Rabbi Art: Judaism and Science

On November 1, 1755, it was All Saints’ Day in Lisbon, Portugal – then one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.  That day, as the churches were packed with devout worshipers at mass, a devastating earthquake struck the city. A modern writer describes it like this: “Just before ten in the morning, the city was hit by a sudden sideways lurch now estimated in magnitude 9.0 and shaken furiously for seven full minutes.
Bill Bryson, author of , “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” presents a primary source, “The convulsive force was so great that the water rushed out of the city’s harbor and returned in a wave fifty feet high, adding to the destruction. When at last the motion ceased, survivors waited just three minutes of calm before a second shock came, only slightly less severe than the first. A third and final shock followed two hours later. At the end of it all, sixty thousand people were dead, and virtually every building for miles reduced to rubble”. 
The Lisbon earthquake, followed by five days of horrific fires, was the most catastrophic natural disaster of the 18th century – it has been called the first disaster of the modern age. Scenes of mass carnage set off seismic shifts in the mind and heart, as well. Ideals were shattered along with the great cathedrals. When churches collapse and bury thousands of pious people at prayer, it is hard to cling to the notion of a beneficent God who governs the universe with justice.
But the day after the earthquake some priests had already mounted their pulpits to explain that the disaster was God’s dire punishment of the people of Portugal for their many sins, including their love for music, dancing, theater and bull fights.
Human beings, then as now, are compelled to make sense of the universe. We look for patterns, we search for meaning, and we dread the very idea of randomness. A God who created the universe with a grand design, a Supreme Being who cares about each one of us, a Being who rewards and punishes us in accordance with our deeds – such a God makes the world intelligible.
The Lisbon earthquake, with all its horrors, was a turning point for the philosophers of the Enlightenment. It made them ask deep questions about the idea of religious faith.
Science and reason have made war on religion since the time of Copernicus, gathering force in every generation, slashing away at the foundations of faith and undermining its claims on the human mind. Recently, a spate of books has appeared with the view that science’s victory over religion as cause for celebration.
Many of today’s attacks on religious faith are waged with a sense of malicious contempt. Read Christopher Hitchens’ “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”—or Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion.” argue, with varying degrees of eloquence, that religion, all religion, preaches lies and stupidities and stands in the way of human progress; that those who practice religion are at best fools and at worst dangerous fanatics who threaten the survival of the human race. Dawkins, an important evolutionary biologist, has curiously suggested that we refer to atheists as “brights,” which leaves believers, I guess, as “dulls”.
Can religion and science coexist today in the mind of a modern Jew? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself intensely for a long time. I am fascinated by science; I have built my life on Judaism and the Jewish People; I have profound respect for the intellect; I do not want to be a fool or a dull. I want to know what I can honestly believe. This is an ultimate issue for me – I know that it is for you, as well.
Our questions matter especially tonight, as we enter these holy days: this intense season of prayer and repentance before the One whom we Jews call the Judge of all the earth. What, exactly, are we doing here? Why are we doing it? Is this coming together in prayer no more than an antiquated ritual, a primitive act of groveling to an imaginary king in the sky? Is it, as Freud might argue, a collective exercise in fantasy, an expression of our longing for a perfect father?
Do we mean the words we read aloud from the prayer book? Can we believe, really believe, in the religious value of what we are doing here tonight? Or should we chalk it up to a purely humanistic experience: a chance to sit quietly and think about whatever we like, a chance to get together with friends and enjoy beautiful music and a sense of community?
I want to say that I can endorse some of what Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have to say. Some religious teachings are foolish or destructive, or both. Some religious people, threatened by the teachings of science, close their eyes to facts and try to impose their ideologies on others by force. Some religious practitioners commit atrocious acts; some are inspired to do so by their religion. Religious wars have killed millions and they continue to ravage our world.
Does religion, then, do more evil than good?  I see no evidence whatever that religion creates the human propensity for aggression or evil, though certainly, religion is used by unscrupulous leaders to incite bigotry and hate. So also are all human institutions – governments, medicine, science, the education system, the legal system – subject to manipulation in destructive ways. All are created and administered by people, and people are flawed. Religion claims, in fact, that it is because people are fallible and flawed that we need the discipline of faith and tradition in the first place.
If there were no religions around, I have no doubt that people would come up with other ways to hurt and oppress one another. That’s certainly been the case in countries where religion has been rigidly suppressed. Communist China and Stalinist Russia were not known for benevolent treatment of their citizens. The worst genocides of the 20th century took place under secular, atheist regimes.
It’s true that religious people cooperated with such genocides. Devout Christians served in the Gestapo and supported Fascism; religious leaders helped carry out the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda.
But secular men and women of science also put their gifts at the service of genocide. Supremely well-educated academics lined up enthusiastically in support of heinous ideologies. They demonstrated with all the tools of their craft that some racial groups were subhuman that mentally-challenged people were “useless eaters,” that enemies of the state did not deserve to live. They designed gas chambers and carried out medical experiments in concentration camps; they persecuted political prisoners in psychiatric hospitals in the Soviet Union.
Does religious faith make people better? Some believers heroically defied the Nazis, fought in other eras for the abolition of slavery and apartheid, work hard throughout the world to alleviate poverty and hunger. Secular atheist heroes have also done all of these things. What are we to make of this? Religion can inspire noble and courageous acts, but there is no hard evidence that religion leads inevitably to improvements in human behavior. It is so called religious people, after all, who blow up abortion clinics, carry out suicide bombings, and terror attacks.
