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

by Jonathan Sacks

  The philosopher John Cottingham, rejecting the view that religious faith is an inference from the balance of good over evil in the world, says something moving:

  The most profoundly spiritual and passionately religious people in the world’s history, the people who produced Moses and the prophets and Jesus and Paul, were a people whose history was conspicuous by the most terrible suffering, the cataclysmic traumas of slavery, wanderings in the desert, a homeland marked by the ever-present threat of war and annihilation, brutal captivity, exile, ruthless suppression and control by a series of imperial subjugators. This is the people who reflected endlessly on chesed, the loving kindness of God, who produced the immortal lines, ach tov va’chesed yirdefuni kol yemei chayai – ‘surely thy goodness and loving kindness shall follow me all the days of my life’.12

  Belief in God is an assertion of human dignity in the face of humiliation, and of hope in the midst of the dark night of despair. It is a refusal to accept evil as inevitable, but at the same time an acknowledgement that we cannot leave redemption entirely to God. He rescued Noah, but Noah had to build the ark. He dwelt among the Israelites in the wilderness, but they had to build the sanctuary. The very fact that the Bible devotes some fifteen times as much space to the Israelites’ constructing the sanctuary as it does to God creating the universe tells us that our deeds are precious to God. God is not the solution of a contradiction, but a call to become his partners in the work of redemption.

  If I did not believe in God, what would persuade me to fight against an injustice that, according to Nietzsche, is written into the basic biological structure of life itself? There were two major secular forms of social hope in the twentieth century. One was the Marxist vision of the proletarian revolution. The other was the Western dream of peace, market economics and technological progress. The former led to the loss of freedom, the latter to large and growing inequalities: hope for the few, not the many. The risk is that in the twenty-first century people will increasingly turn to pessimism, resignation, endurance and ataraxia. They are what the Greeks found refuge in when they lost faith in faith. Lose belief in God, and sooner or later you may lose belief in the possibility and necessity of justice.

  Herbert Schneidau used the phrase ‘sacred discontent’ to describe the Hebrew Bible’s contribution to Western civilisation. The historian Christopher Dawson argued similarly that, alone among the civilisations of the world, Europe ‘has been continually shaken and transformed by an energy of spiritual unrest’. He attributed this to the fact that ‘its religious ideal has not been the worship of timeless and changeless perfection but a spirit that strives to incorporate itself in humanity and to change the world’.13 I have argued in this chapter that this energy is driven by the cognitive dissonance of a faith that sees the world as it is while refusing to let go of its vision of the world as it ought to be. In that world, contradiction is to be resolved not by philosophical thought but by redemptive deed.

  There is a Jewish joke, a tragic one. The time, 1938, the place, a travel agency in Germany. A Jew has entered. He tells the woman at the desk that he would like to buy a ticket for a foreign journey.

  ‘Where to?’ asks the travel agent.

  ‘What are you offering?’ asks the Jew.

  The travel agent passes him a globe. He turns the globe slowly, looking at country after country, knowing that each has closed its doors to people of his faith. He pushes the globe back to the travel agent with the words, ‘Don’t you have another world?’

  Perhaps this is not the world we would have chosen, but it is the only one we have. Either we resign ourselves to the evil it contains, or we register a protest against it. It begins with a cry that is only stilled when we hear the Judge of all the Earth calling on us to help bring justice into the human world we make together.

  13

  When Religion Goes Wrong

  Both read the Bible day and night,

  But thou read’st black where I read white.

  William Blake1

  Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven.

  John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

  On one point, and it is a substantial one, the critics of religion are right. Religion has done harm. It has led to crusades, jihads, inquisitions, autos-da-fé and pogroms. It has shed the blood of human sacrifice in the name of high ideals. People have hated in the name of the God of love, practised cruelty in the name of the God of compassion, waged war in the name of the God of peace, and killed in the name of the God of life. Those are undeniable facts and they are terrifying.

  The great believers have always known this. Blaise Pascal said, ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.’2 Jonathan Swift said, ‘We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love, one another.’3 ‘I think we must fully face the fact’, wrote C. S. Lewis, ‘that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse.’4

  This happens not because religion is religion, but because human beings are human beings, not angels and certainly not God. Religion has power. It bonds people as a group. It moves people to act. It changes lives. And whatever has power can be used, misused or abused. Religion is like fire: it warms, but it also burns. And we are the guardians of the flame.

