Rabbi Janet Marder

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5768

A Rabbi Responds to Atheism

         On November 1, 1755, it was All Saints’ Day in Lisbon , Portugal – then one of the most beautiful cities in Europe , and one of the largest, as well. That day, as the churches were packed with devout worshipers at mass, a devastating earthquake struck the city. A modern writer describes it like this: “Just before ten in the morning, the city was hit by a sudden sideways lurch now estimated in magnitude 9.0 and shaken furiously for seven full minutes.

         “The convulsive force was so great that the water rushed out of the city’s harbor and returned in a wave fifty feet high, adding to the destruction. When at last the motion ceased, survivors enjoyed just three minutes of calm before a second shock came, only slightly less severe than the first. A third and final shock followed two hours later. At the end of it all, sixty thousand people were dead, and virtually every building for miles reduced to rubble” [Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything].

         The Lisbon earthquake, followed by five days of horrific fires, was the most catastrophic natural disaster of the 18^th century – it has been called the first disaster of the modern age. The earthquake’s powerful reverberations were felt throughout North Africa and Europe . But it wasn’t just physical structures that were toppled in the quake. Scenes of mass carnage set off seismic shifts in the mind and heart, as well. Ideals were shattered along with the great cathedrals. When churches collapse and bury thousands of pious people at prayer, it is hard to cling to the notion of a loving God who governs the universe with justice.

         But the day after the earthquake some priests had already mounted their pulpits to explain that the disaster was God’s dire punishment of the people of Portugal for their many sins, including their love for music, dancing, theater and bull fights. Human beings, then as now, are compelled to make sense of the universe. We look for patterns, we search for meaning, we dread the very idea of randomness. A God who created the universe with a grand design, a supreme Being who cares about each one of us, a Being who rewards and punishes us in accordance with our deeds – such a God makes the world intelligible.

         Hold fast to such a God and the earth does not shudder without purpose. Babies born into the world gravely damaged are here for a reason. Strong men and women cut off in their prime by cancer, depression or unseen defects of the heart are part of God’s plan.

         The Lisbon earthquake, with all its horrors, was a turning point for the philosophers of the Enlightenment. It made them ask deep questions about the idea of religious faith. Voltaire cites the quake in Candide, mocking the notion that we live in “the best of all possible worlds,” in which every event reflects God’s beneficent will. Immanuel Kant ridiculed the claim that earthquakes are divine judgments; he suggested, instead, that we investigate the natural causes of tremors and build structures capable of withstanding them.

         Science and reason have made war on religion since the time of Copernicus, gathering force in every generation, slashing away at the foundations of faith and undermining its claims on the human mind. Gone, after Darwin and Galileo, was the notion that human beings are the crown of creation, lovingly fashioned in the Divine image. Gone was our sense that we stand at the center of the universe; that the cosmos was designed to be our home. Gone was the comforting certainty that “God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world.”

         Matthew Arnold, in his famous poem of the 19^th century called “ Dover Beach ,” set forth his vision of a world in which science and reason have forever eroded the Sea of Faith , leaving us only darkness, confusion and despair:

“… The world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain—

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

            Matthew Arnold mourned the passing of certitude and faith, and with them a sense of beauty, meaning and hope for the future. In the 21^st century a spate of recent books view science’s victory over religion as cause for celebration.

            Many of today’s attacks on religious faith are waged with a sense of malicious contempt. Read Christopher Hitchens’ “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” – or Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation” or “The End of Faith”  -- or Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion.”

            All of them argue, with varying degrees of eloquence, that religion, all religion, preaches lies and stupidities and stands in the way of human progress; that those who practice religion are at best fools and at worst dangerous fanatics who threaten the survival of the human race. Dawkins, an important evolutionary biologist, has thoughtfully suggested that we refer to atheists as “brights,” which leaves believers, I guess, sitting in the corner wearing a dunce cap.

            Can religion and science coexist today in the mind of a modern Jew? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself intensely for a long time. I am fascinated by science; I have built my life on religion; I have profound respect for the intellect; I do not want to be a fool or a liar or a hypocrite. I want to know what I can honestly believe. This is an ultimate issue for me – I know that it is for you, as well.

            My question matters especially tonight, as we enter these holy days: this intense season of prayer and repentance before the One we Jews call the Judge of all the earth. What, exactly, are we doing here? Why are we doing it? Is this coming together in prayer no more than an atavistic ritual, a primitive act of obeisance and groveling to an imaginary king in the sky? Is it, as Freud might argue, a collective exercise in fantasy, an expression of our longing for a perfect father?

            Do we mean the words we read aloud from the prayer book? Can we believe, really believe, in the religious value of what we are doing here tonight? Or should we chalk it up to a purely humanistic experience: a chance to sit quietly and think about whatever we like, a chance to get together with friends and enjoy beautiful music and a sense of community?