It is also clear, unfortunately, that reason and science alone do not lead us to the good. The most powerful microscope or telescope can’t provide evidence that mentally or physically challenged people should not be gassed. Logic alone will not make you a moral person. It offers no transcendent values and ethics.
It was for this reason, perhaps, that Albert Einstein uttered his famous words: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” The words suggest that the two can and should co-exist in the mind of a modern Jew, or any person who desires the best for humankind.
Francis Collins, the distinguished scientist who heads up the Human Genome Project. In his book called “The Language of God,” Collins says that unlocking the genetic structure of life and contemplating the process of evolution only enhanced his religious consciousness.
For Einstein and Collins, the advancement of the scientific frontier does not erode belief; rather, the more we learn about the universe, the more amazing and awesome it becomes.
Religion focuses on meaning and value – questions about how we should live and the purpose of our existence. In a famous phrase, scientist, Stephen J. Gould described religion and science as “non-overlapping magisteria”; they are, he said, two separate domains of intellectual authority and neither should interfere with the other.
This is an attractive idea to those of us who want to live in both worlds, to embrace the findings of science while anchoring ourselves in the world of faith and tradition. But we should realize that a religion that wants to co-exist harmoniously with science can not be a simpleminded faith.
First, no religion that reads the Bible literally is compatible with reason and science. No religion that sees in the Bible factual statements about the birth of the cosmos and the origin of life is compatible with science.
Fortunately, that’s not a problem for Judaism. Liberal Jews have never seen the Bible as the literal word of God.  Even traditional Judaism has never favored a narrow, simple, fundamentalist reading of the text.  Our earliest commentaries favor multiple interpretations, allegory, symbolism and metaphor.
In the 12th century, before the advent of telescopes, microscopes and the scientific method, the physician Maimonides wrote that the search for truth draws us closer to God. Exploring the laws of nature, he taught, increases our reverence and awe; so the religious person need not fear the gift of intellect. Maimonides added that if the verifiable discoveries of science are ever shown to contradict the Torah, then the Torah must be re-interpreted and understood differently.
No religion that claims that God protects good people from harm, and punishes evil through the mechanism of earthquakes, fires, floods or disease is compatible with the findings of science. Fortunately, I, as a committed Jew, am not required to believe any such thing. Already in the Talmud we find a statement that the world operates according to the regular laws of nature, without regard to our good or evil acts [Avodah Zarah 54b].
What, then, am I asked to believe, as a committed and faithful modern Jew? Do any of these beliefs contradict the findings of science or reason? And can I, with sincerity and integrity, say the prayers given to us to read on these High Holy Days?
Remember, first, that we shouldn’t read prayers for information about the world around us the way we’d pick up a textbook or the New York Times. We read prayers as we read literature or poetry, attentive to sound and rhythm and powerful symbols. No Jew, no matter how pious or observant, claims that God composed our prayers. They are profoundly human words, a record of Jewish hopes, dreams and fears—crystallized in heartfelt words.
Some prayers go back 2000 years to the time of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Some were composed by the sages of Talmudic times. Some come from the medieval period of Crusaders, Inquisition and martyrdom. Some were composed in our own time. Many passages in the prayer book are not prayers in the literal sense at all. They are passages from the Bible and other study texts, intended to teach Jewish values, addressed not to God but to us.
Prayers speak in the idiom and metaphors of their own time. So some address God as mighty king or shepherd or judge of all the earth. Maimonides and others teach us never to take these metaphors literally or to mistake them for factual statements about God. They are human attempts to comprehend the nature of being and our place in the world.
Here’s what I think the poets who composed our Jewish prayers were really saying:
They said that they experienced life as a whole, with all its struggles and joys and incomprehensible pain, as a precious gift and a blessing. For reasons we don’t comprehend we are called into being, given consciousness and breath. They were not blasé about the incredible fact that we are here at all. They affirmed the sanctity of life, teaching that preserving and protecting life is our sacred obligation.
They found the universe amazing, wondrous, stunning and elegant in its order. Entranced by the natural rhythms of times and seasons, the passage of the heavenly bodies in their orbits, they sought to create the same beautiful, stable, comforting rhythms in their own lives through customs and ceremonies to mark the passages of life.
They saw themselves as part of a distinct people, called to particular tasks and responsibilities in the world; a people with a unique purpose and destiny. They responded to that call with gratitude – an emotion all the more poignant because they were fully aware of the price they paid every day for continuing to be Jews. They regarded with love their Torah, their teaching, grateful for its guidance and wisdom, inspired by its continual challenge to be more and better and higher than they were.
They felt at this autumn season an especially keen sense of the fragility of life, how quickly it passes, how suddenly it leaves us. They believed that we should use our fleeting time to do more than satisfy our own appetites. They taught that we are summoned to lift up our lives to a great purpose, to work to repair what is broken and wounded, to live with righteousness and holiness.
They believed that in the end, goodness would prevail. They believed, like the Reverend Martin Luther King, that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Even in the darkest times, they defiantly declared their commitment to hope.
Can you affirm these things? Can you say these prayers? Can you sing them in the ancient language of our people, feeling in the joining of our voices, a sense that we are part of something greater than ourselves? That, after all, is the central purpose of our Judaism, isn’t it: to expand our awareness and lift us out of the closed circle of self-concern.
My modern Judaism does not give me absolute certainty, and it does not always give me peace. It gives me, more than anything else, a sense of challenge and hope in what people can do, guided and instructed by the highest truths we know by God
My Judaism says that in a world where the very earthquakes under our feet and solid structures fall into the sea, we can be steadfast and constant in our care for one another. It says that the whole world is a narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.