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

by Jonathan Sacks

  The challenges humanity faces in the twenty-first century are legion: climate change, the destruction of biodiversity, the responsible use of bio- and nano-technology, the extreme vulnerability of the international economy, and the power of spectacular acts of terror to achieve that most sought-after commodity in an information-saturated age: the attention of the eyes of the world. At almost every point, seemingly, we have moved from stable equilibrium to those complex conditions charted by chaos theory, where the beating of a butterfly’s wing can set in motion a tsunami.

  We are in a desecularising and destabilising age. That brings fear, and few things are worse than the politics of fear. It creates a sense of victimhood and a willingness to demonise those with and from whom we differ. One of its symptoms is the new secularism, so much angrier and intolerant than the old. Another is the new religiosity that claims to be, but is not, a continuation of the old. The best thing to do in such circumstances is for moderates of all sides to seek and find common ground.

  In an age of fear, moderation is hard to find and harder to sustain. Who wants to listen to a nuanced argument, when what we want is someone to relieve us from the burden of thought and convince us that we were right all along? So people mock. They blame. They caricature. They demonise. In an age of anxiety, few can hear the still small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God.

  Hence Sam Harris’s argument, mentioned in chapter 13, that the real villains are the religious moderates. Get rid of the moderates, the argument goes, and we can have a fair fight: scientific atheists versus religious Neanderthals. If Sam Harris knew history, he would know the result of all such encounters. The barbarians win. They always do.

  You do not have to be an atheist to fear the new religiosity. I am a believer, and I too fear it. I fear angry people who invoke God and religion to justify their anger at a world that fails to meet their expectations. I fear religion when it leads believers to brand as heretics anyone whose understanding transcends theirs; when it becomes adversarial, turning its followers against the world instead of trying to mend the world; when it becomes involved in partisan politics, dividing where it ought to unite; and when it leads to tyrannical or totalitarian societies where barbaric punishments are exacted and human rights denied.

  There is a difference between righteousness and self-righteousness. The righteous are humble, the self-righteous are proud. The righteous understand doubt, the self-righteous only certainty. The righteous see the good in people, the self-righteous only the bad. The righteous leave you feeling enlarged, the self-righteous make you feel small. It is easy enough to befriend the former and avoid the latter.

  We need moderates, that is, people who understand that there can be a clash of right and right, not just right and wrong. We need people capable of understanding cognitive pluralism, that is, that there is more than one way of looking at the world. We need people who can listen to views not their own without feeling threatened. We need people with humility.

  That is why I ask for your understanding. E. O. Wilson wrote his lovely little book about nature conservation, The Creation, as a series of open letters to a Southern Baptist pastor. He explains why:

  Because religion and science are the two most powerful forces in the world today, including especially the United States. If religion and science could be united on the common ground of biological conservation, the problem would soon be solved.2

  Speaking personally, I do not think any real problems are soon solved. The way is always long and hard. But the only way is together. Religion and science, believer and sceptic, agnostic and atheist. For, whatever our view of God, our humanity is at stake, and our future, and how that will affect our grandchildren not yet born.

  Religion and science share much, but in particular they share faith. This sounds odd. After all, Richard Dawkins is on record as saying:

  I think a case can be made that faith, the principled vice of any religion, is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith is a great cop out.3

  But that cannot be the full story. Listen to Max Planck, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist and founder of quantum theory:

  Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realises that over the entrance to the gates of the Temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.4

  Next, Einstein:

  But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.5

  Finally this by Friedrich Nietzsche:

  It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests – that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.6

  Clearly Dawkins means something different by ‘faith’ than do the others. He thinks of faith as a refusal to ask questions. But faith as Planck, Einstein and Nietzsche understood it is the opposite: the courage and principled determination to go on asking questions despite the fact that there is no easy or immediate answer.

  Faith has driven the scientific and religious imaginations along their different paths, but with the same basic refusal to rest content with what we know – with the same non-rational but not irrational willingness to travel to an unknown destination beyond the visible horizon, to attempt dimly to discern an order beneath the seeming chaos, to hear the music beneath the noise.

  It is that courage to begin a journey not knowing where it will lead but confident that it will lead somewhere, that there really is a destination, an order, a faint but genuine melody, that is the faith not only of the scientist but of Abraham himself who heard a voice telling him to leave his land, his birthplace and his father’s house, and did so, confident that the voice was not an illusion and the destination not a no-man’s-land.

