Cartoon from diaryofanalevelstudent.wordpress.com

[The last installment for Chapter 3 of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ book—a most interesting read, that’s why I bother to type its long chapters.  If you haven’t done so yet, please secure a copy of his book; downloadable on kindle from amazon.com.  Also, if you haven’t done so yet, read the previous posts leading to this one.  We will feature only one more chapter —the concluding one; what else is written between the beginning and the end, you have to find out for yourself when you buy your copy of the book.   Reformatted for this post, image added.—Admin1.]

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  The third story is simply told.  We still do not know what it was about the seventeenth century that led to the rise of experimental science.  Some claim it was religion: Protestantism in general or Calvinism in particular.  Others claim it was the waning of religion.  Some say it was an attempt to repair the Fall of man, who had been exiled from eden for wrongly eating of the tree of knowledge.  Some say it was the attempt to build an Earthly paradise by the use of purely secular reason.  Stephen Toulmin has argued, convincingly in my view, that it was the impact of the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that led figures like Descartes and Newton to seek certainty on the basis of a structure of knowledge that did not rest on dogmatic foundations.

One way or another, first science, then philosophy, declared their independence from theology and the great arch stretching from Jerusalem to Athens began to crumble.

• First came the seventeenth-century realisation that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.
• Then came the development of a mechanistic science that sought explanations in terms of prior causes, not ultimate purposes.

Then came the eighteenth-century philosophical assault, by Hume and Kant, on the philosophical arguments for the existence of God.  Hume pointed up the weakness of the argument from design.  Kant refuted the ontological argument.  

• Then came the nineteenth century and Darwin.  This was, on the face of it, the most crushing blow of all, because it seemed to show that the entire emergence of life was the result of a process that was blind.

We think of these as shaking the religious worldview of the Bible, but in fact they were something else entirely.  

• For it was the Greeks who saw the Earth as the centre of the celestial spheres.
•  It was Aristotle who saw purposes as causes.  
• It was Cicero who formulated the argument from design.  
• It was the Athenian philosophers who believed that there are philosophical proofs for the existence of God.  

The Hebrew Bible never thought in these terms.  The heavens proclaim the glory of God; they do not prove the existence of God.  All that breathes praises its Creator; it does not furnish philosophical verification of a Creator.  In the Bible, people talk to God, not about God.  The Hebrew word da’at, usually translated as ‘knowledge’, does not mean knowledge at all in the Greek sense, as a form of cognition.  It means intimacy, relationship, the touch of soul and soul.  God, for the Bible, is not to be found in nature for God transcends nature, as do we whenever we exercise our freedom.  In Hebrew the word for universe, olam, is semantically related to the word ‘hidden’, ne’elam.  God is present in nature but in a hidden way.  

So the shaking of the foundations that took place between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries was, in reality, the undermining and eclipse of Greek rationalist tradition, not of the Judaic basis of faith itself, which, while respecting and honouring science as a form of divine wisdom, never allied itself to one particular scientific tradition and specifically distanced itself from certain aspects of Greek culture.  

That means that the original basis of Abrahamic monotheism remains, whatever the state of science.  For religious knowledge as understood by the Hebrew Bible is not to be construed as the model of philosophy and science, both left-brain activities.  God is to be found in relationship, and in the meanings we construct when, out of our experience of the presence of God in our lives, we create bonds of loyalty and mutual responsibility known as covenants.  People have sought in the religious life the kind of certainty that belongs to philosophy and science.  But it is not to be found. Between God and man there is moral loyalty, not scientific certainty.

Construe knowledge on the basis of science and, with the best will in the world, you will discover at best only one aspect of God, the aspect the Hebrew Bible calls Elokim, the impersonal God of creation as opposed to the personal God of revelation.

 This is Spinoza’s and Einstein’s God, and they were indeed two profoundly religious individuals — Novalis called Spinoza a ‘God-intoxicated man’.  They could see God in the universe, and find awe at the universe’s complexity and law-governed order.  What they could not conceive was God as the consecration of the personal, the Divinity that underwrites our humanity.  

Elokim, the God of creation whose signature we can read in the natural world, is common ground between the God of Aristotle and the God of Abraham.  These two great conceptions came together for almost seventeen centuries in Christianity and for a short period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries in Islam (Averroes) and Judaism (Maimonides).  But since the seventeenth century science and religion have gone their separate ways and the old synthesis no longer seems to hold.  

But most of the Bible is about another face of God, the one turned to us in love, known in the Bible by the four-letter name that, because of its holiness, Jews call Hashem, the name’.  This aspect of God is found in relationship, in the face of the human other that carries the trace of the divine Other.  We should look for the divine presence in compassion, generosity, kindness, understanding, forgiveness, the opening of soul to soul.  We create space for God by feeding the hungry, healing the sick, housing the homeless and fighting for justice.  God lives in the right atmosphere of the brain, in empathy and interpersonal understanding, in relationships etched with the charisma of grace, not subject and object, command and control, dominance and submission.  

Faith is a relationship in which we become God’s partners in the work of love.  The phrase sounds absurd.  How can an omniscient, omnipotent God need a partner?  There is, surely, nothing he cannot do on his own.  But this is a left-brain question.  The right-brain answer is that there is one thing God cannot do on his own, namely have a relationship.  God on his own cannot live within the free human heart.  Faith is a relationship of intersubjectivity, the meeting point of our subjectivity with the subjectivity, the inwardness, of God.  God is the personal reality of otherness.  Religion is the redemption of solitude.  

