Science versus Religion?
I offered this sermon during Rosh Hashanah morning 5775 (Sep 25, 2014).
Billy
During the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, three men were to be executed by guillotine: a rabbi, a priest, and a rationalist skeptic.
The rabbi was the first to be marched up onto the platform. There, facing Madame Guillotine, he was asked if he had any last words. The rabbi recited the Shema and pleaded with God to save him. The executioner positioned the rabbi beneath the blade, placed the block above his neck, and pulled the lever that set the terrible instrument in motion. The heavy cleaver plunged downward, searing the air. But with a crack, just a few inches above the rabbi’s neck, the blade suddenly stopped. “It’s a miracle!” gasped the crowd, and the executioner had to agree. The rabbi was released.
Next in line was the priest. Asked if he had any last words, the priest cried out, “Our Father, who art in heaven, rescue me in my hour of need.” The executioner positioned the priest beneath the blade and pulled the lever. Again the blade flew downward, stopping one inch, and no more, short of its mark. “Another miracle.” the crowd called out, this time with discernible disappointment. And for a second time, the executioner released his victim.
Now it was the skeptic’s turn. “Any last words?” he was asked. But the skeptic wasn’t paying attention. He was staring intently at Madame G, and not until the executioner poked him in the ribs and the question was asked again did he reply, “Oh, I see your problem. You’ve got a blockage in the gear assembly right … there!”
Which may explain why there are fewer rationalist skeptics than true believers in the world today.
This is the beginning of my twentieth year at Woodlands. First, thanks for the job. I love this temple. Second, in all these years, I still feel like people who question, or who outright don’t believe in, God still shrink from letting me know. Folks, this is a Reform synagogue. You’ve had rabbis who don’t believe in God. I happen to be an agnostic. I try to be humble enough to never assert that I am somehow in possession of any real knowledge of the universe’s Creator.
Let me share with you a passage from “The Pittsburgh Platform,” a statement of guiding principles for Jewish life that was put together by America’s Reform rabbis back in 1885: “We recognize in every religion an attempt to grasp the Infinite, and in every mode, source or book of revelation held sacred in any religious system the consciousness of the indwelling of God in man. We hold that Judaism presents the highest conception of the God-idea as taught in our Holy Scriptures and developed and spiritualized by the Jewish teachers, in accordance with the moral and philosophical progress of their respective ages. We maintain that Judaism preserved and defended amidst continual struggles and trials and under enforced isolation this God-idea as the central religious truth for the human race.”
“God-idea.” I like these guys. They were well-educated and honest spiritual leaders who understood how little they understood about God. The term “God-idea” allowed them to articulate their desire and hope that there is a God, but also their refusal to assert that they indisputably knew anything about God.
There may or may not be a God in the universe. This cannot, and quite likely will not, ever be proved. That’s what faith is. You and I get to choose: believe in God, don’t believe in God. I say don’t even bother trying to substantiate your position. It’s a leap of faith. You may employ logic, even science, to stake out your position, including that of the atheist. But in the end, we’re just choosing the one we want.
That’s the simplest explanation I can offer you as to why science and religion are completely compatible. Neither can prove or disprove God. Theology can’t prove it, even if we use a lot of clever logic. And science can’t disprove it because God, by definition, is beyond the natural world. God would have been the Creator of the laws of physics; not bound by them. When creation started off with a Big Bang some fifteen billion years ago, that beginning was preceded by, astoundingly enough, nothing. No light, no space, no mass. And science doesn’t know what to do with that. Except to wonder and to be amazed. And that’s what religion is all about: wonder and amazement.
Did God create the universe? Who can say? Science starts its explanation of Creation after Creation’s already happened! There’s a number, Planck’s Constant it’s called, that identifies a moment which occurred one teeny-tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. That, according to the scientific community, is when the laws of quantum physics kicked in and anything intelligent can be said about creation. Everything before that is poetry and faith.
Tomorrow morning’s Torah reading will be the story of Creation. Now, that story was written down some 2500 years ago. Among the more recent conversations that are typically kept from me and Rabbi Mara is the one that goes like this: “The story of Creation as told in the book of Genesis is not true. It can’t be true. Science tells us the real story. Science teaches us the way Creation really went down.”
