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

by Jonathan Sacks

  The mutual hostility between religion and science is one of the curses of our age, and it is damaging to religion and science in equal measure. The Bible is not proto-science, pseudo-science or myth masquerading as science. It is interested in other questions entirely. Who are we? Why are we here? How then shall we live? It is to answer those questions, not scientific ones, that we seek to know the mind of God. But there is more to wisdom than science. It cannot tell us why we are here or how we should live. Science masquerading as religion is as unseemly as religion masquerading as science.

  At their best, science and religion are both instances of the human passion to decode mysteries, constantly travelling in search of a destination that continues to elude us, that is always over the furthermost horizon. It is that willingness to search, ask, question, that makes us what we are. Wallace Stevens, in his poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, wrote:

  I do not know which to prefer,

  The beauty of inflections

  Or the beauty of innuendoes,

  The blackbird whistling

  Or just after.

  After the inflections, the innuendos remain, the hints, the intimations, Elijah’s ‘still small voice’, Paul’s ‘through a glass darkly’, Wordsworth’s ‘sense of something far more deeply interfused’. When all the scientific explanations are in, the great questions still remain.

  Faith Is the Courage to Take a Risk

  Somewhere just beyond the edge of the universe, at the far side of the knowable, there either is or is not the Presence who brought it, and life, and you, into being. You have to make a choice and it will affect the whole of your life.

  You may say, I refuse to believe what I cannot test, what I cannot subject even in principle to some kind of proof. So be it. But the big decisions in life – as I learned from Bernard Williams and the Gauguin dilemma – are like that. You can never know in advance the facts that would make your decision the right one under the circumstances. That applies to the decision to marry, to have a child, to start a business, to undertake a research project, to write a symphony, to paint a picture. There is no creation without risk. What impresses me about the Bible is that it suggests that, even for God, creating humanity was a risk, and one that at least once he regretted having taken.

  The same is true about the basic attitudes we take towards life. How can I know in advance, beyond doubt, whether it is right to trust people, to befriend them, to love, to forgive those who have harmed me, to grant those who have failed me a second chance, to act honourably, to resist temptation, to refrain from doing wrong even when I am sure I will not be found out, to make sacrifices for the sake of others, and to refuse to become cynical even when I know the worst about the world and the people in it? There is no ‘rational choice’, no decision procedure, to take the uncertainty out of such choices – not least because they affect not only what happens but also the kind of person I become.

  To be human is to live in a world fraught with risk. We face a future that is unknowable, not just unknown. Faith is a risk and there is no way of minimising that risk, of playing it safe. Hamlet’s soliloquy – ‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?’ – tells us that there is no death, let alone life, without risk. Those who are unprepared to take a risk are unprepared to live fully.

  Faith is the courage to take a risk.

  And what if I am wrong? I would rather have lived believing the best about humanity and the universe than believing the worst. It is perfectly possible and coherent to believe that there is no creative intelligence at work in the universe, or if there is, it is blind; that life is vicious, cruel and unjust; that homo homini lupus est, ‘man is wolf to man’; that pessimism protects us from being disappointed and cynicism is our best defence against being betrayed.

  There is nothing irrational about believing that life has no meaning, that we can make no significant difference to the world, that life is short and death is long, so let us pursue what pleasures we can while hardening ourselves against what malice and misfortune may bring; living, in short, as did the Hedonists, Epicureans and Stoics of Greece of the third pre-Christian century. But these are tired philosophies of life, to be found in civilisations nearing their natural end.

  There are, to be sure, secular humanists who live deeply altruistic lives, fighting injustice or poverty or disease, pursuing truth or goodness or beauty for their own sake, without any super- or infrastructure of belief about the larger metaphysics of existence. I – and I hope all religious believers – feel enlarged, indeed blessed, by such people. To believe that religion holds a monopoly of virtue is as narrow-minded as to believe that science holds a monopoly of truth.

  However, this does not mean that religious faith makes no difference to the kind of people we become. Dozens of research exercises have shown that students grow or shrink to fit the expectations their parents and teachers have of them. When their teacher believes they are capable of greatness and communicates that in the classroom, students perform above the norm. When they are written off as failures, they fail, or at least do worse than they might have done otherwise.

  Monotheism expects great things from us, and by doing so makes us great. It calls us the image of God, the children of God, God’s covenantal partners. It challenges us to become co-builders with God of a gracious society and a more just world. It tells us that each of us is unique, irreplaceable, precious in God’s sight. We are not just the phenotype of a genotype, a member of a species, to a biologist a specimen, to a government a source of income, to an employer a cost, to an advertiser a consumer, and to a politician a vote.