Faith is not a form of ‘knowing’ in the sense in which that word is used in science and philosophy.  It is, in the Bible, a mode of listening.  The supreme expression of Jewish faith, usually translated as ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one’ (Deuteronomy 6:4), really means ‘Listen, O Israel’.  Listening is an existential act of encounter, a way of hearing the person beneath the words, the music beneath the noise.  Freud, who disliked religion and abandoned his Judaism, was nonetheless Jewish enough to invent, in psychoanalysis, the ‘listening cure’; listening as the healing of the soul.  

It may be that we are already embarked on a fourth story.  Again, for me it began with an episode in Cambridge.  I had been taking part in a debate on religion and science.  this was just before the appearance of the string of books by the new atheists, and at the time I thought the subject was so passé that I assumed only a handful of people would turn up.  To my surprise I discovered that the organisers had taken the largest auditorium in the university and it was filled to overflowing.  

My opponent, the professor of the history of science, the late Peter Lipton, was generous and broad-minded.  we found ourselves agreeing on almost everything — so much so the chair of proceedings, Lord Robert Winston, Britain’s most famous television scientist and a deeply religious Jew, said after about half an ahour, ‘In that case, I’m going to disagree with both of you.’  It was a good-natured and open conversation and left most of us feeling that religion and science, far from being opposed, were on the same side of the table, using their distinctive methods to help us better understand humanity, nature and our place in the scheme of things.  

As we were leaving, a stranger came up to me, gentle and unassuming, and said, ‘I’ve just written a book that I think you might find interesting.  If I may, I’ll send it to you.’   I thanked him and some days later the book arrived.  It was called Just Six Numbers, and with a shock of recognition I realised who the stranger was;  Sir Martin, now Lord, Rees, Astronomer Royal, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and President of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest and most famous scientific association.  Sir Martin was, in other words, Britain’s most distinguished scientist.  

The thesis of the book was that there are six mathematical constants that determine the physical shape of the universe.  Had any one of them been even slightly different, the unvierse as we know it would not exist.  Nor would life.  It was my first glimpse into the new cosmology and the string of recent discoveries of how improbably our existence actually is.  James Le Fanu, in his 2009 book Why Us?, adds to this a slew of new findings in neuroscience and genetics to suggest that we are on the brink of  a paradigm shift that will overturn the scientific materialism of the past two centuries:

The new paradigm must also lead to a renewed interest in and sympathy for religion in its broadest sense, as a means of expressing wonder at the ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’ of the natural world.  It is not the least of the ironies of the New Genetics and the Decade of the Brain that they have vindicated the two main impetuses to religious belief — the non-material reality of the human soul and the beauty and diversity of the living world — while confounding the principle tenets of materialism: that Darwin’s ‘reason for everything’ explains the natural world and our origins, and that life can be ‘reduced’ to the chemical genes, the mind to the physical brain.

There may be, in other words, a new synthesis in the making.  It will be very unlike the Greek-thought-world of the medieval scholastics with its emphasis on changelessness and harmony.  Instead it will speak about the emergence of order, the distribution of intelligence and information processing, the nature of self-organising complexity, the way individuals display a collective intelligence that is a property of groups, not just the individuals that comprise them, the dynamic of evolving systems and what leads some to equilibrium, others to chaos.  Out of this will emerge new metaphors of nature and humanity, flourishing and completeness.  Right-brain thinking may reappear, even in the world of science, after its eclipse since the seventeenth century.  Right and left may be closer alignment than they have been.  I say more on the new science in chapters 11 and 14.

What I have sought to show in this chapter, however, is that there is a significant history in the Western experience of God and religion on the one hand, philosophy and science on the other.  They came together in the grand, unique synthesis of Christianity from Paul, through the Church Fathers and the scholastics, to the seventeenth century.  Since then they have been progressively separated, but they may be coming together again in ways we cannot forsee.  There always was, though, an alternative, the road less travelled, adhered to by a tiny people the Jews.

On this view, religion, faith and God are not among the truths discovered by science or philosophy in the Greek and Western mode.  They are about meaning.  Meaning is made and sustained in conversations.  It lives in relationships:  in marriages, families, communities and societies.  It is told in narrative, invoked in prayer, enacted in ritual, encoded in sacred texts, celebrated on holy days and sung in songs of praise.

The left brain, with its linear, atomising and generalising powers, is effective in dealing with things.  It is not best in dealing with people.  It does not understand the inner life of people, their hopes and fears, their aspirations and anxieties.  Religion consecrates our humanity.  In discovering God, singular and alone, our ancestors discovered the human individual, singular and alone.  For the first time in history sanctity was conferred on the human individual as such, regardless of class, caste, colour or creed, as God’s image and likeness, God’s beloved.

Science takes things apart to see how they work.  Religion puts things together to see what they mean.  They speak different languages and use different powers of the brain.  We sometimes fail to see this because of the way the religion of Abraham entered the mainstream consciousness of the West, not in its own language but in the language of the culture that gave birth to science.  Once we recognise their difference we can move on, no longer thinking science and religion as friends who became enemies, but as our unique, bicameral, twin perspective on the difference between things and people, objects and subjects, enabling us to create within a world of blind forces a home for a humanity that is neither blind nor deaf to the beauty of the other as the living trace of the living God.

[This continues the series on our current MUST READ and MUST OWN, featuring Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.  This is the continuation of  Chapter 3: Diverging Paths where Rabbi Sacks narrates his  journey of faith toward Judaism and the Truth it upholds in the Hebrew Scriptures.  But he also gives a perspective to Judaism and Jewish rabbis which/who respect truth and wisdom whatever the source, a value worth emulating by all religionists!

In our Sinaite’s core group just recently, we discussed what has changed in our thinking when we broke away from our former religious beliefs and embraced the Torah and learned from the Jewish Sages.  One significant answer relates to this post:  we have become less judgmental of others of differing religious persuasions; we consider all who are travelling the path to seek to know God better as co-travellers who will eventually arrive at Sinai, the place of divine revelation. . . if they keep seeking with all their heart and mind and soul!