  That restless faith, that sacred discontent, that principled iconoclasm, has driven the West to achieve what it has achieved. It is not a cultural universal. Many cultures, having achieved order, have not sought to move ever forwards. The truth is that most religious expressions in the history of humanity have been intensely conservative – here we stand and here we stay. God or the gods have been seen as endorsing the inevitability of the status quo.

  The God of Abraham, the voice of the world-that-is-not-yet-but-ought-to-be, the God whose name (‘I will be what I will be’) means the unknowability of the future in a world constituted by freedom, is what scientists call a singularity, a one-off, a unique and world-changing event. And we, whether we are religious or not, are in some sense his heirs.

  What might that mean, for us, here, now? Oddly enough, the Bible tells us very little about Abraham that might explain why he was chosen for the mission he undertook. It does not call him righteous, as it does in the case of Noah. It does not portray him as a miracle worker, as it does Moses. The only place in the Bible to explain why Abraham was chosen is this verse:

  For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just.

  This tells us three things about what it is to be an heir of Abraham. First, it means that we are the guardians of our children’s future. We must ensure that they have a world to inherit. Today that means political, economic and environmental sustainability.

  Second, education – directing our children and our household after us – is a sacred task. Teach children to love
, and they will have hope. Teach them to hate, and they will have only anger and the desire for revenge. Thinking about the past leads to war. Thinking about the future helps us to make peace.

  Third, how do you keep the way of the Lord? By doing what is right and just. That is the test. If religious people do what is right and just, they are keeping the way. If they do not, then somehow they have lost their way.

  I think we can agree on those principles whether we believe in the Lord or not.

  In 1779 the German Enlightenment philosopher and art critic Gotthold Lessing wrote a play, Nathan the Wise, that neatly encapsulates the problem of religious conflict and its solution in a way that might be extended to the argument between believer and sceptic.

  The play is set in the twelfth century in the Middle East. The Muslim Sultan Saladin has won a victory against the Crusaders, but it has cost him a great deal and there is an uneasy truce in Jerusalem, with Muslims, Christians and Jews all eyeing one another with suspicion.

  He summons Nathan, a leading Jewish merchant, known for his wisdom. ‘Your reputation for wisdom is great,’ says the Sultan. ‘The great religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all contradict one another. They cannot all be true. Tell me then, which is best?’

  Nathan recognises the trap immediately. If he says Judaism, he insults the Sultan. If he says Islam, he denies his own faith. If he says Christianity, he offends both. Nathan therefore does the Jewish thing. He tells a story.

  There was once, he says, a man who possessed a priceless ring. Its stone was a lustrous opal that refracted light into a hundred colours. But it also had the mysterious power to make its wearer beloved of God and of man. The man passed the ring on to his most cherished son, and so it was handed down, generation after generation.

  Finally it was inherited by a man who had three sons, each of whom he loved equally. Unable to choose between them, he secretly commissioned a jeweller to make two exact copies of the ring. On his deathbed, he blessed each son separately, and gave each a ring. Each son believed that he alone possessed the authentic ring.

  The man died. After the funeral, one after the other of the sons claimed to be the one to whom their father had entrusted his most precious possession, the ring. There seemed no way of resolving the argument because no one could tell which was the original ring. All three were indistinguishable.

  Eventually they brought the case before a judge, who heard the story and the history, and examined the rings. ‘The authentic ring’, said the judge in his verdict, ‘had the power to make its wearer beloved of God and of man. There is therefore only one way each of you will know whether you have the genuine ring, and that is so to act as to become beloved of God and of man.’

  ‘Bravo,’ said the Sultan to Nathan, and let him go in peace.

  Too simple, perhaps, too innocent an example of Enlightenment optimism. But it contains a truth. For if we believe in the God of Abraham, we know we cannot fully know God. We can merely see the effects of his acts. And that surely is true of the children of Abraham. We can see how, given their beliefs, people behave.

  If they love and forgive, if they are open to others, if they respect their opponents as well as honouring their fellow believers, if they work for a better world by becoming guardians of the heritages of nature and culture, if they care about the future our grandchildren will inherit but we will not live to see, then they will be beloved of their fellow humans, and they will become true ambassadors of the God who loves those who perform acts of love.