  I see people transformed by this belief, spending their lives in gratitude to God for the gift of being alive and seeking to repay that debt by giving to others. I see them holding marriage sacred; I see them taking parenthood seriously as God told Abraham to take it seriously. I see them form communities on the basis of chesed, loving kindness. I see the power of faith to generate moral energies in a way nothing else does.

  And when I see people grow taller under the sunlight of divine love than they might have done under a godless sky, then – like the searcher in Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Approach to Al-Mutasim’ – I find the traces that lead eventually to his presence: in people who do not act the way Marx, Darwin, Freud or their disciples taught us to expect. They are the flecks of gold amidst the dust. They are the signals of transcendence.

  I cannot see that value attributed to the human person in any of the secular ideologies conjectured, let alone put into practice. How could there be? Biologically, as the neo-Darwinians remind us, we share 98 per cent of our genes with the primates and quite a lot of them with fruit flies. In any case, science deals with universal propositions, not with what James Joyce called epiphanies of the ordinary. The scientific method must screen out the uniqueness of the unique, the very thing poetry and art render radiant.

  Homo sapiens, discovering God singular and alone, discovered the human being singular and alone. There is no greater dignity than that – we saw it in Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration, the high point of the Renaissance view of man. Monotheism summons us, all of us, not an elite, to greatness.

  I Believe

  This, then, is my credo. I believe that the idea that the universe was created in love by the God of love who asks us to create in love is the noblest hypothesis ever to have lifted the human mind.

  We are the meaning-seeking animal, the only known life form in the universe ever to have asked the question ‘Why?’ There is no single, demonstrable, irrefutable, self-evident, compelling and universal answer to this question. Yet the principled refusal to answer it, to insist that the universe simply happened and there is nothing more to say, is a failure of the very inquisitiveness, the restless search for that which lies beyond the visible horizon, that led to science in the first place.

  The meaning of a system lies outside the system. Therefore the meaning of the universe lies outside the universe. That is why Abrahamic monotheism, b
elief in a God who transcends the physical universe and who brought it into being as an act of free creativity, was the first and remains the only hypothesis to endow life with meaning. Without that belief there is no meaning, there are merely individual choices, fictions embraced as fates. Without meaning there is no distinctively human life, there is merely the struggle to survive, together with the various contrivances human beings have invented to cover their boredom or their despair.

  Without belief in a transcendent God – the God of freedom who acts because he chooses – it is ultimately impossible to sustain the idea that we are free, that we have choice, that we are made by our decisions, that we are morally responsible agents. Science leaves no space for human freedom, and when freedom ceases to exist as an idea, eventually it ceases to exist as a reality also. Those civilisations built on the abandonment of God and the worship of science – the French Revolution, the Soviet Union, the Third Reich and Chinese Communism – stand as eternal warnings of what happens when we turn a means into an end. Science as humility in search of truth is one thing. Science as sole reality is another. It can then become the most pitiless and ruthless of gods.

  Without freedom, there is no human dignity: there is merely the person as thing, a biological organism continuous with all other organisms. The discovery of human dignity is perhaps the single most transformative idea given to the world by Abrahamic monotheism. That faith was the first to teach that every human being regardless of colour, culture or creed is in the image and likeness of God, the first to teach the sanctity of human life and the dignity of the human person, and to show how these ideals might be honoured and made real in the structures we build for our common life.

  The God of Abraham is the God of surprises, the supreme power who intervened in history to liberate the powerless and set them on the long journey to freedom. He taught us the paradoxical truth that nations survive not by wealth but by the help they give to the poor, not by power but by the care they extend to the weak. Civilisations become invulnerable only when they care for the vulnerable.

  Belief in God has historically been the only way to establish the moral limits of power. Belief in the sovereignty of God is infinitely preferable to belief in the sovereignty of humankind. Human beings worship. Sometimes they worship wealth, at other times power. Sometimes, as today, they worship the self. There are people who worship science itself. All these things are parts of life, not its totality, and any worship of the part rather than the whole has led in the past to disaster. Monotheism teaches us the single compelling truth that nothing is worthy of worship that is less than everything, the Author-of-all.

  Abrahamic monotheism speaks on behalf of the poor, the weak, the enslaved. It tells a story about the power of human freedom, lifted by its encounter with the ultimate source of freedom, to create structures of human dignity. It bodies forth a vision of a more gracious world. It tells us that no one is written off, no one condemned to be a failure. It tells the rich and powerful that they have responsibilities to those who lack all that makes life bearable. It invites us to be part of a gentle revolution, telling us that influence is greater than power, that we must protect the most vulnerable in society, that we must be willing to make sacrifices to that end and, most daringly of all, that love is stronger than death. It sets love at the epicentre of the world: love of God, love of the neighbour, love of the stranger. If natural selection tells us anything, it is that this faith, having existed for longer than any other, creates in its followers an astonishing ability to survive.

