The Great Partnership – 'Why God?' – 4

[First posted September 6, 2014.

 

To religionists, the answer to the Q: ‘Why God?’ would be ‘Why not God?’ But even as believers, occasionally we might wonder ‘God, are you there? Are you real? Are you in control?’ — particularly when we look at the state of the world today and when we don’t get the expected answers to our prayers.

 

 Someone observed it’s worse in these times than ever before; we say, humanity has not changed much since the days of Noah. It’s just that we are now in a position to know what goes on anywhere in the globe at any time because of our hi-tech toys that grab our attention 24/7. But isn’t it great to live in such times as these, though unsettling because bad news  on a global scale is all we hear which disturbs our peace.  Perhaps media should balance its coverage and feature  more good news . . . unless there aren’t any . . . more likely it simply doesn’t draw as much attention. 

 

 

Rabbi Sacks in this concluding chapter gives reasons for ‘Why God?’ — not in the sense of asking God why are things the way they are on planet earth; rather, that  it makes more sense to believe there is a Creator and Designer of this universe;  there are reasons to believe in the existence of God.   Frankly, Sinaites think it takes more faith NOT to believe there is a God.  Rabbi Sacks is correct in saying God has authored two books:  the Torah and Nature.  If one misses reading His Sinai revelation, the natural world is a magnificent testimony — indeed, as the psalmist proclaims:

 

 Psalm 19:1-4

‘The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of His hands!

Day after day they pour forth speech;

night after night they display knowledge.  

There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth,

their words to the ends of the world.’

 

This Must Read/Must Own is downloadable as ebook from amazon.com; best to get yourself a copy, worth the ‘spend’. If you haven’t checked out the previous posts from the book; here’s a list:

• Must Read/Must Own – The Great Partnership – Diverging Paths – 3c
• Must Read/Must Own: The Great Partnership – Diverging Paths – 3b
• Must Read/Must Own – The Great Partnership – Diverging Paths 3a
• Must Read/Must Own: The Great Partnership – 2
• Must Read/Must Own: The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

Reformatting, highlights and images added.–Admin1]

 

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In January 2009 the British Humanist Association paid for an advertisement to be carried on the side of London buses.  It read, ‘There’s probably no God.’  It was that advertisement which finally persuaded me to write this book, because it raised the greatest of all existential choices:

• How shall we live our lives?
• By probability?
• Or by possibility?

What has transformed humanity has been our capacity to remain open to the unlikely, the improbable.  Never has this been more true than in the scientific discoveries of the past century.

 

Cosmology

 

Take creation.  For more than two thousand years, religious thinkers had to face the challenge of the prevailing view, that of Aristotle, that there was no creation because the universe had no beginning in time.  Matter was eternal.  Moses Maimonides in the twelfth century says something interesting about this.  His immediate response is that, if Aristotle were right, he would simply reinterpret Genesis 1.  He has no difficulty in stating that religious faith is compatible with scientific truth, even when it seems to deny an item of faith as fundamental as creation.

 

But he does not stop there.  He says that in his view Aristotle has not proved the point. Maimonides was a huge admirer of Aristotle.  He drew from his ideas in ethics, psychology and metaphysics.  But he was critical enough to insist that just because a thinker is right about most things, he is not necessarily right about all.  Maimonides remained unconvinced about the eternity of matter, and his scepticism was justified.

 

In 1964, almost eight centuries after Maimonides wrote The Guide for the Perplexed, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson identified the cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe, the remaining trace of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, that finally proved that the universe did have an origin in time.  Regardless of how it happened, there was an act of creation.  Improbable but true.

 

Alongside this came the discovery that the entire physical universe, from the largest galaxies to the smallest particles, is governed by six mathematical constants:

• the ratio of electromagnetic force to the gravitational force between two electrons;
• the structural constant that determines how various atoms are formed from hydrogen;
• the cosmological constant;
• the cosmic antigravity force;
• the value that determines how tightly clusters of galaxies are bound together;
• and the number of spatial dimensions in the universe.

 

Had the value of any of these constants been different by a small, almost infinitesimal degree, there would have been no universe capable of giving rise to life.  Matter would have expanded too fast to coalesce into stars, or the universe would have imploded after the initial explosion, and so on.  This fine tuning of the universe for life became known as the ‘anthropic principle’.  It all seems too precise for it to have happened by mere chance.