  The same is true of every high ideal, secular no less than religious. Steven Weinberg was wrong when he said, ‘With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.’ The supporters, fellow travellers and ‘willing executioners’ of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Eichmann, Mussolini, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Radovan Karadzic, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il prove otherwise. A reading of Jonathan Glover’s Humanity, a history of secular evil in the past hundred years, should cure all thoughts that it takes religion to move people to do wrong in the belief that they are doing right.5

  Science and technology can also be misused with devastating consequences. The twentieth century gave rise to social Darwinism, the so-called scientific study of race, Zyklon B, the extermination camp, Marxist economic ideology, the Gulag, social engineering, B. F. Skinner and his vision of a world ‘beyond freedom and dignity’, lobotomy, the use of brain surgery to pacify criminals, eugenics, forced sterilisation, euthanasia, abortion on demand, and the various other horrors of a technological age, including modern methods of torture and mind control.6

  The problem is not science or religion, but us: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure’ (Jeremiah 17:9). Some humans hate. Some envy. Some seek power over others. Some want revenge for real or imagined humiliation. The human mind is almost infinite in its capacity to rationalise and justify evil, especially when driven by hate. There is religious hatred, ethnic hatred and ideological hatred: Christians versus Muslims, Serbs against Croats, and the cold war stand-off between capitalism and Communism. The methods used for inciting hatred, demonising the other, making people feel threatened and thus defensiveaggressive, are essentially the same in all cases.

  It is sometimes said nowadays that religions can do what secular systems cannot do, namely persuade people to become suicide bombers for the sake of eternal life in heaven, but that is not so. The first suicide bombing in recent history was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia in 1881 by an anarchist. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, the first to use suicide bombing as a systematic tactic, were not a religious group, nor were the Japanese kamikaze pilots on their suicide missions in the Second World War. As Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, ideological terrorists merge their identity with that of the group. They are willing to give up their lives not for the sake of their share in heaven, but for the sake of the collective with which they identify on Earth.7 Scott Atran’s recent book Talking to the Enemy documents this in vivid detail.8 Suicide bombers, he discovers through spending time
with them, kill not for the cause, but for one another: because of friendship and group loyalty. Atran is particularly critical of the new atheists for using terror as an argument against religion.

  Religion is no more likely than secularism to lead good people to do bad, and sometimes evil, things. But merely saying this is not enough. If we are honest, whether we are religious or secular, we must ask why the ideals in which we believe can, in certain circumstances, do harm. Failure to do this led too many Western intellectuals not to acknowledge the crimes of Soviet Communism – the ‘god that failed’ – until tens of millions of people had died and several generations had been robbed of their freedom.

  Religion is no exception. Its sanctity should never be used as a shield against honest self-criticism. I want in this chapter to examine five of the hazards to which specifically the Judeo-Christian tradition has been prone. They are: hard texts, dualism, messianic politics, the pursuit of power and the inability to see that there is more than one perspective on reality. Each, I believe, must be guarded against.

  Hard Texts

  Every religion based on a body of holy writings, a sacred scripture, contains hard texts: passages which, if taken literally and applied directly, would lead to results at odds with that religion’s deepest moral convictions. There are passages in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Koran that, taken in isolation, are radically inconsistent with the larger commitments of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the sanctity of life and the dignity of all persons as bearers of God’s image.

  Such texts need interpretation. The classic form of fundamentalism is belief in the literal meaning of texts, specifically that we can move from text to application without interpretation. We cannot. Interpretation is as fundamental to any text-based religion as is the original act of revelation itself. No word, especially the word of God, is self-explanatory. Exegetes and commentators are to religion what judges are to law. They are essential to the system, and they can make all the difference between justice and injustice, right and wrong.

  Every text-based religion has its own traditions of interpretation. That is why fundamentalism is so profoundly untraditional. Rabbinic Judaism regarded the Oral Law (tradition and interpretation) as equal in authority to the Written Law (revelation, specifically the books of Moses). The rabbis held that Biblicism – accepting the authority of the written word while rejecting oral tradition, as did the Sadducees and Karaites – was heresy. They said, ‘One who translates a verse literally is a liar.’9 The point is clear: no text without interpretation, and no interpretation without tradition. Christianity contains a similar principle: ‘The letter kills, but the spirit gives life’ (2 Corinthians 3:6).

  Jews, Christians and Muslims have wrestled with the meanings of their scriptures, developing in the process elaborate hermeneutic and jurisprudential systems. Medieval Christianity had its four levels of interpretation – literal, allegorical, moral and eschatological – paralleling the Jewish division into peshat, remez, drush and sod.10 Islam likewise has its fiqh; its four schools of Sunni jurisprudence and their Shia counterparts; its principles of taqleed, itjihad and qiyas. In all of these systems the task is to relate the infinite Word to a finite world, to spell out details unspecified in the text, and to resolve seeming inconsistencies between one passage and another.

  Interpretation is the lifeblood of all systems, including secular ones, that rely on canonical texts. That is what happened to all the biblical texts standardly quoted by the new atheists in their critique of the Bible, especially the wars against the Midianites and Amalekites, with their mandate for total destruction of populations, and Joshua’s wars of conquest. In fact it is just these texts that allow us to see most clearly the power of exegesis to interpret details in the light of the whole.

  In general, the Hebrew Bible is hostile to war. The prophets of Israel were the first people in history to see peace as an ideal. Already in the eighth century BCE, Isaiah and Micah speak of a time when ‘Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war any more’ (Isaiah 2:4; Micah 4:3), and, ‘They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the Earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea’ (Isaiah 11:9). This is the world’s first literature of peace.