  Civilisations have come and gone: Mesopotamia, the Egypt of the pharaohs, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, the empire of Alexander the Great, and of the Caesars and Rome. In the modern world nation after nation rose to eminence: Venice, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Britain. They bestrode the narrow world like a colossus, then they faded, weary and spent. The faith of Abraham, some four thousand years old, continues to flourish, whether as Judaism, Christianity or Islam, looking as young as it ever did, having defied the predictions of centuries of intellectuals who pronounced its imminent demise.

  Religion and science, the heritages respectively of Jerusalem and Athens, products of the twin hemispheres of the human brain, must now join together to protect the world that has been entrusted to our safekeeping, honouring our covenant with nature and nature’s God – the God who is the music beneath the noise; the Being at the heart of being, whose still small voice we can still hear if we learn to create a silence in the soul; the God who, whether or not we have faith in him, never loses faith in us.

  Epilogue: Letter to a Scientific Atheist

  Dear Professor,

  If you have followed me thus far, you will know I see science as one of the two greatest achievements of the human mind. Its achievements in the past century have been frankly astonishing, revealing a universe on the macro- and micro-scale almost beyond comprehension in its intricacy, detail, variety and complexity, from the universe of a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars, to the human body, containing a hundred trillion cells, each with a double copy of the human genome with 3.1 billion letters, each enough, if transcribed, to fill a sizeable library of five thousand books.

  How right Newton was when he said, ‘I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’1 We have seen a little more of the ocean since then, and we have only the dimmest intuition of what we might still discover as Newton’s heirs voyage yet further across strange seas of thought.

  Science fulfils three functions that I see as central to the Abrahamic faith. It diminishes human ignorance. It increases human power. And it exemplifies the fact that we are in God’s image. God wants us to know and understand. He wants us to exercise responsible freedom. And he wants us to use the intellectual gifts he gave us. These are not reasons why scientists should become religious. They are reasons why religious people should respect scientists.

  Yet with knowledge comes power, and with power, responsibility; and we know enough from history to be reasonably sure that responsibility is best exercised when diffused, when thoughtful minds from different disciplines and perspectives engage in respectful conversation as to how best to navigate our way as we travel to that one remaining undiscovered country called the future, unknown because unknowable, unknowable because we who make it are free.

  My aim in writing this book has not been to convince you. As a Jew I do not believe we are called on to convert anyone. Besides which I come from a religious tradition whose canonical texts are all anthologies of arguments, and which coined the phrase ‘arguments for the sake of heaven’. I recall the public conversation I had with the secular Israeli novelist Amos Oz, who began by saying, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to agree with Rabbi Sacks about everything – but then, on most things I don’t agree with myself.’ (The other typically Jewish remark I cherish is Sidney Morganbesser’s. In reply to the theological question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ he said, ‘And if there were nothing, you’d also complain!’)

  I have tried simply to show you that religious faith is not absurd, that it does not involve suspension of our critical faculties, that it does not and should not seek to inhibit the free pursuit of science, that it does not rest on contradiction and paradox, that it does not force us to accept suffering as God’s will for the world, and that it does not ask us to believe six impossible things before breakfast. It involves a mode of engagement with the world significantly different from that of science, but not incompatible with it. Least of all does it presume to tell scientists when they are right and when they are wrong. That is a scientific enterprise to be performed by scientific methodologies.

  I do not regard atheism as an untenable stance towards the world. I have known some of the great atheists of our time, admired them deeply, a
nd – as I hope I have shown in one or two places in this book – learned much from them, not least about religion itself. We disagreed, but I would not wish to live in a world in which people did not disagree. Disagreement is how knowledge grows. Living with disagreement is how we grow.

  Yet I am troubled by the rancour that has entered the debate in recent years. We seem to have moved into an era of extreme and angry voices, of vituperative atheists and militant religious extremists, of people who deny the world of the spirit and those who challenge our very freedom, a clash of fundamentalisms that share a refusal to listen openly and intelligently to voices opposed to their own. If carried further, the result will be a world in which, to take Matthew Arnold’s words from ‘Dover Beach’, there is

  neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  We can do better than that, even if there are fundamentals on which we disagree.

  We are at the end of one chapter of history and are beginning to write the next with no idea of what kind of chapter it will be. We know this, that the end of the Cold War did not bring about the global spread of liberal democracy, the conquest of tyranny in the name of human rights, a greater equality within and between societies, or greater tolerance between conflicting views of the world.

  The new communications technologies are changing almost everything we knew and not so long ago took for granted: the nation state, the idea of national cultures, the nature of politics and economics, the character of war and the fragility of peace, the structure of human groups, even, possibly, the architecture of the human brain. We suffer from information overload and attention deficit. The Internet makes it hard for us to distinguish between truth and rumour and is the most effective disseminator of paranoia and hatred yet invented.