Today’s Post
Last week we looked at the last four of Teilhard’s seven ways of seeing the natural confluence between religion and science. As we saw, Teilhard understands them to be natural facets of a central synthesized understanding of the noosphere, and therefore potentially of benefit to continued relevance to human life.
This week we will take a look at 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. As discussed previously, 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
With this in mind, Sacks recognizes the West’s unique understanding of the person as the cornerstone of its success in improving human welfare. Like Jefferson, he also recognizes the role that religion has played in the development of this unique perspective:
“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 secular 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 denies, the state no longer viable.
Sacks agrees with the success of science in overcoming the superstitions that often accompany religion, but notes that it does not replace the path to ‘meaning’ that religion offered. 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 ‘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 in our series on Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”. Clearly the ‘scientific method’ is at the root of human evolution.
However, as we noted in this series, Norberg recognizes the basis 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 they 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. This, as evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, is what religion does more powerfully than any other system.
The unprovable human capability to trust, like many others, underpins human evolution at the level of society. It contributes to the success of relationships, one of Norberg’s three ‘basics’, as Sacks goes on to observe:
“Therefore, any group in which all the members can trust one another is at a massive advantage to others. This, as evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, is what religion does more powerfully than any other system. “
Religion’s Need for Science
Just as the left- brained perspectives of science are in need of the right-brained balance of religion, as implicitly recognized by Norberg, so are the perspectives of religion in need of balance from science.
The claims of all forms of religion are based on metaphorical beliefs, many of which are anathema to those who are powering the ‘progress’ curve outlined by Norberg. As we saw in the case of Thomas Jefferson, he systematically stripped the gospels of such ‘miraculous’ teachings to reveal what he considered to be the bedrock of “The Teachings of Jesus” which he in turn applied to his underlying (and unprovable) assertions of the value and dignity of the individual human person.
Many educated persons believe that scientific insight will eventually replace religion as the base of human action. It is certainly true that in the past two hundred or so years, many religious teachings have become unacceptable due to the rise of empiricism, such as the formal blaming of the Jewish race for the death of Jesus, the seven literal days of creation, and so on. The continuing influence of religion in many parts of the world is more due to its ability to push back on state corruption and savagery than its teachings on reincarnation and virgin births. But with the increasing evolution of state structures more benign to the human person, such as that found in democracies, the underlying importance that religion places on the individual human person plays a larger role.
For religion to continue to play a role in this evolution, it must be seen as relevant. As Sacks sees it:
“Religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world. If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.”
The Road to Synthesis
So, how do we get to the point where right- and left- brain process are balanced? Sacks addresses what happens when we don’t:
“Bad things happen when religion ceases to hold itself answerable to empirical reality, when it creates devastation and cruelty on earth for the sake of salvation in heaven. And bad things happen when science declares itself the last word on the human condition and engages in social or bio-engineering, treating humans as objects rather than as subjects, and substitution of cause and effect for reflection, will and choice.”
He recognizes that science and religion have their own way of asking questions and searching for answers, but doesn’t see it as a basis for compartmentalization, in which they are seen as entirely separate worlds. Like Teilhard, he sees the potential for synergy “..because they are about the same world within which we live, breathe and have our being”.
He sees the starting point for such synergy as “conversation”, in hopes that it will lead to “integration”. From Sacks’ perspective:
“Religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world. If we try to, the result will be magic or misplaced supernaturalism.”
By the same token, he goes on:
“Science needs religion, or at the very least some philosophical understanding of the human condition and our place within the universe, for each fresh item of knowledge and each new accession of power raises the question of how it should be used, and for that we need another way of thinking.”
Even though Sacks doesn’t place his beliefs, like Teilhard, in an explicitly evolutionary context, he does envision a more complete manifestation of the human emerging as a result of a more complete balance between the influence of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains (modes of engaging reality). In this sense, he echoes Teilhard’s belief of ‘fuller being’ resulting from ‘closer union’.
The Next Post
This week we have seen how Jonathan Sacks approaches Teilhard’s call for a fresh approach to the potential synergy between religion and science. Like Teilhard, he concludes that the success of the West requires a synergy between science and religion if it is to continue.
Next week I will begin to wrap up this blog, “The Secular Side of God” with a review of what we set out to do, the steps we took, and the conclusions to which we came.