 

This led several scientists, among them Lord Rees and Stephen Hawking, to resolve the problem by predicating an infinite number of parallel universes, each instantiating a different value for the various constants.  Our universe is improbable only if it is the only one there is.  If there were an infinity of them, at least one would fit the necessary parameters, and it happens to be ours.

 

  This disposes of the improbability of the universe in which we live, but only by postulating another and higher improbability.  For we have to no reason to suppose that there are parallel universes, and we could never establish whether there were.  If we could make contact with a parallel universe then, by definition, it would not be a parallel universe but part of our own, which simply turned out to be larger than we thought it was.

 

  The improbability is multiplied by those scientists who argue that the universe was self-creating: it spun itself into being out of nothing.  Again this is eminently possible.  It is what the birth of the universe would look like according tot he Bible if the words ‘Let there be’ were edited out — if, as it were, we were watching the event with vision but no sound.  But it shows that to explain the existence of the universe that precisely fits the given mathematical parameters without acknowledging the existence of a creator, we are forced to hypothesise the existence of an infinity of self-creating universes for which we have no evidence whatsoever.  The rule of logic known as Ockham’s Razor — do not multiply unnecessary entities — would seem to favour a single unprovable God over an infinity of unprovable universes.  Be that as it may, cosmology has become one of those areas in which the improbable has prevailed over previous conceptions of the probable.

 

The Argument from Life

 

So has biology.  Among the more than a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars, only one planet thus far known to us, Earth, seems finely tuned for the emergence of life.  And by what intermediate stages did non-life become life?

 

There is a monumental gap between inanimate matter and the most primitive life form, bacteria, the simplest of which, mycoplasma, contains 470 genes.  How did inert matter become living self-producing life, and within a relatively short space of time?  So puzzling was this that Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA and a convinced atheist, was forced to conclude that life did not originate on Earth at all.  It came to Earth from Mars.  Since no trace of life has yet been found on Mars, this too sounds like replacing one improbability with another.

 

 

How did life become sentient?  And how did sentience grow to become self-consciousness, that strange gift, known only to Homo sapiens, that allows us to ask the question ‘Why?’

 

So many improbabilities had to happen that Stephen J. Gould was forced to the conclusion that if the process of evolution were run again from the beginning, it is doubtful whether Homo sapiens would ever have emerged.

 

You do not have to be religious to have a sense of awe at the sheer improbability of things.  James Le Fanu, in Why Us?, argues that we are about to undergo a paradigm shift in scientific understanding.  The complexities of the genome, the emergence of the first multicellular life forms, the origins of Homo sapiens and our prodigiously enlarged brain:  all these and more are too subtle to be accounted for in reductive, materialist, Darwinian science.

 

  Particularly unexpected was the result of the decoding of the human genome.  It was anticipated that at least 100,000 genes would be found, allowing us to explain what made humans human, and establishing a one-to-one correlation between specific genes and physical attributes.  Improbably, there turned out to be a mere 26,000 –not much more than the blind millimetre-long roundworm C. Elegans that has 19,100.

 

  Still more improbably, ‘master’ genes that orchestrate the building of complex life forms turn out to be the same across different species.  The same genes that cause a fly to be a fly cause a mouse to be a mouse.  A single gene, Pax 6, that in a mouse gives rise to a camera-type eye, when inserted into a fly embryo produces the compound eye characteristic of a fly.  Far from being ‘selfish’, genes turn out to be ensemble players capable in mysterious ways of knowing contextually where they are and of what larger entity they are part.  Stephen J. Gould said that the significance of these results ‘lies not in the discovery of something previously unknown — but in their explicitly unexpected character’.  Improbability again.

 

Nor are we any nearer an understanding of why the evolution of life as a biological phenomenon should give rise to an organism capable of self-consciousness, of thinking, reflecting, remembering, of asking the question ‘Why?’  This is perhaps the most improbable phenomenon of all, yet it is also the most consequential.  Without that ‘thinking and contemplating entity, man’, wrote Diderot, the universe would be ‘changed into a vast solitude, a phenomenon taking place obscurely, unobserved’.

 

In Homo sapiens, for the first time the universe became self-aware.

