The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning - Softcover

Sacks, Jonathan

 
9780805212501: The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0805212507 ISBN 13: 9780805212501
Verlag: SCHOCKEN BOOKS INC, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Impassioned, erudite, thoroughly researched, and beautifully reasoned, The Great Partnership argues not only that science and religion are compatible, but that they complement each other—and that the world needs both.
 
“Atheism deserves better than the new atheists,” states Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “whose methodology consists of criticizing religion without understanding it, quoting texts without contexts, taking exceptions as the rule, confusing folk belief with reflective theology, abusing, ridiculing, and demonizing religious faith and holding it responsible for the great crimes against humanity. Religion has done harm; I acknowledge that. But the cure for bad religion is good religion, not no religion, just as the cure for bad science is good science, not the abandonment of science.” Rabbi Sacks’s counterargument is that religion and science are the two essential perspectives that allow us to see the universe in its three-dimensional depth. Science teaches us where we come from. Religion explains to us why we are here. Science is the search for explanation. Religion is the search for meaning. There have been times when religion tried to dominate science. And there have been times, including our own, when it is believed that we can learn all we need to know about meaning and relationships through biochemistry, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology. In this fascinating look at the interdependence of religion and science, Rabbi Sacks explains why both views are tragically wrong.

***National Jewish Book Awards 2012, Finalist***
Dorot Foundation Award for Modern Jewish Thought and Experience

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

One of the most admired religious thinkers of our time, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is the award-winning author of more than two dozen books, is heard regularly on the BBC, and has received many international awards and honorary degrees from universities around the world. From 1991 to 2013 he served as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. He was made a Life Peer and took his seat in the House of Lords in October 2009.

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1

The Meaning-Seeking Animal

Two Stories

The first: In the beginning, some 13.7 billion years ago, there was an unimaginably vast explosion of energy, out of which the universe emerged for no reason whatsoever. In the course of time stars coalesced, then planets, then, 4.54 billion years ago, one particular planet capable of supporting life. Seven hundred million years later, inanimate matter became animate. Cells began to reproduce. Life forms began to appear, first simple, then of ever-increasing complexity. Some of these survived; others disappeared. Eventually a life form came into being capable of complex patterns of speech, among them the future tense and the ability to ask questions. For the first time something in the universe became capable of knowing that the universe existed, that it might not have done, and of asking, ‘Why is it here? Why are we here?’

The formation of the universe involved massive improbabilities. Had a single one of the mathematical constants that determined the shape of the universe been slightly different – even by the order of one in a million – there would have been no stars, no planets, no life. Had the evolution of life been slightly different, had the dinosaurs not become extinct, for example, there would have been no Homo sapiens, no self-conscious being and no civilisation. But all of this was accidental, blind, mere chance. It happened. No one intended it to happen. There was no one to intend it to happen, and there is no meaning to the fact that it happened. The universe was. One day it will cease to be. To the question, ‘Why are we here?’ the answer is silence.

We, members of the species Homo sapiens, are wrong to believe that our questions and answers, hopes and dreams, have any significance whatsoever. They are fictions dressed up to look like facts. We have no souls. Even our selves are fictions. All we have are sensations, and even these are mere by-products of evolution. Thought, imagination, philosophy, art: these are dramas in the theatre of the mind designed to divert and distract us while truth lies elsewhere. For thoughts are no more than electrical impulses in the brain, and the brain is merely a complicated piece of meat, an organism. The human person is a self-created fiction. The human body is a collection of cells designed by genes, themselves incapable of thought, whose only purpose is blindly to replicate themselves over time.

Humans might write novels, compose symphonies, help those in need, and pray, but all this is a delicately woven tapestry of illusions. People might imagine themselves as if on a stage under the watchful eye of infinity, but there is no one watching. There is no one to watch. There is no self-conscious life anywhere else, either within the universe or beyond. There is nothing beyond sheer random happenstance. Humans are no more significant, and less successful at adapting to their environment, than the ants. They came, they will go, and it will be as if they had never been. Why are we here? We just are.

The second: The universe was called into being by One outside the universe, fascinated by being, and with that desire-to-bring-things-into-being that we call love. He brought many universes into being. Some exploded into being, then collapsed. Others continued to grow so fast that nothing coalesced into stable concentrations of matter. One, however, so closely fitted the parameters that stars and planets did form. The One waited to see what would happen next. Eventually life formed and evolved, until one creature emerged capable of communication.

The One sent messages to this creature. At first no one noticed. Thousands of years passed during which the creatures invented tools, hunted, developed agriculture, and eventually built cities and constructed cultures. They told all sorts of stories to explain why they were there, fanciful stories to be sure, for this was the childhood of civilisation. But eventually one man, Abraham, a shepherd far away from the noise of the city, listened to the silence for long enough, intently enough, to discern a message, the message. The one heard the One.

It was enough to send him on a journey. Where, why, to do what – of these things he had no more than a dim intuition. But he sensed that he had stumbled on something of immense significance, and he handed on the memory to his children with the instruction that they should hand it on to theirs. Eventually his descendants grew to become a nation, not numerous, not powerful; indeed they had become slaves. This time another individual, Moses, a complex figure who had spent his life among strangers as an Egyptian prince and then as a shepherd among the Midianites, heard the voice again. What it told him changed his life. Through an immense historic drama of liberation and revelation it transformed Abraham’s children, by then known as the Israelites, into a covenanted nation under the sovereignty of God. Eventually it changed the world.

It said that every human being had within him or her a trace of the One who created the universe. Like the One, human beings could speak, think and communicate. They could imagine a world not present to the senses, entertain different scenarios for the future and choose between them. They could change their environment because they could change themselves. They could show that history is not destined to be an endless replay of the victory of the strong over the weak. They could construct a society built on respect for human dignity, equality and freedom, and though they failed time and again, the prophets who came after Moses never gave up the vision or the hope. Somehow they sensed that something of larger consequence was at stake.

And so the journey continued, haltingly, never without relapses and sometimes with terrible failures. The people Moses led, known to themselves as the Israelites, to others as the Hebrews, and to history as the Jews, never lost faith with that original vision even when they lost everything else: their land, their sovereignty and their freedom.

Other people in the course of time were impressed by their message and adapted and adopted it in somewhat different forms, becoming new religions in their own right. One became known as Christianity, the other Islam. Eventually it became the faith of more than half of the six billion people on the face of the planet. It did not fully transform humanity. We remain fallible people, all too often falling short of what we are called on to become.Yet those who followed Abraham’s call gave rise to moments of graciousness that lifted our small and insignificant species to great heights of moral, spiritual and aesthetic beauty.

Thus the One came to be known by the many, obscurely to be sure, in visions and voices that strained against the limits of language, for the words we have to describe things within the universe are by definition inadequate to describe what lies beyond it. The closest the voice ever came to identifying itself was in the cryptic, enigmatic words Ehyeh asher ehyeh, ‘I will be what I will be’. But in striving to listen to the more-than-human, human beings learned what it is to be human, for in discovering God, singular and alone, they eventually learned to respect the dignity and sanctity of the human person, singular and alone. We may be dust of the Earth, the debris of exploded stars, a concatenation of blindly self-replicating genes, but within us is the breath of God.

Two rival views, each coherent and consistent, each simplified to be sure, but marking out the great choice, the two framing visions of the human situation. One asserts that life is meaningless. The other claims that life is meaningful. The facts are the same on both scenarios. So is the science that explains the facts. But the world is...

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Verlag
SCHOCKEN BOOKS INC
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0805212507
ISBN 13 
9780805212501
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
370
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
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