The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
Page 36
Pagels, Elaine H., The Gnostic Gospels, New York, Random House, 1979.
Pagels, Elaine H., The Origin of Satan, New York, Random House, 1995.
Reich, Walter, Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, Washington, DC, Woodrow Wilson Center, 1998.
Schwartz, Regina M., The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Stern, Jessica, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, New York, Ecco, 2003.
Talmon, J. L., The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, New York, Praeger, 1960.
Volf, Miroslav, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, Nashville, TN, Abingdon, 1996.
Volkan, Vamik D., The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From Clinical Practice to International Relationships, Northvale, NJ, J. Aronson, 1988.
14. Why God?
COSMOLOGY
Barrow, John D., and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986.
Davies, P. C. W., The Cosmic Blueprint, New York, Unwin Paperbacks, 1989.
Davies, P. C. W., God and the New Physics, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1983.
Davies, P. C. W., The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
Davies, P. C. W., The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World, New York, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Rees, Martin J., Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe, New York, Basic, 2000.
Rees, Martin J., Our Cosmic Habitat, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2003.
Schroeder, Gerald L., Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery of Harmony between Modern Science and the Bible, New York, Bantam, 1990.
Schroeder, Gerald L., God According to God: A Physicist Proves We’ve Been Wrong about God All Along, New York, HarperOne, 2009.
Schroeder, Gerald L., The Hidden Face of God: How Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth, New York, Free Press, 2001.
Schroeder, Gerald L., The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom, New York, Free Press, 1997.
Spitzer, Robert J., New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy, Grand Rapids, MI, Eerdmans, 2010.
SOCIOLOGY
Froese, Paul, and Christopher Bader, America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God – & What That Says about Us, New York, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Putnam, Robert D., Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Putnam, Robert D., David E. Campbell, and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2010.
Roof, Wade Clark, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation, San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.
Roof, Wade Clark, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1999.
Stout, Jeffrey, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2010.
Wuthnow, Robert, Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1991.
Wuthnow, Robert, Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009.
Wuthnow, Robert, Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America’s New Quest for Community, New York, Free Press, 1994.
CONTEMPORARY REVIVAL OF RELIGION
Berger, Peter L., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, Washington, DC, Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999.
Berger, Peter L., Grace Davie, and Effie Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe?: A Theme and Variations, Surrey, UK, Ashgate, 2008.
Casanova, José, Public Religions in the Modern World, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Juergensmeyer, Mark, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to Al Qaeda, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008.
Lilla, Mark, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
Micklethwait, John, and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World, New York, Penguin, 2009.
Norris, Pippa, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Thomas, Scott, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-first Century, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Appendix: Jewish Sources on Creation, the Age of the Universe and Evolution
This book is not specifically about Jewish faith, but for Jewish readers and others interested in how Judaism confronted some of the issues raised in the book, I include here some of the Jewish sources on science, creation and evolution that guided me in the presentation of the argument.
The Religious Importance of Studying Science
On seeing one of the sages of the nations of the world, one makes the following blessing: ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has given of his wisdom to mortal human beings.’
Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 58a
If someone says to you, ‘There is wisdom among the nations of the world,’ believe it.
Midrash Eichah Rabbati 2:13
He who knows how to calculate the cycles and planetary courses, but does not, of him Scripture says, but they regard not the work of the Lord, neither have they considered the operation of his hands (Isaiah 5:12). How do we know that it is one’s duty to calculate the cycles and planetary courses? Because it is written, for this is your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the peoples (Deuteronomy 4:6). What wisdom and understanding is in the sight of the peoples? Say, that is the science of cycles and planets.
Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 75a
What is the way that leads to the love and awe of God? When someone contemplates His great and wondrous works and creatures, and from them obtains a glimpse of His wisdom which is incomparable and infinite, he will immediately love Him, praise Him, glorify Him, and long with an exceeding longing to know His great name, as David said My soul thirsts for God, for the living God (Psalm 42:3). And when he ponders these matters, he will recoil affrighted and realise that he is a small creature, lowly and obscure, endowed with slight and slender intelligence, standing in the presence of Him who is perfect in knowledge. And so David said, When I consider your heavens the work of your fingers … what is man that you are mindful of him? (Psalm 8:4–5).
Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah 2:2
Consequently, he who wishes to attain to human perfection must therefore first study logic, next the various branches of mathematics in their proper order, then physics, and lastly metaphysics.
Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, Book I, 34
Comment: The sages attached religious dignity and integrity to science, both as human wisdom and as an insight into the divine wisdom evident in the cosmos. The Babylonian Talmud sees the study of astronomy, for those who are capable of it, as a religious duty. Maimonides sees science as a way to the love and awe of God.