 

Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin have argued that the higher states of consciousness are to human life what a spandrel is to a cathedral: an accidental byproduct, a decorative motif.  Can we prove otherwise?  No.  But we can say with some certainty that this is a very odd way of understanding the human condition.

 

Human self-consciousness lies at the heart of all art, metaphysics, poetry; of all science, mathematics and cosmology; of everything that makes humanity different, distinct, unique.  The least significant fact about Homo sapiens is that we have evolved to survive.  So has everything else that lives.  All that lives, said Spinoza, has a conatus, a will to live.  What makes us different is that we are the meaning-seeking, culture-creating animal.  That is constitutive of our humanity.  To think of self-consciousness as a spandrel is as tone deaf as to think about a cathedral as a building to keep out the rain.  A cathedral is a building constructed ad majorem Dei gloriam, ‘for the greater glory of God’.  Ignore that, and you will not understand what a cathedral is.  Why should humanity be different?

 

  Equally unexpected, and a direct consequence of the discovery of DNA, is the finding that virtually all life from the most primitive bacterium to us has a single source, DNA itself.  Every living thing shares the same genetic script, what Francis Collins — head of the project to map the human genome — called ‘the language of God’.  Collins is just one of several distinguished scientists to have arrived at a religious conclusion, having embarked on a scientific journey.  We now know the truth of a proposition that, though it proves no theological truth, nonetheless has deeply spiritual resonance, namely that unity begets diversity.  The many derive from the One.

 

Nor does unity end there.  Sustained reflection on the Earth’s ecology has made us aware that life in all its almost unimaginable diversity is interlinked.  Not only is all humanity part of a single fate — John Donne’s ‘any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.’  So too is all of nature.  Life is a series of interlinked systems in which each plays a part in the whole, and the loss of a single species may affect many others.  Again, the many point to the One.

 

  The sheer improbability of the scientific discoveries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is overwhelming.  In 1894, Albert A. Michelson, the German-born American physicist, said,

 

 

‘The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.’

 

In 1900, speaking to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Lord Kelvin said,

‘There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.  All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’

 

The long list of failed predictions should tell us to expect the unexpected.  We are the unpredictable animal navigating our way through a universe that, from quantum physics to black holes to the Higgs boson, is stranger than any nineteenth-century scientist could have dreamed.

 

Everything interesting in life, the universe and the whole shebang is improbable, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb reminds us in The Black Swan, subtitled ‘The Impact of the Highly Improbable’.  The books title drawn from the fact that people were convinced that, since no one had ever seen a black swan, they did not exist — until someone discovered Australia.

 

My favourite improbability is the fact that the man who invented probability theory, a brilliant young mathematician called Blaise Pascal, decided at the age of thirty to give up mathematics and science and devote the rest of his life to the exploration of religious faith.

 

  None of this is intended as proof of the existence of God.  The Bible itself satirises the Egyptian magicians who, unable to reproduce the plague of lice, declare, ‘It is the finger of God’ (Exodus 8:19).  So much for the ‘God of the gaps’ –invoking God to explain the not-yet-scientifically-explicable.  That is the way of the Egyptians, not the faith of Abraham.

 

Science gives us a sense of wonder.   It does not disclose the source and origin of that wonder.  Maimonides said that science, by disclosing the vastness of the universe and the smallness of mankind, leads to the love and awe of God.  He did not say it leads to belief in God.

 

Contemplation of the natural universe is an intimation, no more and no less, of the presence of a vast intelligence at work in the universe, an intelligence capable of constantly surprising us, showing us that the more we know, the more we know we do not know, yet still beckoning us onwards to a point beyond the visible horizon.

 

  The Argument from History

 

  Thus science.  What of history?  How probable is it that one man

who performed no miracles, uttered no prophecies, had no legion of disciples and wielded no power — Abraham — would become the most influential figure who ever lived, with more than half of the six billion people alive today tracing their spiritual descent from him?

 

How probable is it that a tiny people, the children of Israel, known today as Jews, numbering less than a fifth of a per cent of the population of the world, would outlive every empire that sought its destruction?

             

Or that a small, persecuted sect known as the Christians would one day become the largest movement of any kind in the world?

