Sunday, October 05, 2008

Rabbi Art: Judaism and Science

Judaism and Science: A Modern Faith Partners not Rivals
Rosh Hashanah 5769
Rabbi Art Donsky's Rosh Hashanah sermon

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 beneficient 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, 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 have 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 cannot 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 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.