            I want to say, at the outset, that the High Holy Days, or any worship service, can certainly be valuable for those reasons alone. It’s not so often that we get to sit quietly and think about our lives, or have the opportunity to feel strongly connected to others.

            I also want to say that I can endorse much of what Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have to say. Some religious teachings are foolish or pernicious, or both. Some religious people, threatened by the teachings of science, close their eyes to facts and try to impose their ideologies on others by force. Some religious practitioners commit atrocious acts; some are inspired to do so by their religion. Religious wars have killed millions and they continue to ravage our world.

            Does religion, then, do more evil than good?  I see no evidence whatever that religion creates the human propensity for aggression, though certainly religion is used by unscrupulous leaders to incite bigotry and hate. So also are all human institutions – medical science, the education system, the legal system, psychiatry – subject to manipulation in destructive ways. All are created and administered by people, and people are flawed. Religion claims, in fact, that it is because people are fallible and flawed that they need the discipline of religion in the first place.

            If there were no religion around, I have no doubt that people would come up with other ways to hurt and oppress one another. That’s certainly been the case in countries where religion was rigidly suppressed. Communist China and Stalinist Russia were not known for benevolent treatment of their citizens. The worst genocides of the 20^th century took place under secular, atheist regimes.

            It’s true that religious people cooperated with such genocides. Devout Christians served in the Gestapo and supported Fascism; some priests and nuns helped carry out the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda .

            But secular men of science also put their gifts at the service of genocide. Supremely well-educated academics lined up enthusiastically in support of heinous ideologies. They demonstrated with all the tools of their craft that some racial groups were subhuman, that retarded people were “useless eaters,” that enemies of the state did not deserve to live. They designed gas chambers and carried out medical experiments in concentration camps; they persecuted political prisoners in psychiatric hospitals in the Soviet Union .

            Does religion make people better? Religious people heroically defied the Nazis, fought in other eras for the abolition of slavery and apartheid, work hard throughout the world to alleviate poverty and hunger. Secular atheist heroes have also done all of these things. What are we to make of this? Religion can inspire noble and courageous acts, but there is no hard evidence that religion leads inevitably to improvements in human behavior. It is religious people, after all, who blow up abortion clinics and carry out suicide bombings and terror attacks.

            It is also clear, unfortunately, that reason and science alone do not lead us to the good. The most powerful microscope or telescope can’t provide evidence that retarded people should not be gassed. Logic alone will not make you a moral person. It offers no transcendent values and ethics.

            It was for this reason, perhaps, that Albert Einstein uttered his famous words: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”  The words suggest that the two can and should co-exist in the mind of a modern Jew, or any person who desires the best for humankind.

            Einstein, of course, did not mean just any religion. He himself, though proudly Jewish, did not consider himself a practitioner of any traditional faith. As a boy, just before his Bar Mitzvah, he rebelled against the Orthodox dogma and practice of his childhood [See Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe].

            Around the age of 50, though, Einstein, surprisingly, began to articulate a belief in God – a sense that the universe reflects a great, unfathomable intelligence. A recent biographer argues that Einstein’s belief arose “from the sense of awe and transcendent order that he discovered through his scientific work” [ibid, p.385]. At the age of 12, it was science that drove him to rebel against religion [see Isaacs, p.20-21], but it was science — the highest levels of physics he encountered through the intellect – that brought him back to faith.

            Francis Collins, the distinguished scientist who heads up the Human Genome Project, moved from agnosticism to atheism while in grad school, pursuing a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Yale. Today he is a devoutly religious man. In a book called “The Language of God,” Collins says that unlocking the genetic structure of life and contemplating the process of evolution only enhanced his religious consciousness. These are his words:

             “For me, there is not a shred of disappointment or disillusionment in these discoveries about the nature of life – quite the contrary! How marvelous and intricate life turns out to be! How deeply satisfying is the digital elegance of DNA! How aesthetically appealing and artistically sublime are the components of living things, from the ribosome that translates RNA into protein, to the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly, to the fabulous plumage of the peacock attracting his mate! Evolution, as a mechanism, can and must be true. But that says nothing about the nature of its author. For those who believe in God, there are reasons now to be more in awe, not less” [p.106-7].

            For Einstein and Collins, the advancement of the scientific frontier does not erode religious faith; rather, the more we learn about the universe, the more amazing and awesome it becomes.

            The eminent scientist Stephen Jay Gould argued, in a book called “Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life,” that there is no inherent conflict between the two realms. Science, he said, attempts to describe the factual character of the natural world and to develop theories that explain and predict its workings.