 

 

  Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian Marxist who broke with the movement after the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.  He became an unconventional Christian — he had been charged with blasphemy for criticising the Russian Orthodox Church in 1913 — and went into exile, eventually settling in Paris.  In The Meaning of History, he tells us why he abandoned Marxism:

 

I remember how the materialist interpretation of history, when I attempted in my youth to verify it by applying it to the destinies of peoples, broke down in the case of the Jews, where destiny seemed absolutely inexplicable from the materialistic standpoint . . . Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination, transcending the processes of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history.  The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history:  all these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny.

 

Consider this one fact.  The Bible records a series of promises by God to Abraham:  that he would become a great nation, as many as the stars of the sky or the sand on the sea shore, culminating in the prophecy that he would become ‘the father of many nations’.  Yet in Deuteronomy 7:7, Moses makes a statement that seems flatly to contradict this:

 

 ‘The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you are the fewest of all peoples’.

 

  There seems no way of reconciling these two statements, none at any rate that could have been true at the time of the canonisation of the Mosaic books.  Yet in the twenty-first century we can give precise meaning to these two prophecies.

 

More than half of the six billion people alive today claim descent, literal or metaphorical, from Abraham, among them 2.2 billion Christians and 1.3 billion Muslims.  Abraham did become ‘the father of many nations’.  Yet Jews — those whose faith is defined by the law of Moses — remain, at 13 million, ‘the fewest of all peoples’.    As the late Milton Himmelfarb once remarked, the total population of world Jewry is the size of the statistical error in the Chinese census.

 

  Somehow the prophets of Israel, a small, vulnerable nation surrounded by large empires, were convinced that it would be eternal.

 

‘This is what the Lord says, he who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night …”Only if these decrees vanish from my sight,” declares the Lord, “will Israel ever cease being a nation before me” (Jeremiah 31:35-6).

 

They were certain that their message of monotheism would eventually transform the imagination of humankind.  There was nothing to justify that certainty then, still less after a thousand years of persecution, pogroms and the Final Solution.  Yet improbably, Jews and Judaism survived.

 

King Frederick the Great once asked his physician Zimmermann of Brugg-in-Aargau, ‘Zimmermann, can you name me a single proof of the existence of God?’   The physician replied, ‘Your majesty, the Jews.’

 

  The Argument from Entropy

 

Consider the pattern of civilisation itself.  One of the first historians to give a cyclical account of history, Giambattista Vico, argued that all civilisations were subject to a law of rise and decline.  They are born in austerity.  They rise to affluence and power.  Then they become decadent and eventually decline.

 

 ‘People first sense what is necessary, then consider what is useful, next attend to comfort, later delight in pleasures, soon grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad squandering their estates.’

 

The only antidote to this, he argued, was religion, which motivates people to virtue and concern for the common good.  Providence ‘renews the piety, faith and truth which are both the natural foundations of justice, and the grace and beauty of God’s eternal order’.

 

It is an argument that has been repeated in our time by figures like Vaclav Havel and Jürgen Habermas.  Havel, protesting the materialist conception of human life, argues that such a view leads inevitably to

 

‘the gradual erosion of all moral standards,

the breakdown of all criteria for decency,

and the widespread destruction of confidence in the meaning of such values as truth, adherence to principles, sincerity, altruism, dignity and honour’.

He adds,

 

 

‘If democracy is not only to survive but to expand successfully … it must rediscover and renew its own transcendental origins.  It must renew its respect for the non-material order that is not only above us but also in us and among us.’

 

Habermas, like Havel a secular intellectual, has nonetheless spoken of how ‘enlightened reason’ reaches a crisis when it discovers it no longer has sufficient strength ‘to awaken, and to keep awake, in the minds of secular subjects, an awareness of the violations of solidarity throughout the world, an awareness of what is missing, of what cries out to heaven’.  His conclusion is that—

 

‘Among modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human role will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.’

 

  There have been many superpowers:

• Spain in the fifteenth century,
• Venice in the sixteenth,
• Holland in the seventeenth,
• France in the eighteenth,
• Britain in the nineteenth,
• the United States in the twentieth.

 Yet Judaism has existed in some form for the better part of four thousand years, Christianity for two thousand, and Islam for fourteen centuries.  Religions survive.  Superpowers do not.  Spiritual systems have the capacity to defeat the law of entropy that governs the life of nations.  