 My free-thinker-non-religious father once wrote “Education is a  shield against the intolerance of the mind.”  In a way he was right; education does widen mental horizons to every kind of information out there . . . but it has been our experience that education is not enough; the will to know truth is a good start, but once truth is known, each person has yet to decide whether to accept it or not, particularly divinely-revealed truth and its source, both of which are questioned because of ‘religious’ intolerance and close-mindedness and the confusion of so much information out there.  Enough said, this is about Rabbi Sacks’ mind-opening perspective-widening book, so let’s get to it.

Please refer to the previous posts if you haven’t already done so.  Reformatting and highlights added, as well as images.—Admin1.]

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The second story began for me in 1993 when I was privileged to receive an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University together with, among others, James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA.  It gave me the opportunity of saying the ancient blessing, coined by Judaism’s sages some two thousand years ago and still to be found in all Jewish prayer books, thanking God for bestowing His wisdom on human beings.  Essentially it is a blessing to be said on seeing a great scientist, although the word ‘scientist’ was not coined until many centuries later, and it reflects a time when religion and science were seen not as adversaries but as respected friends.

I thought hard about that blessing because it is so unexpected.  The Talmud says it is to be said on seeing ‘one of the sages of the nations of the world’.  The sages they were referring to were either Greek or Roman.  Remember that Greeks, under the Seleucid Antiochus IV, had banned the public practice of Judaism.  Centuries later, the Romans had destroyed the Temple and razed Jerusalem.  These were Israel’s enemies, politically, militarily, above all culturally and spiritually.  The Greeks were polytheists.  The Romans had a disturbing tendency to turn caesars into gods.  For the sages to institute a blessing — a religious act of thanksgiving — over their scholars showed a remarkable open-mindedness to wisdom whatever its source.  ‘Accept the truth, whoever says it,’ said Maimonides.  There is religious dignity and integrity to science.

No less remarkable is the way in which the rabbis of the era recognised that when it came to science, their own views might simply be wrong.  There is a talmudic passage — it reads somewhat quaintly nowadays — in which the rabbis are discussing the question of where the sun goes at night.  First they give their own opinion, then they cite the Greek view, that of Ptolemy.  They then conclude, ‘And their view seems more plausible than ours.’  That is the way the Talmud says the story.  They are right.  We are wrong.  End of discussion.

Similarly, on a more religiously sensitive matter, the rabbinic literature records a conversation between Rabbi Judah the Prince, head of the Jewish community in the early third century and Antoninus, a Roman sage, about when the soul enters a child.  Rabbi Judah says, at birth.  Antoninus says, at conception.  The rabbi then astonishingly declares that Antoninus is right.  Thereafter when he repeats the teaching, the rabbis is careful to say, ‘Antoninus taught me this.’  This was a religious attitude to science both open-minded and willing to learn.

Yet I remained puzzled about one of the most curious facts in the intellectual history of Judaism.  The first chapter of Genesis with its momentous simplicity — ‘And God said let there be . . . and there was . . . and God saw that it was good’ –was described by Max Weber and more recently by Peter Berger as the origin of Western rationality.

Image from aviewfromtheright.com

 Unlike all the cosmological myths of the ancient world, there is no clash of the gods and their rivals, no cosmic battles like those of Tiamat and Marduk, Seth and Osiris, Kronos and Zeus.  There is no myth at all.  God speaks and the universe comes into being.  The universe has been stripped of its overlay of mystery and caprice.  It has been, in Weber’s famous word, ‘disenchanted’.

 Genesis 1 is the beginning of the end of mythic imagination.

It made science possible.  No longer was the universe seen as unpredictable.  It was the work of a single, rational creative will.  Nor was it — as were the gods of myths — at best indifferent, at worst actively hostile to human beings.  Genesis spoke of a God who endowed humanity with his image.  Evidently he wanted humans to be, in at least some respect, god-like.  Had we the evidence of Genesis 1 alone, we could have predicted that the people who lived by this book would have become a nation of scientists.

The curious incident is that they did not.  The Greeks did.  Jews knew that they did.  As we have seen, they admired their work and even coined a blessing over its practitioners.  Yet neither in the biblical nor in the early rabbinic age did Jews evince a sustained, widespread, focused interest in science.  It is as if from the outset Jews knew that science — what they called ‘wisdom’ –was one thing, and religion another.

• Science was about natural law, religion about moral law.
• Natural laws are laws that predict and explain, moral laws are laws that command or constrain.
• Science was about things, religion about people and their freely chosen acts.

Having established the preconditions of science, Jews evinced no further interest in it at least until the Middle Ages.

Why then is Genesis 1 there?

1.  The most obvious reason is that it is not a myth but a polemic against myth.  Unlike the gods of myth, God is not part of nature.  He is the author of nature which he created by a free act of will.  By conferring his image on humankind, God gives us freedom of the will.  This generates the entire moral world of the Bible with its vision of the human person as a responsible, choosing moral agent.  Rejecting myth, the Bible discovers freedom.

2.  Second is the insistence on the goodness of the world.  Even times we read that ‘God saw that it was good.’   This too was revolutionary.  Most religions, ancient and modern, have contrasted this world and the next, Earth and heaven, the world of the senses and that of eternity, this life and the afterlife.  Here is chaos, there is order.  Here is suffering, there is its reward.  To a remarkable degree the Hebrew Bible is reticent about life after death and never uses it to reconcile people with their condition on Earth.  The religious drama takes place here.  This world, this life, is where we meet God and either do or fail to do his will.  The universe is good, but humans are free to do evil.  This frames the entire religious drama of humankind.

