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Dec. 28, 2012

Straw dog view hinders

The Great Partnership tackles science, religion.
DR. GRAHAM FORST

The title of Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ latest book, The Great Partnership (Hodder, 2011), refers to a wished-for “partnership” between science and religion, each of which, in theory, requires the other’s methods and conclusions to complete themselves. As Sacks writes, “science takes things apart to see how they work, religion puts things together to see what they mean.” (Albert Einstein made the same point when he said “science without religion is lame, religion with science is blind.”)

We may assume we know what the rabbi means by “religion,” but what he means by “science” is unclear. It is vaguely defined here in reductionist terms of analysis and generalization – as “murder by dissection” to evoke Wordsworth. Unfortunately, this “straw-dog” view of science skews Sacks’ thesis seriously and unnecessarily.

Sacks’ religion/science dichotomy draws on a view of the brain as “bicameral”: the left hemisphere as dissecting and the right as assembling. But it doesn’t take long for this disjunction to become something pejorative. Not only does it become the basis for the science/religion dualism but also, by extrapolation, of a sterile “Greek” versus a fruitful “Hebrew” perspective. In Sacks’ view, the “Greek” perspective is exclusively “this worldly” and wholly rational, and, as such, “intrinsically dehumanizing.” The “Hebrew” (biblical) perspective, however, is more “other-worldly,” thus ennobling, holistic, value-laden and sacramental.

Clearly, there’s no hiding where the rabbi’s sentiments lie here: we learn, among other things, that the philosophically inspired French and Communist revolutions failed because they were left-hemispheric, unlike the successful, right-hemispheric, Bible-inspired American Revolution, and the British “Glorious Revolution” of 1666. We also learn that leftbrained-ness leads to toleration of divorce, abortion and same sex marriage; right-brainedness to traditional marriage and family values. In literary history, the left-hemispheric Homeric epics lack an “internalized conscience” as opposed to the higher morality of the right-hemispheric biblical ethics (unless of course you’re an Amalekite or a Canaanite), and so on.

Sacks also sees the Greek/science view of life as inferior to the Hebrew religious view on the grounds that the Greek view “lacks meaning” and “seems despairing,” whereas the Hebrew vision has always remained (Job, Jeremiah, Sigmund Freud and Elie Wiesel notwithstanding) purpose-driven and “optimistic,” which completely begs the question as to whether such optimism is based on what Karl Marx called the “opium of the people” or Freud as psychopathology.

In the end, we must adopt the religious view, writes Sacks, because religion, as opposed to philosophy, “works.” Religion “works” because (the Abrahamic) religion, and only (the Abrahamic) religion “can create human freedom and dignity.”

What about the dignity of the whole humanist tradition of the classical world, and its revival in the Renaissance? What about freedom and dignity in the irreligious Shakespeare, and in those who challenge conventional religion and/or are atheists, like Mozart and Nehru, George Eliot and Benjamin Franklin, not to mention in the whole universe of Buddhists? What about Sacks’ own beloved mentor, Bernard Williams – who, like those mentioned above, in Sacks’ terms, must have lacked dignity, and lived an unfree and unproductive life?

Even more problematic is Sacks’ insistence that the so-called Greek “tragic view” is inherently depressing. As Bertrand Russell said, the open window of free thought can indeed make us shiver, but “in the end, the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.” Not for Sacks, however, for whom only such a “framing belief” as a “loving, transcendental God” can “render human existence other than tragic.”

Is Sacks proposing that belief in a comforting illusion is better than no belief at all? (Note that Sacks doesn’t think God’s existence needs proving – that’s a reductionist “Greek” strategy. God needs glorifying, he writes, not analyzing.)  Does he mean that a drugged existence is better than an existence marked by Albert Camus’ “revolt” or “scorn”? Camus represents his rock-pushing Sisyphus as “happy” in his scorning of his fate, a fact that Sacks recognizes. Sisyphus, however, is despairingly alone, writes Sacks; he lacks the loving community of faith and is, therefore, eternally condemned to solitude and anguish, since “religion is the redemption of solitude.” For Camus and others, of course, solitude is the redemption of religion.

What about evil? The reader has to wait until the very short Chapter 12 for a discussion of evil, only to be told that rational attempts to account for evil are just so many more reductionist “Greek” strategies, and that we should rather become right-brained “Hebrews” by simply accepting evil and working to prevent it.

So, how do we reconcile “God’s transforming love” with the plangent cry from Auschwitz, “For God’s sake, where is God?” Again and again throughout his book, Sacks speaks of “the goodness of the world” and repeats that “the universe was created in love by the God of love”: surely these claims, when made post-Holocaust, demand a reasoned response to the existence of evil – but it won’t be found here, where evil is discussed in terms of tsunamis and earthquakes.  The Holocaust is never mentioned in Sacks’ chapter on evil.

Sacks’ only answer to suffering is that it is needed for “growth.”  But surely this view, however valid in the past, cannot apply since Hitler.

Sacks’ final push for the right-brained God hypothesis is that it is required to account for our sense of moral values. Without God, he writes, citing the old canard, “all is permitted.” For (the Abrahamic) religion and only (the Abrahamic) religion can “teach us to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

That’s the “great commandment,” says Jesus, citing Leviticus. Ironically, for Sacks’ religious point, Jesus’ counsel is illustrated in parable by the godless Samaritan’s assisting of the dying Jew – the same dying Jew who had been ignored by the God-loving Levite who passed by him. The biblical point of the Good Samaritan parable, no less than of the Book of Ruth, is, surely, that morality boils down simply to helping each other and refusing to do harm, values that are deeply embedded in our social consciences, without which ethical dimension our societies would crumble. We know this, no less than did the Good Samaritan, even if he did not, or we do not, know God.

So, in Sacks’ “partnership,” one partner “screens out” that which makes us free, worthy, spiritual, lovers of art, lovers of life, responsible and selfless; the other champions these qualities, while maintaining the conservative traditions of love and family and fear of God.

Clearly, Lord Sacks’ partnership is a partnership of one. This is a pity, because perhaps an “arranged” relationship with a science defined more richly would be more promising. Much good thinking has been done recently on the partnership of religion and a science reflecting the “weird” dimensions of quantum theory – relativity, non-locality, quantum entanglement, wave-particle identity, uncertainty, superposition, etc. This potentiality is theoretically rich because in quantum theory, as in religion, there must be room for extra-dimensionality, for places where there’s no place (eternity) and times when there’s no time (infinity), for things we know must exist, but can’t define or detect, like that completely conjectural particle denoted left-hemispherically as the Higgs boson or right-hemispherically as the “God Particle.” Now there’s a partnership.

Graham Forst, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education departments at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

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