He is being punished for some wrong he did.

  Yet we the readers know something Job’s comforters do not. Job has not sinned. That was how the story was introduced in the first place. Job is the only person in the entire Hebrew Bible to be called sinless. There is therefore a massive irony throughout. Job’s comforters, who defend God’s justice, are in fact slandering Job, accusing him of a wrong he did not commit.

  As the book rises to a crescendo, God, who has been absent throughout, finally reveals himself to Job. Now, we expect, we will hear the answer to the question of questions. Instead, for a full four chapters, God simply asks questions of his own – unanswerable questions. ‘Where were you when I laid the Earth’s foundation? Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been shown to you?’ And so on.

  Job is silenced. Then, in an astonishing reversal, God tells Job that he, who challenged God’s justice, is right and his comforters, who defended God, are wrong. Job is then blessed with a restoration of his wealth and with more children.

  It is as bewildering a book as you will ever find. It raises questions without ever answering them. It bars the way to theodicy – explanations of why God permits evil in the world – since that is what Job’s comforters do and they, in the book, are condemned as wrong. It is a book of questions without answers, the last thing we would expect to find in a canon of sacred scriptures.

  There is a left-brain and a right-brain way of asking the question of why there is unjustified evil in the world. T
he left-brain, philosophical, analytical way is to ask it hypothetically. ‘What would we expect the world to be like if … there were an omnipotent, omniscient, all-good God?’ No child would die. Perhaps no adult would die. Animals would not hunt one another for food. There would be no sickness, no poverty and no hunger. No one would be homeless or without access to pure water and medical treatment. There would be no Earthquakes, no tsunamis, or if there were, they would cause no loss of life.

  The world is not like that. Therefore there is no God. That is a philosophical way.

  It is not the way an Abraham or a Sarah ask the question.

  The religious mind begins not with the world there might hypothetically be, but with the world that is. There is suffering and injustice. There is sickness and premature death. There are natural disasters. That is the world we inhabit and for the time being there is no other. The religious mind starts with the world that is, not with the world that might have been.

  Within this world, it seeks meaning. It does not seek explanation. Explanation is something else. Through explanation we learn how tsunamis happen, how populations suffer from sickle-cell anaemia or become infected by AIDS. The religious question is about meaning.

  Suffering tears our world apart. Something in our life that once rooted us is taken from us. Where there was once wholeness there is now a gaping hole. Suffering threatens to render life meaningless. How can I live with this pain? How can I want to continue to live in such a world? In extremis we cry with the words of the Psalm, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Psalm 22:1).