3.  Third is the orderliness of the universe.  Gone is the mythic mindset of ever-threatening chaos.  The narrative is tightly structured.  For three days God creates domains — light and dark, sea and sky, sea and dry land.  For the next three days he populates those domains with moving things: the sun, moon and stars, fish and birds, land animals and man.

The seventh day, the day of rest, is holy: an enduring symbol of the world at peace with itself and its maker.  The implication is clear.  God creates order; it is man who creates chaos.

Equally radical is the fact that, since God created everything, he is God of everywhere.  For the first time, God and religion are de-territorialised.  There is no longer a god of this place and a god of that; a god of these people as opposed to those.  Abrahamic universalism is born here.  This will prove crucial in the book of Exodus when God intervenes to deliver one nation out of another, what we would call today an international intervention in defence of human rights.  His authority extends, as it were, not only over the Promised Land but also over Egypt.  God is the God of everyone, though not necessarily in the same way.  Unlike Plato, the Hebrew Bible emphasises both the universal and the particular.

It is a worldview of extraordinary simplicity and power.  The buzzing confusion of the polytheistic pantheon has disappeared and the entire universe has been cleared for the drama between the lone God and lonely humanity, who have, as it were, only each other for company.  Nature has been demystified and demythologised.  All Earthly power has been relativised, allowing for the desacralisation of kingship and the eventual secularisation of the political domain.

So Genesis 1, a text that might have been a prelude to science, turns out not to lead in that direction at all.  Its frame of reference is moral and spiritual.

• It is about freedom and order and goodness.
• It is about a God who creates and makes a bing, Homo sapiens, able to create;
• a God who is free and bestows on his most cherished creation the gift of freedom.

Virtually everything that follows in the Bible is about this personal relationship between Creator and creation, at times tender, often tense.  To be sure, from time to time the Hebrew Bible expresses wonder at the divine wisdom within creation — the wisdom tracked by science — but that is not where its interest lies.

I have told this second story to show that there was an alternative to the synthesis that eventually emerged in Christianity, namely the way taken by the Judaism of the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic sages.  It saw science as an autonomous activity with its own dignity.  It was the wisdom of the Greeks, not the gift of the Jews.  Science reveals the wisdom of God in creation, and wisdom is itself the gift God gave humanity when he made us in his image and likeness, which Rashi, the classic Jewish commentator, reads as ‘with the capacity to understand and discern’.

But there is a difference between wisdom and Torah.

• Wisdom tells us how the world is.  Torah tells us how the world ought to be.
• Wisdom is about nature.  Torah is about will.  It is about human freedom and choice and the way we are called on to behave.
• Wisdom is about the world God makes.  Torah is about the world God calls on us to make, honouring others as bearers of God’s image, exercising our freedom in such a way as not to rob others of theirs.

The difference between the two is freedom.  The natural universe is as it is because that is how it is.  The planets are not free int heir movements.  Chemical elements do not choose which way to combine.  Genes do not make decisions.  But we are free; we do choose; we do make decisions.  

If the movements of the planets fail to obey Aristotle’s law of circular motion, that is not because they are disobedient but because Aristotle’s law is wrong.  But if human beings fail to obey the laws against murder, robbery or theft, that is not because there is something wrong with the laws but because there is something wrong with us.  Moral laws are not scientific laws.  They belong to a different world, the human world, the world of freedom, God’s most fraught and fateful gift.  The Hebrew Bible is entirely about this drama of human freedom.  Hence the possibility of admiring science as wisdom while at the same time seeing it as a separate discipline best left to scientists.

[Please read the introduction to this post:   Must Read: The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has his own website at  http://www.rabbisacks.org.  

Reformatted for this post is the whole Introduction that explains what to expect in every chapter; initially I intended to pick out only excerpts but while following the discussion, I just couldn’t stop typing the whole piece!   Please notice as well that the Rabbi being British, uses British spelling of some English words, use of ‘s’ instead of ‘z’ for instance, or ‘ou’ for ‘u’.—Admin1.]

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART ONE   God and the Search for Meaning

1. The Meaning-Seeking Animal
2. In Two Minds
3. Diverging Paths
4. Finding God

PART TWO   Why It Matters
5.  What We Stand to Lose
6.  Human Dignity

7.  The Politics of Freedom

8.  Morality

9.  Relationships

10.  A Meaningful Life

PART THREE   Faith and Its Challenges

11.  Darwin

12.  The Problem of Evil

13.  When Religion Goes Wrong

14.  Why God?

Epilogue:  Letter to a Scientific Atheist

Notes

For Further Reading

Appendix:  Jewish Sources on Creation, the Age of the Universe and Evolution

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INTRODUCTION

If the new atheists are right, you would have to be sad, mad or bad to believe in God and practise a religious faith.  We know that is not so.  Religion has inspired individuals to moral greatness, consecrated their love and helped them to build communities where individuals are cherished and great works of loving kindness are performed.  The Bible first taught the sanctity of life, the dignity of the individual, the imperative of peace and the moral limits of power.

To believe in God, faith and the importance of religious practice does not involve an abdication of the intellect, a silencing of critical faculties, or believing in six impossible things before breakfast.  It does not involve reading Genesis 1 literally.  It does not involve rejecting the findings of science.  I come from a religious tradition where we make a blessing over great scientists regardless of their views on religion.

So what is going on?

Debates about religion and science have been happening periodically since the seventeenth century and they testify to some major crisis in society.

• In the seventeenth century it was the wars of religion that had devastated Europe.
• In the nineteenth century it was the industrial revolution, urbanisation and the impact of the new science, especially Darwin.
• In the 1960s, with the ‘death of God’ debate, it was the delayed impact of two world wars and a move to the liberalisation of morals.

