Today’s Post
Last week we looked at, in some detail, how the perspectives and insights of Paul Davies and Teilhard offer the concept of a ‘terrain of synergy’ in which the underlying basis of universal evolution, increasing complexity, can be examined as Teilhard states, by “assailing the real from different angles and on different planes”.
This week we will address this terrain from the insights of Jonathan Sacks, Former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the United Kingdom, who views this from the middle ground.
The Human Person’s Need for Balance
Sacks locate the center point of this ‘terrain of synergy’ in the phenomenon of the human person:
“It is not incidental that Homo sapiens has been gifted with a bicameral brain that allows us to experience the world in two fundamentally different ways, as subject and object, ‘I’ and ‘Me’, capable of standing both within and outside our subjective experience. In that fact lies our moral and intellectual freedom, our ability to mix emotion and reflection, our capacity for both love and justice, attachment and detachment, in short, our humanity.”
He notes that the difficulty of attaining such synergy can be seen in the human difficulty to integrate these two modes of understanding, resulting in the dualisms to which we have become accustomed.
“ It is this (potential for synergy) that the reductivist – the scientist who denies the integrity of spirituality, or the religious individual who denies the findings of science- fails to understand.”
He also notes that most of us do not live our day-to-day lives in such a divided world. While the empirical facts that guide science must be recognized, our daily lives are lived in a mileu more ‘intuitional’ than ‘empirical’. He uses the human characteristic of ‘trust’ as an example. As Yuval Noah Harari explains in great detail in his book, “Sapiens”, the whole human edifice of economics, (so necessary for the welfare detailed by Johan Norberg) is predicated on ‘trust’. This welfare, unprecedented in human history, requires not only that individuals trust one another, but that they trust the ‘imaginary’ but tangible fabric of society. The nodes of this fabric, such as states, banks, schools and laws are both results of ‘trust’ and structures upholding welfare.
Such trust isn’t empirically measurable or provable (as the empiricists would require) but it is nonetheless a key strand of the fabric that holds society together. Those times when it erodes (as in an economic collapse), human welfare suffers greatly.
Sacks goes on to show how trust is more than just part of the glue that holds society together, and is the basis for our own personal outlook:
“Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved. For example, a person who manages the virtue of trust will experience a different life than one to whom every human relationship is a potential threat.”
And this is where the ‘center’ of the ‘terrain of synergy’ is located.
How Did We Get Here?
As Sacks sees it, the road to today’s bifurcation between science and religion began in the sixteenth century:
“The rise of science can be seen to have resulted from the impact of the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that led figures like Descartes and Newton to seek certainty on the basis of a structure of knowledge that did not rest on dogmatic foundations. One way or another, first science, then philosophy, declared their independence from theology and the great arch stretching from Jerusalem to Athens began to crumble. First came the seventeenth century realization that the earth was not the center of the universe. Then came the development of a mechanistic science that sought explanations in terms of prior causes, not ultimate purposes. Then came the eighteenth century philosophical assault by Hume and Kant, on the philosophical arguments for the existence of God. Hume pointed up the weakness of the argument from design. Kant refuted the ontological argument. Then came the nineteenth century and Darwin. This was, on the face of it, the most crushing blow of all, because it seemed to show that the entire emergence of life was the result of a process that was blind.”
In his view, the Christian religion of the West arose with a few foundational cracks that would eventually weaken it.
“Christendom drew its philosophy, science and art from Greece, its religion from Israel. But from the outset it contained a hairline fracture that would not become a structural weakness until the seventeenth century. It consisted in this: that though Christians encountered philosophy, science and art in the original Greek, they experienced the religion of their founder in translation. While Greek is not the language of Jesus, it was the natural language of thought of Paul, the writers of the gospels, the authors of the other books of the NT, the early church Fathers, and the first Christian theologians. This was (brilliant but with) one assumption that would eventually be challenged from the seventeenth century until today: namely that science and philosophy, on the one hand, and religion on the other, belong to the same universe of discourse. They may, and they may not. It could be that Greek science and philosophy and the Judiac experience of God are two different languages- that, like the left- and right-brain modes of thinking only imperfectly translate into one another.”
Sacks not only envisions the possibility that science and religion can ‘intertranslate’, but goes a little further. He believes that they need each other. Better yet, he believes that humanity needs both of them to be able to flourish.
The Next Post
This week we addressed Davies’ and Teilhard’s ‘terrain of synthesis’ as the intersect between science and religion, this time from Jonathan Sacks’ ‘middle ground’: the human person.
Next week we will build on this centrist vision to address how the powerful systems of science and religion can benefit from expanding this terrain.