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Anyone interested in interfaith dialogue will find this book full of insights and quotable statements. Those seeking to deepen the understanding of their own faith tradition will find this book transforming. Scientists, skeptics and agnostics will find this book helps understand the cultural value of the Abrahamic traditions: Hebrew, Christian and Muslim. The book ends with a well written Epilogue for atheists.
Many people of faith do not know or want to know the enormous harm done in God’s name for several thousand years. Rabbi Sachs faces the world as it is, and addresses this “power over” human temptation and abuse with adequate discussion of remedies. “Men never do evil so comfortably and cheerfully as when they do it from religious confection.” Blaise Pascal.
In the main, Rabbi Sachs shows how science and religion need one another, and how either by itself, is incomplete. I can hardly recommend this book highl6 enough. I made over 200 notes on my kindle while reading this. I look for his other writings. For its purposes, scope, scholarship, readability and relevance, this book is a winner.
Paschal Baute, Ed. D.
Also, as a response to recent works by New Atheists (Sacks’s term, not sure if it’s pejorative) like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens (RIP), and Sam Harris, Sacks’s defense of the religious life is thoughtful, moderate, respectful, and conducted at low decibel. And though It is an incredibly welcome and needed entry into that discussion, in many ways, Sacks’s preoccupation with defending religion against the NA’s overtly dismissive diatribes is one of its faults as well. What I mean is that, and maybe I’m wrong here, I don’t think that many thinking people believe, as Hitchens claimed, that “religion poisons everything.” Emanating from such brilliant minds, it’s a startlingly stupid assertion. OBVIOUSLY, one can cherry pick ANY “ism’s” most morally deranged followers, most chillingly nationalistic writings, and most violent outliers and claim that the ISM “poisons everything.” So Sacks spends far too much of this book arguing that there is something worthwhile, noble, and good, about leading a religious life. He never claims that these are guaranteed, only that throwing out religion altogether, as the NAs would have us do, robs humanity of one its most beautiful creations.
One other weakness (and then onto the justification for FOUR stars). As Sacks spends chapter after chapter explaining what is lost if we abandon religion (and by contrast what one gains through its maintenance), he bases much of his argument upon the foundation that the alternatives to God are meaninglessness, loneliness, loss, and desperation. In time, perhaps all of those are possible. But just because an existentialist understanding of the universe causes sadness and a sense of life’s being absurd, doesn’t make it UNTRUE! Sacks says here, as he has elsewhere, that he doesn’t see why it’s any more intellectually honest to choose despair over hope and faith. He’s right. But he’s mis-identifying the context of that belief moment: For many, especially in the atheist camp he’s chiding, the disbelief in God is NOT a choice. To suppose that they’re making a choice is to presuppose God as a given. As if God is a completely natural, logical, and untaught conclusion to come to merely through living. It is, for scientists, not that way at all. I think Sacks KNOWS this as well because he’s brilliant.
And so the REAL choice being offered and defined in this book is: given the pain and suffering in the world, and frequently, its seeming meaninglessness, doesn’t religious faith offer an amazingly healthful, holistic, communal, and thoughtful alternative? Absolutely! It just doesn’t mean that its tenets are TRUE!
Where Sacks is strongest is in two sections. First, his discussion of right and left brain thought as mirrored in Hebraic and Hellenistic LANGUAGE and culture is absolutely fascinating, and as far as I know, novel. He admits that the right/left split he describes is overly reductive, but it is illustrative nonetheless.
Finally, and this is no small feat—Sacks’s chapter on suffering and why bad things happen to good people is brilliant. Thankfully, at least from this reviewer’s perspective, he REJECTS all traditional theodicies as facile and “comfort too cheaply earned.” He never explains away suffering, but rather, argues that central to Hebraic thought is the REJECTION of comfort and an embracing of conflict and cognitive dissonance. He calls this the “The Theology of Protest,” and though at times its real life implications seem cloudy, it is on the whole inspirational and smart.
Insightful, intelligent, thought provoking. Very good for anyone with an open mind to hearing the positives of religion on long lasting cultures and the downsides of pure philosophy, neo-Darwinism, and the like on the cultures that have abandonned the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) specifically. Sacks makes a very convincing argument not just for mono-theism but for societies’ need for religion. I highly suggest that anyone with curiousity give this book a chance. (Note: I’m a cradle Catholic with a degree in Biological Sciences trying that is very excited to see someone bring together Science, Philosophy, Religion and a bit of Theology in a logical and well thought out manner.)