When we come to a major crossroads in history it is only natural to ask who shall guide us as to which path to choose.

• Science speaks with expertise about the future, religion with the authority of the past.
• Science invokes the power of reason, religion the higher power of revelation.

The debate is usually inconclusive and both sides live to fight another day.

The current debate, though, has been waged with more than usual anger and vituperation, and the terms of the conflict have changed.  In the past the danger — and it was a real danger –was a godless society.  That led to four terrifying experiments in history—

• the French Revolution
• Nazi Germany
• the Soviet Union
• and Communist China.

Today the danger is of a radical religiosity combined with an apocalyptic political agenda, able through terror and assymetric warfare to destabilise whole nations and regions.  I fear that as much as I fear secular totalitarianisms.  All religious moderates of all faiths would agree.  This is one fight believers and non-believers should be fighting together.

Instead the new atheism has launched an unusually aggressive assault on religion, which is not good for religion, for science, for intellectual integrity or for the future of the West.  When a society loses its religion it tends not to last very long thereafter.  It discovers that having severed the ropes that moor its morality to something transcendent, all it has left is relativism, and relativism is incapable of defending anything, including itself.  When a society loses its soul, it is about to lose its future.

So let us move on.

I want, in this book, to argue that we both need religion and science; that they are incompatible and more than incompatible.  They are the two essential perspectives that allow us to see the universe in its three-dimensional depth.  The creative tension between the two is what keeps us sane, grounded in physical reality without losing our spiritual sensibility.  It keeps us human and humane.

The story I am about to tell is about the human mind and its ability to do two quite different things.  One is the ability to break things down into their constituent parts and see how they mesh and interact.  The other is the ability to join things together so that they form relationships.  The best example of the first is science, of the second, religion.

Science takes things apart to see how they work.

Religion puts things together to see what they mean.

Without going into neuroscientific detail, the first is a predominantly left-brain activity, the second is associated with the right hemisphere.

Both are necessary, but they are very different.  The left brain is good at sorting and analyzing things.  The right brain is good at forming relationships with people.  Whole civilisations made mistakes because they could not keep these two apart and applied to one the logic of the other.

When you treat things as if they were people, the result is myth: light is from the sun god, rain from the sky god, natural disasters from the clash of deities, and so on.  Science was born when people stopped telling stories about nature and instead observed it; when, in short, they relinquished myth.

When you treat people as if they were things, the result is dehumanisation: people categorised by colour, class or creed and treated differently as a result.  The religion of Abraham was born when people stopped seeing people as objects and began to see each individual as unique, sacrosanct, the image of God.

One of the most difficult tasks of any civilisation — of any individual life, for that matter — is to keep the two separate, but integrated and in balance.  That is harder than it sounds.  There have been ages — the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries especially — when religion tried to dominate science.  The trial of Galileo is the most famous instance, but there were others.  And there have been ages when science tried to dominate religion, like now.  The new atheists are the most famous examples, but there are many others, people who think we can learn everything we need to know about meaning and relationships by brain scans, biochemistry, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, because science is all we know or need to know.

Both are wrong in equal measure.  Things are things and people are people.  Realising the difference is sometimes harder than we think.

In the first part of the book I give an analysis I have not seen elsewhere about why it is that people have thought religion and science are incompatible.  I argue that this has to do with a curious historical detail about the way religion entered the West.  It did so in the form of Pauline Christianity, a religion that was a hybrid or synthesis of two radically different cultures, ancient Greece and ancient Israel.

The curious detail is that all the early Christian texts were written in Greek, whereas the religion of Christianity came from ancient Israel and its key concepts could not be translated into Greek.  The result was a prolonged confusion, which still exists today, between the God of Aristotle and the God of Abraham.  I explain in chapter 3 why this made and makes a difference, leading to endless confusion about what religion and faith actually are.  In chapter 4 I tell the story of my own personal journey of faith.

In the second part of the book I explain why religion matters and what we stand to lose if we lose it.  The reason I do so is that, I suspect, more than people have lost faith in God, they simply do not see why it is important.  What difference does it make anymore? My argument is that it makes an immense difference, though not in ways that are obvious at first sight.  The civilisation of the West is built on highly specific religious foundations, and if we lose them we will lose much that makes life gracious, free and humane.

We will, I believe, be unable to sustain the concept of human dignity.  We will lose a certain kind of politics, the politics of common good.  We will find ourselves unable to hold on to a shared morality — and morality must be shared if it is to do what it has always done and bind us together into communities of shared principle and value.  Marriage, deconsecrated, will crumble and children will suffer.  And we will find it impossible to confer meaning on human life as a whole.  The best we will be able to do is to see our lives as a personal project, a private oasis in a desert of meaninglessness.

In a world in which God is believed to exist, the primary fact is relationship.  There is God, there is me, and there is the relationship between us, for God is closer to me than I am to myself.  In a world without God, the primary reality is ‘I’, the atomic self.  There are other people, but they are not as real to me as I am to myself.  Hence all the insoluble problems that philosophers have wrestled with unsuccessfully for two and a half thousand years.  How do I know other minds exist?  Why should I be moral?  Why should I be concerned about the welfare of others to whom I am not related?  Why should I limit the exercise of my freedom so that others can enjoy theirs?  Without God, there is a danger that we will stay trapped within the prison of the self.

As a result, neo-Darwinian biologists and evolutionary psychologists have focused on the self, the ‘I’.  ‘I’ is what passes my genes on to the next generation.  ‘I’ is what engages in reciprocal altruism, the seemingly selfless behaviour that actually serves self-centered ends.  The market is about the choosing ‘I’.  The liberal democratic state is about the voting ‘I’. The economy is about the consuming ‘I’.  But ‘I’, like Adam long ago, is lonely.  ‘I’ is bad at relationships.  In a world of ‘I’s, marriages do not last.  Communities erode.  Loyalty is devalued.  Trust grows thin.  God is ruled out completely.  In a world of clamorous egos, there is no room for God.

