In the potential collaboration between science and religion to lead us forward, what part can religion play?
Today’s Post
Last week we looked at the last four of Teilhard’s eight ways of seeing the natural confluence between religion and science. As we saw, Teilhard understands them to be natural facets of a synthesized understanding of the noosphere, and therefore potentially of benefit to an increased insight into human life.
This week we will see how another thinker sees this potential for a closer and more beneficial relationship. Jonathan Sacks, former British Chief Rabbi, comes at this subject from a slightly different perspective. While Teilhard situates traditional dualities into an evolutive context to resolve them, Sacks understands them in the context of the two primary modes of human understanding intuition and empiricism.
Sacks On the Evolution of Religion
Teilhard of course placed religion (as he does all things) into an evolutionary context as one strand of ‘universal becoming’. His understanding of the mutual benefit of a synthesis between science and religion is focused on their paired value to the continuation human evolution.
Sacks, in his book, “The Great Partnership”, stays closer to home, focusing on religion’s potential to help us to become what we are capable of becoming. From this perspective, religion, properly understood and applied, is a mechanism for our personal growth in the context of our collective growth. Sacks sees the evolution of human thinking in the unfolding of religion and the evolution of language, and thus as a slow movement towards a balance between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ hemispheres of the human brain. In this way, the cooperation between religion and science can be seen as simply a more balanced and harmonious way of thinking in which the traditional ‘dualities’ (as seen by both Teilhard and Sacks) can be resolved.
Science’s Need for Religion
Sacks’ perspective is strongly resonant with Johan Norberg’s insight as he sees the freedom of the human person as the cornerstone of improving human welfare. Like Jefferson, he also recognizes the role that religion has played in the evolution of society:
“Outside religion there is no secure alternative base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image. Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded.”
The ‘none’ to which he refers can of course be seen in those countries which tried to create a “social order based on materialistic lines”. These examples can be seen in Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the Kim family’s North Korea.
As he sees it, the problem arises when an alternative to religion’s value of the human person is sought. Sacks locates the failure of such searches in science’s inability to address human freedom. As he sees it:
“To the extent that there is a science of human behavior, to that extent there is an implicitly denial of the freedom of human behavior.”
He sees this duality at work in Spinoza, Marx and Freud, who argued that human freedom is an illusion, but notes that “If freedom is an illusion, so is human dignity”. Hence when human dignity is denied, the state is no longer viable.
Sacks agrees with the success of science in overcoming the superstitions that so often accompany religion, but notes that it does not replace the path to ‘meaning’ offered by religion. He summarizes these two facets of human understanding:
“Science takes things apart to understand how they work. Religion puts things together to show what they mean.”
For science to be effective, its statements must be objectively ‘proved’, and the means of doing so are accepted across the breadth of humanity. Both the need for such rigor and the success of its application can be seen in the many aspects of increased human welfare (effectively advances in human evolution) as seen by Johan Norberg. Clearly the ‘scientific method’ is a significant root of human evolution.
However, Norberg recognizes the cornerstones of human evolution as human freedom, innovation and relationship. These three facets of the human person are not ‘provable’, and which existence, as we saw above, is even denied by many ‘empiricists’. Since these facets are active in the sap of evolution, they also must be in the root.
At the level of the human person, Sacks observes that
“Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved.”
He offers the example of ‘trust’.
“A person who manages the virtue of trust will experience a different life than one to whom every human relationship is a potential threat.”
Therefore, any group in which all the members can trust one another is at a massive advantage to others. As evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, this is what religion does more powerfully than any other system.
The Next Post
This week we took a first look at the insights into Jonathan Sacks on the value of religion to human evolution, and of how these values, while critical to this evolution, are not to be found in our other great system of thought: science.
Next week, we will look at the other side of the coin to see how science offers its own critical value. These two perspectives, when seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, can lead to an insight in which they can collaborate in insuring our path to the future.