 

  We can trace this process in the present.  Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam became famous in the late 1990s for a phrase he coined to describe the loss of social capital — networks of reciprocity and trust — in the liberal democracies of the West.  He called it ‘bowling alone’.  More people were going ten-pin bowling, but fewer were joining teams and leagues.  This was his symbol of the West’s increasingly individualistic, atomistic, self-preoccupied culture.  Things people once did together, we were now doing alone.  Our bonds of belonging were growing thin.

 

In 2010, in his book American Grace, Putnam set out the good news that a powerful store of social capital still exists.  It is called religion:  the churches, synagogues and other places of worship that still bring people together in shared belonging and mutual responsibility.

 

An extensive survey carried out throughout the United States between 2004 and 2006 showed that frequent church- or synagogue-goers are more likely to give money to charity, regardless of whether the charity is religious or secular.  They are also more likely to do voluntary work for a charity, give money to a homeless person, give excess change back to a shop assistant, donate blood, help a neighbour with housework, spend time with someone who is feeling depressed, allow another driver to cut in front of them, offer a seat to a stranger, or help someone find a job.  Religious Americans are simply more likely than their secular counterparts to give of their time and money to others, not only within but also beyond their own communities.

 

Their altruism goes further.  Frequent worshippers are also significantly more active citizens.  They are more likely to belong to community organisations.  Within these organisations they are more likely to be officers or committee members.  They take a more active part in local civic and political life, from local elections to town meetings to demonstrations.  They are disproportionately represented among local activists for social and political reform.  They get involved, turn up and lead.  The margin of difference between them and the more secular is large.

 

Tested on attitudes, religiosity as measured by church or synagogue attendance turns out to be the best predictor of altruism and empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race.  Religion creates community, community creates altruism, and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good.  Putnam goes so far as to speculate that an atheist who went regularly to church (perhaps because of a spouse) would be more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than a believer who prays alone.  There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it an ongoing tutorial in citizenship and good neighbourliness.

 

This is path-breaking research by one of the world’s greatest sociologists, and it confirms what most members of religious congregations know, that they give rise to networks of support often breathtaking in their strength and moral beauty:  visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved, helping individuals through personal crisis, supporting those in financial need, assisting people who have lost jobs, caring for the elderly, and proving daily that troubles are halved and joys doubled when they are shared with others.  Even today, religion still has the improbable power to renew the habits of the heart that drive civil society, defeating entropy and civilisational decline.

 

The Argument from Happiness

 

Thus far probability.  But there was a second sentence adorning London buses courtesy of the British Humanist Association.  In full the advertisement read, ‘There’s probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’

 

I am perplexed by this non sequitur.  To me, faith is about, in the Bible’s phrase, ‘rejoicing in all the good the Lord your God has given you’ (Deuteronomy 26:11).  It is about celebration, gratitude, praise, thanksgiving and what Wordsworth and C.S. Lewis called being ‘surprised by joy’.  For many people, religion is an essential part of the pursuit of happiness.  A host of surveys show that people who have religious faith and regularly attend religious services report higher life satisfaction and live longer than those who do not.

 

For two generations, while Europe has secularised, it has witnessed the rise, especially among the young, of depressive illness, stress-related syndromes, drug and alcohol abuse, violent crime and attempted suicide.  Stable families have been replaced by an almost open-ended range of variants, leaving in their wake troubled and disadvantaged children.  Fewer people find themselves surrounded by the networks of support once provided by local communities.  Robert Bellah and his co-authors, in Habits of the Heart, diagnosed the multiple ways in which our social ecology is being damaged ‘by the destruction of the subtle ties that bind human beings to one another, leaving them frightened and alone’.

 

The current preoccupation with happiness — a massive spate of books in recent years — testifies to a genuine questioning of whether we may not have taken a wrong turning in the unbridled pursuit of economic gain.  The consumer society, directed at making us happy, achieves the opposite.  It encourages us to spend money we do not have, to buy things we do not need, for the sake of a happiness that will not last.  By constantly directing our attention to what we do not have, instead of making us thankful for what we do have, it becomes a highly efficient system for the production and distribution of unhappiness.

 

What do we know about happiness?  There are basic preconditions:  food, clothing, shelter, health, what Abraham Maslow called the physiological and safety needs.  Similarly, Moses Maimonides said that perfection of the body takes chronological precedence over perfection of the soul.  It is impossible to focus on the higher reaches of spirituality if you are cold, hungry, homeless and sick.  One of the things I respect about Judaism is its refusal to romanticise poverty.