So the presence or absence of God makes an immense difference in our lives.  We cannot lose faith without losing much else besides, but this happens slowly, and by the time we discover the cost it is usually too late to put things back again.

In the third part of the book I confront the major challenges to faith.  One is Darwin and neo-Darwinian biology, which seems to show that life evolved blindly without design.  I will argue that this is true only if we use an unnecessary simplistic concept of design.

The second is the oldest and hardest of them all:  the problem of unjust suffering, ‘when bad things happen to good people’.  I will argue that only a religion of protest — of ‘sacred discontent’ — is adequate to the challenge.  Atheism gives us no reason to think the world could be otherwise.  Faith does, and thereby gives us the will and courage to transform the world.

The third charge made by the new atheists is, however, both true and of the utmost gravity.  Religion has done harm as well as good.  At various times in history 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.  this is a shattering fact and one about which nothing less than total honesty will do.

We need to understand why religion goes wrong.  That is what I try to do in chapter 13.  Sometimes it happens because monotheism lapses into dualism.  Sometimes it is because religious people attempt to bring about the end of time in the midst of time.  They engage in the politics of the apocalypse, which always results in tragedy, always self-inflicted and often against fellow members of the faith.  Most often it happens because religion becomes what it should never become: the will to power.  The religion of Abraham, which will be my subject in this book, is a protest against the will to power.

We need both religion and science.  Albert Einstein said it most famously:  ‘Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.’  It is my argument that religion and science are to human life what the right and left hemispheres are to the brain.  They perform different functions and if one is damaged, or if the connections between them are broken, the result is dysfunction.  The brain is highly plastic and in some cases there can be almost miraculous recovery.  But no one would wish on anyone the need for such recovery.

• Science is about explanation.  Religion is about meaning.
• Science analyses, religion integrates.
• Science breaks things down to their component parts.  Religion binds people together in relationships of trust.
• Science tells us what is.  Religion tells us what ought to be.
• Science describes.  Religion beckons, summons, calls.
• Science sees objects.  Religion speaks to us as subjects.
• Science practices detachment.  Religion is the art of attachment, self to self, soul to soul.
• Science sees the underlying order of the physical world.  Religion hears the music beneath the noise.
• Science is the conquest of ignorance.  Religion is the redemption of solitude.

We need scientific explanation to understand nature.  We need meaning to understand human behaviour and culture.  Meaning is what humans seek because they are not simply part of nature.  We are self-conscious.  We have imaginations that allow us to envisage worlds that have never been, and to begin to create them.  Like all else that lives, we have desires.  Unlike anything else that lives, we can pass judgment on those desires and decide not to pursue them.  We are free.

All of this, science finds hard to explain.  It can track mental activity from outside.  It can tell us which bits of the brain are activated when we do this or that.  What it cannot do is track it on the inside.  For that we use empathy.  Sometimes we use poetry and song, and rituals that bind us together, and stories that gather us into a set of shared meanings.  All of this is part of religion, the space where self meets other and we relate as persons in a world of persons, free agents in a world of freedom.  That is where we meet God, the Personhood of personhood, who stands to the natural universe as we, free agents, stand to our bodies.  God is the soul of being in whose freedom we discover freedom, in whose love we discover love, and in whose forgiveness we learn to forgive.

I am a Jew, but this book is not about Judaism.  It is about the monotheism that undergirds all three Abrahamic faiths:  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  It usually appears wearing the clothes of one of these faiths.  But I have tried to present it as it is in itself, because otherwise we will lose sight of the principle in the details of this faith or that.  Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe more than what is set out here, but all three rest on the foundation of faith in a personal God who created the universe in love and who endowed each of us, regardless of class, colour, culture or creed, with the charisma and dignity of his image.

The fate of this faith has been, by any standards, remarkable.  Abraham performed no miracles, commanded no armies, ruled no kingdom, gathered no mass of disciples and made no spectacular prophecies.  Yet there can be no serious doubt that he is the most influential person who ever lived, counted today, as he is, as the spiritual grandfather of more than half of the six billion people on the face of the planet.

His immediate descendants, the children of Israel, known today as Jews, are a tiny people numbering less than a fifth of a percent of the population of the world.  Yet they outlived the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, the medieval empires of Christianity and Islam, and the regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, all of which opposed Jews, Judaism or both, and all of which seemed impregnable in their day.  They disappeared.  The Jewish people live.

It is no less remarkable that the small persecuted sect known as Christians, who also saw themselves as children of Abraham, would one day become the largest movement of any kind in the history of the world, still growing today two centuries after almost every self-respecting European intellectual predicted their faith’s imminent demise.

As for Islam, it spread faster and wider than any religious movement in the lifetime of its founder, and endowed the world with imperishable masterpieces of philosophy and poetry, architecture and art, as well as a faith seemingly immune to secularisation or decay.

All other civilisations rise and fall. The faith of Abraham survives.

If neo-Darwinism is true and reproductive success a measure of inclusive fitness, then every neo-Darwinian should abandon atheism immediately and become a religious believer, because no genes have spread more widely than those of Abraham, and no memes more extensively than that of monotheism.  But then, as Emerson said, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

What made Abrahamic monotheism unique is that it endowed life with meaning.  That is a point rarely and barely understood, but it is the quintessential argument of this book.  We make a great mistake if we think of monotheism as a linear development from polytheism, as if people first worshipped many gods, then reduced them to one.  Monotheism is something else entirely.  The meaning of a system lies outside of the system.  Therefore the meaning of the universe lies outside the universe.  Monotheism, by discovering the transendental God, the God who stands outside the universe and creates it, made it possible for the first time to believe that life has meaning, not just a mythic or scientific explanation.