I’m okay with most of that reasoning. Again, I don’t know why you won’t talk to your clergy about this. We’re as steeped in science as you are. But there are some people here who will speak with me. Come join me in the Meeting Room some Wednesday evening or Sunday morning when I’m studying Torah with the seventh grade. Seventh graders are fearless. They say what’s on their mind. Somehow they haven’t yet learned to filter their honest thinking when in the presence of a rabbi.
These seventh graders, studying the Genesis account of Creation, are quick to notice a couple of things about the ancient storytellers. First, Creation doesn’t begin “in the beginning.” That’s a mistranslation you and I have been living with for far too long. Bereshit bara Elohim does not mean “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The correct translation is, “When God began creating the heavens and the earth.” And what does that say to my fearless seventh graders? It says that the authors of the Torah didn’t presume to know what there was “in the beginning.” Could have been something, could have been nothing. So they started in the middle, or perhaps a teeny-tiny fraction of a second after the beginning, just like every scientist does.
My seventh graders also noticed that the progression of created flora and fauna, which, in a Torah that was written down a very long time before Darwin did his work on the origin of the species, is remarkably similar to what Darwin would assert in the mid-1800s. These people were not scientists, but they weren’t dummies either. They intuited, without the evidence that would come later, that life on earth started simply and became more and more complex. Day one: a swirling mass of primordial matter. Day two: land and water aggregate. Day three: vegetation. Day four: sun, moon and stars (okay, I’ve got no idea why they placed these on the fourth day … ask my seventh graders). Day five: amphibious creatures and birds. Day six: land animals, large animals and, lastly, humankind. Remarkably similar to evolution, don’t you think?
What’s this mean for you and me? First, it may allow us to be more accepting of the Genesis account. As my seventh graders love to offer, “Maybe each of the six days of Creation was a lot longer than twenty-four hours.” Thirteenth-century commentator Nachmanides, the Ramban, might agree. He seems to have thought that since the sun, moon and stars weren’t created until the fourth day, there was no way that the first three could be described as happening in only twenty-four hours. The Ramban, it would appear, intuited the complexity of creating an entire universe, even if you’re God. Second, our ancestors were thoughtful about the origins of life. And Darwin, I think, would have been proud to have them as his students.
Even in the Talmud, written nearly two thousand years ago, our sages and rabbis readily admit they are not scientists, and that when new knowledge is discovered, they most willingly incorporated it not only into their world-view, but into their religious-view. For the Jewish sages, science and religion needed to be able to coexist.
This summer, the Union for Reform Judaism opened a new camp: 6 Points Science and Technology Academy. When I first learned about Sci-Tech at the 2013 URJ Biennial, I flipped. Not just because Paul Zaloom was onstage working his magic – or his science, rather – as he had done from 1992-1997 as the crazed but brilliant scientist Beakman in Beakman’s World. But also because the Sci-Tech Academy, he told us, would be a place where “scientific inquiry meets fun!” Campers would “explore what Judaism means to them—and how this complements their interests in science and technology.”
I knew I had to be there for this camp’s inaugural summer. Sci-Tech director Greg Kellner graciously accommodated my request, and this past June I found myself moving in for a week to The Governor’s Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, Sci-Tech’s summer home. Through robotics, video game design, environmental science, and digital media, boys and girls in grades 5-10, including Woodlands’ science maniacs Jonathan Montague and Matthew Kaminskas, would not only explore these emergent technologies but they would be asked to consider how 21st century living – with its smartphones, the internet, GPS, wikipedia, text messaging, Netflix, cameras in our phones, and amazon.com – all impact on how we live, on the soul and the spirit of how we live. In other words, where does religious life – for us, Jewish life – intersect with science and technology? And how might one inform the other?
Rabbi Geoff Mitelman, Founding Director of Sinai and Synapses, an organization that seeks to bridge the scientific and religious worlds (and who I remember as a baseball-loving little boy who grew up here at Woodlands), writes of the ways in which people perceive how science and religion coexist (or not) in our world. His preference is that science and religion each inform the other so that both will not only thrive, but will do so with clarity, honesty and with integrity. If you’re thinking that only religion is in need of “clarity, honesty and integrity,” just remember who funds most of the scientific inquiry in our world: governments and the military. So spending some time reflecting on the ethics of science, the spirituality of science, could be very much worth the world’s while.