 

•   But beyond a basic minimum, the relationship between income and happiness is slight.  Research bears out Maslow’s analysis that the higher needs are love and belonging, esteem and self-actualisation.  The most significant determinants of happiness are strong and rewarding personal relationships, a sense of belonging to a community, being valued by others and living a meaningful life.  These are precisely the things in which religion specialises:  sanctifying marriage,
• etching family life with the charisma of holiness,
• creating and sustaining strong communities in which people are valued for what they are, not for what they earn or own,
• and providing a framework within which our lives take on meaning, purpose, even blessedness.

Even Karl Marx admitted that religion was ‘the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions’.

 

  Two British authors, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, have argued recently that societies that are more equal tend to have higher reported life satisfaction.  Religious faith does not of itself create economic equality.  But it does tell us that we are all equal in the sight of God.  Each of us counts.  A house of worship is one of the few places nowadays where rich and poor, young and old, meet on equal terms, where they are valued not for what they earn, but for what they are.

 

• It makes a difference to happiness to know that we are at home in the universe, that we are here because someone wanted us to be, and that something of us will live on.  The practices of religion — prayer as an expression of gratitude,
• ritual as enactment of meaning,
• sacred narrative as a way of understanding the world and our place in it,
• rites of passage that locate our journey as a shared experience connecting us to past and future generations,
• deeds of reciprocal kindness that bind us to a group in bonds of faith, loyalty and trust

— create structures of meaning and relationship within which our individuality can flourish.  This is where, for many of us, happiness is to be found.

 

‘There’s probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’ is one of the less profound propositions to have been produced by the collective intelligence of people who pride themselves on their intelligence.  It is at least as true as saying, ‘Exams don’t matter, work is a waste of time, love does not last, commitment only leads to disappointment.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’  Nothing worth striving for is easy, and nothing not worth striving for brings happiness. Pleasure, maybe; fun, perhaps; but happiness in any meaningful sense, no.  If I wanted to stop worrying, I would not choose a world blind to my existence, indifferent to my fate, with no solace in this life or any other.  Nor would I put my trust in those who ridiculed my deepest commitments.

 

  The Greatest Improbability of All

 

Writing in 1832, the young Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville made a mordant comment.

 

‘Eighteenth century philosophers,’ he wrote, ‘had a very simple explanation for the gradual weakening of beliefs.  Religious zeal, they said, was bound to die down as enlightenment and freedom spread.  It is tiresome that the facts do not fit this theory at all.’

 

Tocqueville was writing in the 1830s, in the full shock of his discovery that America — the very country that established the principle of separation of church and state — remained a deeply religious society.  It still is.  Today more Americans go weekly to a place of worship than do the people of Iran, a theocracy.

 

The survival of religion is the greatest improbability of all.  The world has changed beyond recognition since the Middle Ages.  Religion has lost many of the functions it once had.

• To explain the world, we have science.
• To control it, we have technology.
• To negotiate power, we have democratic politics.
• To achieve prosperity, we have a market economy.
• If we are ill, we go to a doctor, not a priest.
• If we feel guilty, we can go to a psychotherapist; we have no need of a confessor.
• If we are depressed, we can take Prozac; we do not need the book of Psalms.
• Schools and welfare services are provided by the state, not by the church.
• And if we seek salvation, we can visit the new cathedrals — the shopping malls –at which the consumer society pays homage to its gods.

 

Faith would seem to be redundant in the contemporary world.  And yet far from disappearing, it is alive and well and flourishing, in every part of the world except Europe.  In America there are mega-churches with congregations in the tens of thousands.  In China today there are more practising Christians than members of the Communist Party and almost as many Muslims as there are in Saudi Arabia.  In Russia, where religion was exiled for seventy years, a poll in 2006 showed that 84 per cent of the population believed in God.  And, as the editor of The Economist writes, whereas in the past religion was often associated with poverty, today ‘the growth in faith has coincided with a growth in prosperity’.

 

  Why is this so?  Because religion does what none of the great institutions of contemporary society does:  not politics, not economics, not science and not technology.  It answers the three great questions that any reflective human being will ask:

• Who am I? (the question of identity),
• Why am I here? (the question of purpose), and,
• How then shall I live?  (the question of ethics and meaning).