Monotheism, by giving life a meaning, redeemed it from tragedy.  The Greeks understood tragedy better than any other civilisation before or since.  Ancient Israel, though it suffered much, had no sense of tragedy.  It did not even have a word for it.  Monotheism is the principled defeat of tragedy in the name of hope.  A world without religious faith is a world without sustainable grounds for hope.  It may have optimism, but that is something else, and something shallower altogether.

A note about the theological position I adopt in this book:  Judaism is a conversation scored for many voices. It is, in fact, a sustained ‘argument for the sake of heaven’.  There are many different Jewish views on the subjects I touch on in the pages that follow. My own views have long been influenced by the Jewish philosophical tradition of the Middle Ages — such figures as Saadia Gaon, Judah Hallevi and Moses Maimonides — as well as modern successors: Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch, Abraham Kook and Joseph Soloveitchik.  My own teaher, Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, and an earlier Chief Rabbi, J.H. Hertz have also been decisive influences.  Common to all  of them is an openness to science, a commitment to engagement with the wider culture of the age, and a belief that faith is enhanced, not compromised, by a willingness honestly to confront the intellectual challenges of the age.  For those interested in Jewish teachings on some of the issues touched on in this book, I have added an appendix of Judaic sources on science, creation, evolution and the age of the universe.

A note about style:  often in this book I will be drawing sharp contrasts, between science and religion, left-and-right brain activity, ancient Greece and ancient Israel, hope cultures and tragic cultures, and so on.  These are a philsopher’s stock-in-trade.  It is a way of clarifying alternatives by emphasising extreme opposites, ‘ideal types’.  We all know reality is never that simple.  To give one example I will not be using, anthropologists distinguish between shame cultures  and guilt cultures. Now, doubtless we have sometimes felt guilt and sometimes shame.  They are different, but there is no reason why they cannot coexist.  But the distinction remains helpful.  There really is a difference between the two types of society and how they think about wrongdoing.

So it is, for example, with tragedy and hope.  Most of us recognise tragedy, and most of us have experienced hope.  But a culture that sees the universe as blind and indifferent to humanity generates a literature of tragedy, and a culture that believes in a God of love, forgiveness and redemption produces a literature of hope.  There are no Sophocles in ancient Israel. There was no Isaiah in ancient Greece.

Throughout the book, it may sometimes sound as if I am setting up an either/or contrast.  In actuality I embrace both sides of the dichotomies I mention:  science and religion, philosophy and prophecy, Athens and Jerusalem, left brain and right brain.  This too is part of Abrahamic spirituality.  People have often noticed, yet it remains a very odd fact, indeed, that there is not one account of creation at the beginning of Genesis, but two, side by side, one from the point of view of the cosmos, the other from a human perspective.  Literary critics, tone deaf to the music of the Bible, explain this as the joining of two separate documents.  They fail to understand that the Bible does not operate on the principles of Aristotelian logic with its either/or, true-or-false dichotomies.  It sees the capacity to grasp multiple perspectives as essential to understanding the human condition.  So always, in the chapters that follow, read not either/or but both/and.

* * * * * * * *

The final chapter of this book sets out my personal credo, my answer to the question, ‘Why believe?’  It was prompted by the advertisement, paid for by the British Humanist Association, that for a while in 2009 decorated the sides of London buses:  ‘There’s probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’  I hope the British Humanists will not take it amiss if I confess that this is not the most profound utterance yet devised by the wit of man.  It reminds me of the remark I once heard from an Oxford don about one of his colleagues:  ‘On the surface, he’s profound; but deep down, he’s superficial.’  Of course you cannot prove the existence of God.  This entire book is an attempt to show why the attempt to do so is misconceived, the result of an accident in the cultural history of the West.  But to take probability as a guide to truth, and ‘stop worrying’ as a route to happiness, is to dumb down beyond the point of acceptability two of the most serious questions ever framed by reflective minds.  So, if you want to know why it makes sense to believe in God, turn to chapter 14.

Atheism deserves better than the new atheists, whose methodology consists in criticising religion without understanding it, quoting texts without contexts, taking exceptions as the rule, confusing folk belief with reflective theology, abusing, mocking, ridiculing, caricaturing and demonising religious faith and holding it responsible for the great crimes against humanity.   Religion has done harm; I acknowledge that candidly in chapter 13.  But the cure of bad religion is good religion, not no religion, just as the cure of bad science is good science, not the abandonment of science.

The new atheists do no one a service by their intellectual inability to understand why it should be that some people lift their eyes beyond the visible horizon or strive to articulate an inexpressible sense of wonder; why some search for meaning despite the eternal silences of infinite space and the apparent random injustices of history; why some stake their lives on the belief that the ultimate reality at the heart of the universe is not blind to our existence, deaf to our prayers, and indifferent to our fate; why some find trust and security and strength in the sensed, invisible presence of a vast and indefinable love.  A great Jewish mystic, the Baal Shem Tov, compared such atheists to a  deaf man who for the first time comes on a violinist playing in the town square while the townspeople, moved by the lilt and rhythm of his playing, dance in joy.  Unable to hear the music, he concludes that they are all mad.

Perhaps I am critical of the new atheists because I had the privilege of knowing and learning from deeper minds than these, and I end this introduction with two personal stories to show that there can be another way.   I had no initial intention of becoming a rabbi, or indeed of pursuing religious studies at all (I explain what changed my mind in chapter 4).  I went to university to study philosophy.  My doctoral supervisor, the late Sir Bernard Williams, described by The Times in his obituary as ‘the most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time’, was also a convinced atheist.  But he never once ridiculed my faith; he was respectful of it.  All he asked was that I be coherent and lucid.