  That surely is an act of faith on which religion and science can agree. Let us join hands and build a more hopeful future.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Albert Einstein, ‘Science, philosophy and religion’ (1940), in Albert Einstein and Alice Calaprice, The Quotable Einstein, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996.

  2. See Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, New York, Viking, 2008.

  3. See, for example, Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, New York, HarperCollins, 2010. On the difference, see Jonathan Sacks, From Optimism to Hope: Thoughts for the Day, London, Continuum, 2004.

  4. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, Berkeley, University of California, 1993, p. 166.

  5. Ibid., p. 167. Pindar, Pythian Odes, IV: 263–9.

  6. T. S. Eliot, ‘What is a classic?’ in Frank Kermode (ed.), Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p. 130.

  7. Williams, Shame and Necessity, p. 167.

  8. Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, London, Halban Publishers, 2007, p. 110.

  1. The Meaning-Seeking Animal

  1. Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, New York, Dell Publishers, 1954, p. 11.

  2. Sigmund Freud and James Strachey, Civilization and Its Discontents, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 2005, p. 76.

  3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914–16, 2nd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1979, p. 74e.

  4. Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, London, Faber and Faber, 1993, Act 2, scene 7.

  5. Thomas Nagel, a secular philosopher, puts it well. In response to those who say that the universe exists merely because it exists, he writes, ‘To me, it has always seemed an evasion. It requires that we leave the largest question unanswered – in fact, that we leave it unasked, because there is no such question. But there is: it is the question “What am I doing here?” and it doesn’t go away when science replaces a religious worldview.’ Thomas Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002–2008, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 8.

  6. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, New York, Vintage, 1972, p. 160.

  7. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, New York, Basic, 1977, pp. 154–5.

  8. Bertrand Russell, ‘A Free Man’s Worship’, in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, London, Routledge Classics, 2009, p. 39.

  9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, London, 1922, 6.41.

  10. Joseph Heller, Good as Gold, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1979, p. 74.

  11. See Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1953.

  12. See, for example, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980.

  13. See Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, New York, Random House, 2007.

  14. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1984, p. 33.

  15. Ibid., p. 86.

  16. Viktor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, New York, Vintage, 1986, p. 104.

  17. Ibid., p. 107.

  18. Ibid., p. 13.

  19. Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 5b; Nedarim 7b; Sanhedrin 95a.

  20. Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility, New York, Schocken, 2005.

  21. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self, Louisville, KY, Westminster John Knox Press, 1999, p. 126.

  22. Ibid., p. 94.

  2. In Two Minds

  1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 251.

  2. Martin Luther King and Susan Carson, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr, Advocate of the Social Gospel: September 1948 – March 1963, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007, p. 108.

  3. William Blake, letter to Thomas Butt, 22 November 1802, quoted in Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), The Letters of William Blake, London, Rupert Hart Davis, 1956, p. 79.

  4. See Derrick De Kerckhove and Charles J. Lumsden, The Alphabet and the Brain: The Lateralization of Writing, Berlin, Springer-Verlag, 1988; Robert Ornstein, The Right Mind: Making Sense of the Hemispheres, New York
, Harcourt Brace, 1997, pp. 26–42; Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 276–9.

  5. E. M. Forster, Howards End, New York, Signet Classics, 2007, ch. 33.

  6. See David Diringer, Writing, London, Thames and Hudson, 1962; The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind, London, Hutchinson, 1968; The Story of the Aleph Beth, New York, Yoseloff, 1958; Joseph Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet: An Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography, Jerusalem, Magnes, Hebrew University, 1982; David Sacks, The Alphabet: Unravelling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z, London, Hutchinson, 2003. See also David Shlain’s fascinating The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image, New York, Viking, 1998.

  7. Nicholas G. Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, London, Atlantic, 2010; Richard Watson, Future Minds: How the Digital Age Is Changing Our Minds, Why This Matters, and What We Can Do About It, London, Nicholas Brealey Publishers, 2010; Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, New York, Penguin, 2010. Also see John G. Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, New York, Basic, 2008.

  8. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London, Routledge, 2002.

  9. Mishnah, Berakhot 1:1.

  10. James Le Fanu, Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, London, HarperPress, 2009.

  11. Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, New York, Viking, 2007. For a moving description of how one woman recovered full functions after a massive stroke that immobilised her entire left brain, see Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, New York, Viking, 2008.