I was disappointed in this book. Such a learned man could have written a better book. I think Rabbi Sacks should have written for his usual audience instead of trying to convince atheists why they should believe. They won’t. But a book synthesizing science with Jewish thought could have been very uplifting and inspiring. Like some other reviewers, I thought this book would draw more heavily on Jewish textual sources to make its argument. Rabbi Sacks does so, mostly in the last chapter; these chapters shine and are the reason I give it 3 stars. When he draws on Maimonides, other sages, and Talmud, his case is solid and his writing superb. He should have done more of this to educate those of us who lack his grasp of these texts. In other areas, drawing on physicists and philosophers, the writing is still wonderful, but the facts muddled.
1) Einstein’s quote regarding G-d not playing dice with the universe is not a comment on religious view, it is Einstein’s rejection of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle;
2) The Greeks did not practice infanticide of deformed infants, the Spartans (with whom the Greeks were at war at times) purportedly did. They also gave such children to slaves to raise;
3) The story of Oedipus was misrepresented: Oedipus’ father Laius received an oracle that a son would be born who would murder Laius and marry his mother Jocasta. When a son was born (with a club foot, hence the name Oedipus, meaning swollen foot), Laius put the infant on the hillside to die. A shepherd couple found the infant and raised it as their own. The rest is told by Sophocles in the famous trilogy.
4) Ancient Greeks believed strongly in an afterlife; indeed the most famous street in Paris is named for the Greek concept of Heaven, and there are descriptions in stories such as that of Orpheus and Euridice;
5) In the last chapter discussing technological advances Rabbi Sacks thinks demean human civilization he includes “abortion on demand.” That’s a legal construct and not a technological advance;
6) Several times Rabbi Sacks mentions abortion and contraceptives as if they are antithetical to Judaism; it is not so. There are limits, to be sure. But I noticed that nowhere did Rabbi Sacks mention the Talmudic notion of a fetus as rodef (that is, pursuer, meaning a pregnancy that if allowed to continue will kill the mother);
7) In the discussion of the rabbi with Lucretius, Rabbi Sacks would leave the reader thinking that Judaism accepts ensoulment at conception. That is not the mainstream belief- ensoulment at birth is; An index would have been most useful, so that one could go back to specific topics covered within chapters. I think I will stick to Rabbi Sacks’ strictly religious books (which, by the way, I think are the best out there- siddur, haggadah, machzorim for the High Holy Days) in the future.
Instead he distinguishes Science as providing explanations of Reality, while Religion provides interpretations that give Life Meaning. As he understands it the meaning of the Universe can be understood only by going outside the universe, and pointing to the transcendent God that Abraham first revealed to Humanity. The discovery and revelation of God , is for Sacks the key element in transforming the story of Humanity from being one of Tragedy to one of Hope.
As he passionately argues “man despite being the product of seemingly blind causes is not blind, that being in the image of God he is more than an accidental allocation of atoms; that being free, he can rise above his fears, and, with the help of God, create oases of justice and compassion in the wilderness of space and time, that though his life is short he can achieve immortality by his fire and heroism,his intensity of thought and feeling, that humanity too, though it may one day cease to be , can create before night falls, a noonday brightness of the human spirit , trusting that none of our kind will be here to remember, yet in the mind of God, none of our achievements is forgotten-all these things, if not beyond dispute have proven themselves time and again in history. We are made great by our faith,small by our lack of it. Only within the scaffolding of these truths,only on the firm foundation of unyielding hope, can the soul’s salvation be built.”
This is an eloquent and in many ways strongly persuasive work. It certainly shows why Science is not and cannot be a substitute for Religion.
My one real problem with it is that it does not deal with the question of how scientific discoveries have by undermining tradiional religious doctrines put into question the truth- value of each of the three Abrahamic faiths. It is after all one thing to defend Religion as useful, and even invaluable to Mankind, and another to defend it as Truth.
Nonetheless even this objection has a kind of answer in Sacks text. In perhaps the most illuminating section of the book called ‘Why God?’ Sacks makes telling arguments against Atheism showing how in its hypothesis of Multiverses it substitutes what he calls an improbability, the existence of a transcendent Creator of the Universe for greater improbabilities. Sacks takes the scientific findings regarding the improbability of their being a Universe at all, the improbability of their being Life on Earth, the improbability of our unique human consciousness, and makes the argument that improbability should not stand in the way of Faith. As Sacks sees it Faith is Courage and Faith provides the means through which humans not simply establish a connection with God but give order and meaning to their own lives. It is almost as if he is saying that we should believe in God be religious believers because it is better for us. Here I find certain echoes of the Pascalian wager but where Pascal was telling us to wager for God in order to win the world- to- come Sacks suggests we wager for God in order to provide meaning, happiness, goodness in this life.
This book is one of the most helpful and meaningful books I have read in many years. I have long held a position similar to the one Rabbi Sacks espouses in this book and this is the most convincing presentation of this position I know.
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