  In 1 Chronicles 22:8, David is told by God he was not permitted to build the Temple, because ‘you have shed much blood and have fought many wars’. War may sometimes be necessary, but it has no place in the domain of the holy. One who has ‘shed much blood’ may not build a house of God.

  The sages ruled, early in the second century, that the entire biblical legislation relating to Israel’s neighbours and enemies was no longer operative, because after Sennacherib’s conquests and population transfers (722–705 BCE), the ‘nations’ against which Israel was commanded to wage war could no longer be identified. As Maimonides writes, ‘their memory has already perished’.11 We no longer know who is who. That chapter in Jewish history is closed, not to be reopened. As for Joshua’s conquest of the land, the Talmud offers a radical interpretation, insisting that they were all prefaced by an offer of peace.12 War was deemed never to be mandated except when the effort to make peace has been tried and has failed.

  As for the Amalekites, about whom the Bible commands the Israelites to ‘blot out their memory from under heaven’, they too can no longer be identified,13 because the nations of today are not the nations of biblical times. ‘Amalek’ survives as a symbol of radical evil, a metaphor, not a people.14 War, except in self-defence, no longer takes place on the battlefield; it becomes a struggle within the soul.15 The biblical phrase ‘the wars of the Lord’ becomes in the Talmud a description of debate in the house of study.16 The Talmud goes so far as to say, in connection with the drowning of the Egyptians at the Red Sea (Exodus 15), that the angels wished to sing a song of triumph but God silenced them with the words, ‘My creatures are drowning – and you wish to sing a song?’17 Israel’s enemies have become ‘my creatures’. In short, by a process of interpretation, itself confirmed by the course of history, all biblical texts relating to wars of conquest were rendered inoperative. If you seek to understand a religious ethic, never look at its written texts alone. Always seek to know how they were understood by the community of faith and how in practice they were applied. The difference is often great.

  Living traditions constantly interpret their canonical texts. That is what makes fundamentalism – text without interpretation – an act of violence against tradition. In fact, fundamentalists and today’s atheists share the same approach to texts. They read them directly and literally, ignoring the single most important fact about a sacred text, namely that its meaning is not self-evident. It has a history and an authority of its own. Every religion must guard against a literal reading of its hard texts if it is not to betray God’s deeper purposes.

  Dualism

  The second danger within religion was vividly exemplified by two sensational discoveries of ancient manuscripts in the 1940s that revolutionised our understanding of sectarian Jewish and Christian groups in the era around the birth of Christianity. One was the library of a Jewish sect at Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls. The other was the find in the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi of a cache of early Christian codices. The Qumran sectarians may have been a branch of the movement known as the Essenes. Members of the group were disaffected by the official priesthood in Jerusalem and awaited a saviour known as the Teacher of Righteousness. The Nag Hammadi Christians were devotees of an esoteric doctrine known as Gnosticism. The find disclosed fifty-two texts from the first and second centuries including nine gospels, many of which had not been known before.

  The two sects were significantly different, but they had one thing in common: they saw reality in starkly dualistic terms. There was a sharp separation between good and evil, light and dark, the saved and the damned, the children of light and the children of darkness, and little if any shading in between. The children of darkness, they believed, were
currently in control. Humanity was in the grip of evil. The Qumran sectarians believed that this would be reversed after a massive convulsion in the affairs of humankind. The Gnostic Christians were more inclined to see evil as the natural condition of the world.

  What both groups testify to is that the greatest danger to monotheism is not polytheism or atheism, but dualism. It arises out of a specific crisis of faith, namely the existence of evil. How can a just God allow unjust suffering to exist? There are many answers to this question, but there are times when the world seems too out of joint for the conventional answers to suffice. It is then that an unconventional answer appears: evil is an independent, active force, apart from and opposed to God. Dualism – which enters the West through Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and Hellenistic Gnosticism – explains evil as the work of a mythic counterforce: the devil, the demiurge, Satan, the anti-Christ, the Prince of Darkness, and the many other names for the embodiment of evil.

  Dualism is a faith of sharp distinctions: between body and soul, this world and the next, material and spiritual, substance and form. God is in heaven; on Earth, all too often, evil reigns. Dualism is thus able to preserve the goodness of God while attributing the sufferings of the faithful to a malevolent force, protean in form and universal in reach.

  As its name implies, dualism is not monotheism, despite the fact that it has appeared at times of crisis in all three Abrahamic faiths. It is a murderous creed. In medieval Christianity, for example, Jewry was seen as a demonic force responsible for the poisoning of wells, the spread of the plague, the death of children, the desecration of the host, and so on, and these accusations led to massacres and expulsions.18 At the end of the nineteenth century, dualism reappeared in a secular form known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.19 Though this myth originated in Tsarist Russia, it was used with devastating effect by Hitler, and continues to be popular today in many parts of the Middle East.