I’ll give you a few examples. DNA analysis. We not only possess the technology to identify the DNA profile of any human being, it’s rapidly becoming cheap enough and available enough that anybody can acquire such information. But what happens when you find out you carry a gene that might lead to breast cancer? Do you proactively remove a breast? What happens if you find out you carry a gene that might lead to abnormal pregnancy? Do you not get pregnant? And what about privacy issues? Insurance companies that obtain your DNA profile and deem you a poor risk? How about a potential employer doing the same?
Another example why pondering the soul of science may be worthwhile is driverless cars. To what standard do we hold a driverless car? The same as a new, teen-aged driver? Or something more rigorous? If driverless cars are programmed to obey the law, what about a situation where breaking the law would save someone’s life? And what if a situation calls not for saving a life but for ending one? What if five people are in danger of being hit by a driverless car, the car is able to sense the danger but determines that the only solution, the only way to save those five lives, is to veer off in a direction that would cause it to hit someone else, to deliberately end one life in order to save five? Is that ethical? Do we program the car to opt for intentional death in order to avoid unintentional death? And we’d best figure this out soon, because Zipcar is planning on using them as soon as they’re legal.
Religion is about ethics. Call it “obeying God,” if you will, but whether you live within a fundamentalist religious community where God’s commands are never questioned, or a liberal-progressive one where God’s role is always under discussion, religions seek to understand how you and I ought to behave in our day-to-day lives. In Judaism, the mitzvot regulate our daily behavior. Call it “doing God’s will,” but what it really is, is answering the question, “Why am I alive, and how ought I behave while I’m here?” Ethics are guidelines or rules for human behavior. Religion may gussy it up a bit, but it’s pretty much the same thing. While I would never give religion a veto, I do think it can sit at the table of scientific inquiry, serving as a voice of conscience, goading us toward moral clarity.
20th century Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote, “We shall accomplish nothing at all if we divide our world and our life into two domains: one in which God’s command is paramount, the other governed by the laws of economics, politics, and the ‘simple self-assertion’ of the group. […] Stopping one’s ears so as not to hear the voice from above is breaking the connection between existence and the meaning of existence.”
What Buber’s words are saying to me is that our world needs an integration of the rational and the spiritual. One ought not censor the other, but the two should be in conversation, even in argument. Judaism is better for science having taught it something about the origins of life. And science is better for all the world’s religions applying pressure to be considering not just the material benefits, but the moral consequences, of knowledge gained and applied.
My time at the Sci-Tech Academy did not change the way I see the universe. It underscored and implemented what I’ve always felt to be valuable and really important to our lives: that ideas of the spirit and of the physical world talk to each other. The world is such a complicated place. We need all the help we can get to make some reasonable, value-laden sense of it all.
Avinu Malkeynu … when the founders of our nation decreed that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean that You should be cordoned off from the laboratories and research institutes. My great tenet of faith is that science and religion should spend lots of time talking to each other. So long as we don’t lose our heads about it (to bring back the imagery of Madame Guillotine), I believe our lives and Your universe will be better for our having imbued the act of human creativity with the same sense of tov, of the goodness, with which our Torah imagines that You imbued the entire universe.
Ken y’hee ratzon … may these words be worthy of coming true.
Closing words at the end of the service
At the URJ Science and Technology Academy this summer, each morning began before breakfast with the Boker Big Bang. The camp gathered at an outdoor location, seated themselves close but not too close, because a daily experiment involving something that would either smoke, make dazzling arrays of color, or blow up, was about to take place.
Everyone from youngest to … rabbis … was excited about this moment. But we quickly learned that science is filled with many more failures than successes. And it soon became evident that the camp would need to embrace its duds as well as its kapows.
Rabbi Nathaniel Share, who led the New Orleans Reform Congregation Gates of Prayer from 1934-1974, taught the following: “Jewish tradition encourages us to strive to be failures. It does this by urging us to set standards of conduct for ourselves far higher than we can possibly attain. We will fall short. But what a glorious way to fail. For in failing to be as good as we might, we become better than we were.”
This is the spirit of our High Holy Days – set the bar as high as we possibly can, keep it in view for the entire year ahead. And when we fall short, applaud our efforts, the heights that we’ve achieved, and then return here, to this tent, next fall, and begin the whole, honorable process all over again.