Literal and Non-Literal Readings of the Bible
The sages said, ‘Whoever translates a verse literally is a liar’ (Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 49a), expressing their dissent from those who disbelieved in the Oral Law and read the biblical text without reference to authoritative tradition. However, they also said (Shabbat 63a) that ‘a text does not depart from its plain sense’. Beginning with Rav Saadia Gaon, medieval Jewish thinkers formulated general principles for when not to read a text literally.
And so I declare, first of all, that it is a well-known fact that every statement in the Bible is to be understood in its literal sense except those
that cannot be so construed for one of the following four reasons: it may, for example, either be rejected by the observation of the senses … or else the literal sense may be negated by reason.
Saadia Gaon, Sefer Emunot ve-Deot, Book VII
Comment: The view of Saadia (882–942), shared by all the medieval philosophers, is that when a biblical text is incompatible with either reason or observation, that is sufficient evidence that it is to be read figuratively, allegorically, poetically or in some other way. Reason and observation, later to become the methodology of science, were regarded as reliable bases of knowledge, and it was taken as axiomatic that the Torah could not conflict with established truth.
Maimonides (1135–1204) repeatedly states that the creation narrative in Genesis 1 is not to be taken literally.
Now, on the one hand, the subject of creation is very important, but on the other hand, our ability to understand these concepts is very limited. Therefore, God described these profound concepts, which His Divine wisdom found necessary to communicate to us, using allegories, metaphors, and imagery. The sages put it succinctly, ‘It is impossible to communicate to man the stupendous immensity of the creation of the universe. Therefore, the Torah simply says, In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth (Genesis 1:1). But they pointed out that the subject is a deep mystery, as Solomon said, It is elusive and exceedingly deep; who can discover it? (Ecclesiastes 7:24). It has been outlined in metaphors so that the masses can understand it according to their mental capacity, while the educated take it in a different sense.
Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, Introduction
The account given in Scripture of the creation is not, as is generally believed, intended to be in all its parts literal … The literal meaning of the words might lead us to conceive corrupt ideas and to form false opinions about God, or even entirely to abandon and reject the principles of our faith. It is therefore right to abstain and refrain from examining this subject superficially and unscientifically … It is, however, right that we should examine the Scriptural texts by the intellect, after having acquired a knowledge of demonstrative science, and of the true hidden meaning of prophecies.
Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, Book II, 29
Comment: Maimonides holds that the entire creation narrative is an allegory not to be understood literally. Its true meaning is disclosed by the findings of natural science, though we will never be fully able to unravel its secrets. Maimonides elsewhere (Guide, Book III, 21) makes a distinction, very similar to that developed in the early eighteenth century by Giambattista Vico, that only the maker of a thing can fully understand it. To that extent, he would almost certainly have concurred that there will always be a margin of mystery when it comes to the understanding of the natural world and how it came into being.
These hesitations [in accepting an evolutionary view of the development of life] have nothing to do with any difficulty in reconciling the verses of Torah or other traditional texts with an evolutionary standpoint. Nothing is easier than this. Everyone knows that here, if anywhere, is the realm of parable, allegory and allusion. In these most profound matters people are willing to accept that the true meaning lies on the mystical plane, far above what is apparent to the superficial eye.
Rabbi Abraham Kook, Orot Ha-Kodesh, 559
Comment: Rabbi Kook takes it as obvious that the creation account is not to be read literally. The resistances to contemporary science lie elsewhere.
The Age of the Universe
Heaven forbid that there should be anything in the Bible to contradict that which is manifest or proved … The question of eternity and creation is obscure, whilst the arguments are evenly balanced … If, after all, a believer in the Law finds himself compelled to admit an eternal matter and the existence of many worlds prior to this one, this would not impair his belief that this world was created at a certain epoch.
Judah Halevi, Kuzari, I:67
We do not reject the eternity of the universe because certain passages in Scripture confirm the creation, for such passages are not more numerous than those in which God is represented as a corporeal being, nor is it impossible or difficult to find for them a suitable interpretation. We might have explained them in the same manner as we did in respect to the incorporeality of God. We should perhaps have had an easier task in showing that the Scriptural passages referred to are in harmony with the theory of the eternity of the universe if we accepted this idea, than we had in explaining the anthropomorphisms in the Bible when we rejected the idea that God is corporeal.
Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, Book II, 25
Comment: Both philosophers, Judah Halevi (1075–1141) and Maimonides, who on many other matters held diametrically opposite views, agreed that, were the eternity of the universe proved, it would not constitute an objection to their faith. Maimonides says that, had Aristotle succeeded in proving the eternity of the universe, he would have had no difficulty in reinterpreting Genesis 1. In fact, however, he maintained that Aristotle had not proved the point. He believed that the current state of science in his day, the twelfth century, was inconclusive on the matter, and therefore he saw no reason to modify his view that the universe had an origin in time. The correctness of this view was eventually established by Penzias and Wilson in 1964.
Rabbi Judah bar Simon said: it does not say, ‘It was evening,’ but ‘And it was evening.’ Hence we derive that there was a time-system prior to this.
Rabbi Abbahu said: This teaches us that God created worlds and destroyed them, saying, ‘This one pleases me; those did not please me.’
Rabbi Pinhas said, Rabbi Abbahu derives this from the verse, ‘And God saw all that He had made, and behold it was very good,’ as if to say, ‘This one pleases me, those others did not please me.’
Genesis Rabbah 3:7
Comment: In this early rabbinic passage, Rabbi Judah infers from the word ‘and’, said of the first day of creation, that there must have been something prior to which it is added. Thus there were universes before this. Rabbi Abbahu, as understood by Rabbi Pinhas, derives the same principle from the Bible’s use of the word ‘behold’, implying a sense of surprise. The implication is that God had previously created universes that were not ‘very good’. This classic rabbinic exposition became an important source for Jewish thinkers in the Middle Ages faced with the challenge of Aristotle’s belief in the eternity of matter, like Judah Halevi and Maimonides above.
There were 974 generations before Adam.
Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 88b
Comment: On the basis of Proverbs 8, the rabbis said that the Torah preceded the creation of the world, and that God created the universe according to its blueprint. It existed for a thousand generations before it moved from heaven to Earth. Since there were twenty-six generations between Adam and Moses, it follows that there were 974 generations before Adam. This and the previous passage were invoked by Rabbi Israel Lipschitz (1782–1860) to show how new teachings about the age of the Earth, and the discovery of extinct species, vindicated ancient rabbinic teaching.
We are enabled to appreciate to the full the wonderful accuracy of our holy Torah when we see that this secret doctrine, handed down by word of mouth for so long, and revealed to us by the sages of the Kabbala many centuries ago, has been borne out in the clearest possible manner by the science of our generation.
The questing spirit of man, probing and delving into the recesses of the Earth, in the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Rocky Mountains in America and the Himalayas, has found them to be formed of mighty layers of rock lying upon one another in amazing and chaotic formations, explicable only in terms of revolutionary transformations of the Earth’s surface.
Probing still further, deep below the Earth’s surface, geologists have found four distinct layers of rock, and between the layers fossilised remains of creatures; those in the lower layers being of monstrous size and structure, while those in the higher and more recent layers being progressively sm
aller in size but incomparably more refined in structure and form.
Further, they found in Siberia in 1807, under the eternal ice of those regions, a monstrous species of elephant, some three or four times larger than those found at the present day; the skeleton may still be seen in the Zoological Museum at St Petersburg. Since that icy region is incapable of supporting any species of elephant, we must conclude either that the creature was swept there as a result of some cosmic upheaval, or that in some previous epoch the climate of Siberia had been warm enough to support elephants.
Similarly, fossilised remains of sea creatures have been found within the recesses of the highest mountains, and scientists have calculated that of every 78 species found in the Earth, 48 are species which are no longer found in our present epoch.
We know, too, of the remains of a giant creature discovered deep in the Earth near Baltimore, 17 ft long and 11 ft high, specimens of which have also been found in Europe, and which has been given the name ‘mammoth’. Another giant creature whose fossilised remains have been found is the iguanodon, which stood 15 ft high and whose length extended to 90 ft. From its internal structure scientists have concluded that it was herbivorous. Another is the megalosaurus, which was slightly smaller than the iguanodon, but which was carnivorous.
From all this, we can see that all the Kabbalists have told us for so many centuries about the fourfold destruction and renewal of the Earth has found its clearest possible confirmation in our time.
And if we know how to look, we shall see that the holy Torah itself hints at these facts in its opening verses. The first verse refers to the original act of creation, while the Earth was void and waste refers to the epochs of upheaval and destruction which preceded our present age. The Torah passes over the intervening epochs in silence, because they have no immediate relevance to us; but the spirit of God which was moving over the face of the waters denotes the spirit of life which was, so to speak, waiting to re-enter the creation to be the vehicle of the glory of God. The ascending scale of being of the seven days of creation thus reflects the ascending scale of the great cosmic cycle …