 

Today’s atheists — the neo-Darwinians, sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists –all too often engage in a sustained act of self-contradiction.  For them, what works is what survives:  genes biologically, and ‘memes’ culturally.  But manifestly, religion survives.  Faith lives on.  The religious in most countries have more children than the non-religious.  They are better at handing on their genes and memes to the next generation.  Meanwhile, after three centuries of sometimes aggressive secularism, we have moved into what Jürgen Habermas calls a ‘post-secular age’.  Yet in defiance of all the evidence on their own terms, the new atheists argue that religion is an epiphenomenon, an accidental by-product of something else:  once functional, now dysfunctional.  If this were so, it would have disappeared long ago.  Its survival is the supreme improbability.

 

The Defeat of Probability by the Power of Possibility

 

So if probability were the measure, there would be no universe, no life, no sentience, no self-consciousness, no humanity, no art, no questions, no poetry, no Rembrandt, no sense of humour, no sanctity of life, no love.  How probable is it that the most primitive bacterium would one day evolve into a humanity capable of decoding the genome itself?  Or that small religious groups would outlive great empires, that one day people would hold these truths self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that slavery would be abolished, tyrannies would fall and apartheid would end?

 

Faith is the defeat of probability by the power of possibility.  

 

The prophets dreamed the improbable and by doing so helped bring it about.  All the great human achievements, in art and science as well as the life of the spirit, came through people who ignored the probable and had faith in the possible.

 

How did this happen?  It happened in the West because Abraham and his descendants believed in a God who stood outside the entire natural order, the domain of cause and effect and of probability itself.  They believed in a God who defined himself in the phrase ‘I will be what I will be’, meaning, ‘I will be what, where and how I choose’ — hence, the God who defies predictability and probability.   By setting his image on humanity, he gave us too the power to defy probability to stand outside the taken-for-granted certainties of the age and live by another light.  The belief that gave the West its faith in the great duality charged by science and religion, the orderliness of the universe on the one hand, the freedom of humanity on the other.

 

‘Once you eliminate the impossible,’ said Sherlock Holmes, ‘whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’  That is the left-brain way of putting the argument.  The sheer cumulative weight of the evidence from cosmology, biology, history, the decline and fall of civilisations, the failure of secular revolutions, the forces making for altruism in an age of individualism, event he pursuit of happiness itself — all these point towards the presence of a vast intelligence at work in the universe that has revealed itself directly or obliquely to our ancestors and through them to us.

Despite E.O. Wilson’s noble effort at ‘consilience’, a scientific theory-of-everything, there is no hypothesis remotely as simple, elegant and all-encompassing as the idea that an intelligent Creator endowed creation with creativity.  For those who seek proof, this is as close as we can come, given our present state of knowledge of the universe and ourselves.

 

Speaking personally, however, as I have argued throughout, I believe that the demand for proof is misconceived.  It came from the strange combination of events in the first century when two very different cultures, ancient Greece and ancient Israel, came together in the form of a synthesis that eventually encouraged people to believe that science and religion, explanation and interpretation, impersonal and personal knowledge, were the same sort of thing, part of the same world of thought.  I have argued otherwise, that it is precisely because they are not the same sort of thing that the counterpoint between them gave and still gives human life its depth and pathos.  We can no more dispense with either than we can with one of the two hemispheres of the brain.

 

If so, then the improbabilities that have accumulated are not proof of the existence of God but a series of intimations.

• Science does not lead to religious conclusions;
  • religion does not lead to scientific conclusions.
• Science is about explanation.
  • Religion is about interpretation.
• Science takes things apart to see how they work.
  • Religion puts things together to see what they mean.

They are different intellectual enterprises that engage different hemispheres of the brain.

 

• Science — linear, atomistic, analytical — is a typical left-brain activity.
  • Religion — integrative, holistic, rational — is supremely a work of the right brain.

This is meant only as a metaphor, but it is a powerful one.

 

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

 

  At their best, science and religion are both instances of the human passion to decode mysteries, constantly travelling in search of a destination that continues to elude us, that is always over the furthermost horizon.  It is that willingness to search, ask, question, that makes us what we are.

 

Wallace Stevens, in his poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, wrote:

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

 

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

 

  Faith is the Courage to Take a Risk

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Faith is the courage to take a risk.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

  I Believe

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Abraham Joshua Heschel