He stated his own credo at the end of one of his finest works, Shame and Necessity:

We know that the world was not made for us, or we for the world, that our history tells no purposive story, and that there is no position outside the world or outside history from which we might hope to authenticate our activities.

Williams was a Nietzchean who believed that not only was there no religious truth, there was no metaphysical truth either.  I shared his admiration for Nietzsche, though I drew the opposite conclusion — not that Nietzsche was right, but that he, more deeply than anyone else, framed the alternative:  either faith or the will to power that leads ultimately to nihilism.

 William’s was a bleak view of the human condition but a wholly tenable one.  His own view of the meaning of a life he expressed at the end of that work in the form of one of Pindar’s Odes:

Take to heart what may be learned from Oedipus:

If someone with a sharp axe

Hacks off the boughs of a great oak tree,

And spoils its handsome shape;

Although its fruit has failed, yet it can give an account of itself

If it comes later to a winter fire,

Or if it rests on the pillars of some palace

And does a sad task among foreign walls,

When there is nothing left in the place it came from.

I understood that vision, yet in the end I could not share his belief that it is somehow more honest to despair than to trust, to see existence as an accident rather than as invested with meaning we strive to discover.  Sir Bernard loved ancient Greece; I loved biblical Israel.  Greece gave the world ltragedy; Israel taught it hope.  A people, a person, who has faith is one who, even in the darkest night of the soul, can never ultimately lose hope.

The only time he ever challenged me about my faith was when he asked, ‘Don’t you believe there is an obligation to live within one’s time?’  It was a fascinating question, typical of his profundity.  My honest answer was, ‘No.’  I agreed with T.S. Eliot, that living solely within one’s time is a form of provincialism.  We must live, not in the past but with it and its wisdom.  I think that in later years, Williams came to the same conclusion, because in Shame and Necessity, he wrote that ‘in important ways, we are, in our ethical situation, more like human beings in antiquity than any Western people have been in the meantime’.  He too eventually turned for guidance to the past.  Despite our differences I learned much from him, including the meaning of faith itself.  I explain this in chapter 4.

The other great sceptic to whom I became close, towards the end of his life, was Sir Isaiah Berlin.  I have told the story before, but it is worth repeating, that when we first met he said, ‘Chief Rabbi, whatever you do, don’t talk to me about religion.  When it comes to God, I’m tone deaf!’  He added, ‘What I don’t understand about you is how, after studying philosophy at Cambridge and Oxford, you can still beleive!

‘If it helps,’ I replied, ‘think of me as a lapsed heretic.’

‘Quite understand, dear boy, quite understand.’

In November 1997, I phoned his home.  I had recently published a book on political philosophy which gave a somewhat different account of the nature of a free society than he had done in his own writings.  I wanted to know his opinion.  He had asked me to send him the book, which I did, but I heard no more, which is why I was phoning him.  His wife, Lady Aline, answered the phone and with surprise said, ‘Chief Rabbi — Isaiah has just been talking about you.’

‘In what context?’ I asked.

‘He’s just asked you to officiate at his funeral.’

I urged her not to let him think such dark thoughts, but clearly he knew.  A few days later he died, and I officiated at the funeral.

His biographer Michael Ignatieff once asked me why Isaiah wanted a religious funeral, given that he was a secular Jew.  I replied that he may not have been a believing Jew but he was a loyal Jew.  In fact, I said, the Hebrew word emunah, usually translated as ‘faith’, probably means ‘loyalty’.  I later came across a very significant remark of Isaiah’s that has a bearing on some of today’s atheists:

I am not religious, but I place a high value on the religious experience of believers . . . I think that those who do not understand what it is to be religious, do not understand what human beings live by.  That is why dry atheists seem to me blind and deaf to some forms of profound human experience, perhaps the inner life:  It is like being aesthetically blind.

Since then, I have continued to have cherished friendships and public conversations with notable sceptics like the novelists Amos Oz and Howard Jacobson, the philosopher Alain de Botton, and the Harvard neuroscientist Steven Pinker (my conversation with Pinker figures in the recent novel by his wife Rebecca Goldstein, entitled 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, subtitled A Work of Fiction).

The possibility of genuine dialogue between believers and sceptics show why the anger and vituperation of the new atheists really does not help.  It does not even help the cause of atheism.  People who are confident in their beliefs feel no need to pillory or caricature their opponents.  We need a genuine, open, serious, respectful conversation between scientists and religious believers if we are to integrate their different but conjointly necessary perspectives.  We need it the way an individual needs to integrate the two hemispheres of the brain.  That is a major theme of the book.

When he last visited us, I asked Steven Pinker whether an atheist could use a prayer book.  ‘Of course,’ he said, so I gave him a copy of one I had just newly translated.  I did not pursue the subject further but I guess, if I had asked, that he would have told me the story of Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of complementarity theory.

A fellow scientist visited Bohr at his home and saw to his amazement that Bohr had fixed a horseshoe over the door for luck.  ‘Surely, Niels, you don’t believe in that?’

‘Of course not,’ Bohr replied.  ‘But you see –the thing is that it works whether you believe in it or not.’

Religion is not a horseshoe, and it is not about luck, but one thing many Jews know — and I think Isaiah Berlin was one of them — is that it works whether you believe in it or not.  Love, trust, family, community, giving as integral to living, study as a sacred task, argument as a sacred duty, forgiveness, atonement, gratitude, prayer:  these things work whether you believe in them or not.  The Jewish way is first to live God, then to ask questions about him.

Faith begins with the search for meaning, because it is the discovery of meaning that creates human freedom and dignity.  Finding God’s freedom, we discover our own.