            Religion focuses on meaning and value – questions about how we should live and the purpose of our existence. In a famous phrase, Gould described religion and science as “non-overlapping magisteria”; they are, he said, two separate domains of intellectual authority and neither should interfere with the other.

            This is an attractive idea to those of us who want to live in both worlds, to embrace the findings of science while anchoring ourselves in the world of faith and tradition. But we should realize that a religion that wants to co-exist harmoniously with science cannot be a simpleminded faith.

            First, no religion that reads the Bible literally is compatible with reason and science. No religion that sees in the Bible factual statements about the birth of the cosmos and the origin of life is compatible with science.

            Fortunately, that’s not a problem for Judaism. Liberal Jews have never seen the Bible as the literal word of God.  Even traditional Judaism has never favored a narrow, simple, fundamentalist reading of the text.  Our earliest commentaries favor multiple interpretations, allegory and symbol.

            In the 12^th century, before the advent of telescopes, microscopes and the scientific method, the physician Maimonides wrote that the search for truth draws us closer to God. Exploring the laws of nature, he taught, increases our reverence and awe; so the religious person need not fear the gift of intellect. Maimonides added that if the verifiable discoveries of science are ever shown to contradict the Torah, then the Torah must be re-interpreted and understood differently [see The Guide for the Perplexed 2:25].

            Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others reject the Hebrew Bible because they read it in the most simplistic and ill-informed way. But just as scientific books will yield up their wisdom only when read seriously, thoughtfully and with a solid educational background, the same is true of the Bible. It takes a good intellectual foundation to understand this ancient text, written millennia ago in an environment utterly foreign to us.

            For a beautiful, reverent and compelling reading of the Book of Genesis, informed by science, reason and philosophy, I recommend “The Beginning of Wisdom,” by Leon Kass, professor at the University of Chicago . Or, as Charlie said, come to Torah study next Shabbat morning and we’ll explore these questions together.

            No religion that relies on supernatural miracles is compatible with science. Fortunately, this too is not a problem for Judaism. Christianity without a divine Jesus, without a virgin birth and a miraculous resurrection, may well not be Christianity, but Judaism is not dependent on any supernatural occurrences. Whether or not Elijah went up to heaven in a chariot of fire, or the Red Sea parted by a wind from God, or Moses heard a voice while gazing at a burning bush, makes no fundamental difference to the teachings of Judaism.

            No religion that claims that God protects good people from harm, and punishes evil through the mechanism of earthquakes, fires, floods or disease is compatible with the findings of science. Fortunately, I, as a committed Jew, am not required to believe any such thing. Already in the Bible this theory is attacked and discredited. Already in the Talmud we find a statement that the world operates according to the regular laws of nature, without regard to our good or evil acts [Avodah Zarah 54b].

            What, then, am I asked to believe, as a committed and faithful modern Jew? Do any of these beliefs contradict the findings of science or reason? And can I, with sincerity and integrity, say the prayers given to us to read on these High Holy Days?

            Remember, first, that we shouldn’t read prayers for information about the world around us the way we’d pick up a textbook or the New York Times. We read prayers as we read literature or poetry, attentive to sound and rhythm and powerful symbols. No Jew, no matter how pious or observant, claims that our prayers were composed by God. They are profoundly human artifacts, a record of the Jewish spirit – of Jewish hopes, dreams and fears -- crystallized in heartfelt words.

            Some prayers go back 2000 years to the time of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem . Some were composed by the sages of Talmudic times. Some come from the medieval period of Crusaders, Inquisition and martyrdom. Some were composed in our own time. Many passages in the prayer book are not prayers in the literal sense at all. They are passages from the Bible and other study texts, intended to teach Jewish values, addressed not to God but to us. 

            Prayers speak in the idiom and metaphors of their own time. So some address God as mighty king or shepherd or judge of all the earth. Maimonides and others teach us never to take these metaphors literally or to mistake them for factual statements about God. They are human attempts to comprehend the nature of being and our place in the world.

           In the idiom of their own time, here’s what I think the poets who composed our Jewish prayers were really saying.

            They said that they experienced life as a whole, with all its struggles and joys and incomprehensible pain, as a precious gift and a blessing. For reasons we don’t comprehend we are called into being, given consciousness and breath. They were not blasé about the incredible fact that we are here at all. They affirmed the sanctity of life, teaching that preserving and protecting life is our sacred obligation.

            They found the universe amazing, wondrous, stunning and elegant in its order. Entranced by the natural rhythms of times and seasons, the passage of the heavenly bodies in their orbits, they sought to create the same beautiful, stable, comforting rhythms in their own lives through customs and ceremonies to mark the passages of life.

            They saw themselves as part of a distinct people, called to particular tasks and responsibilities in the world; a people with a unique purpose and destiny. They responded to that call with gratitude – an emotion all the more poignant because they were fully aware of the price they paid every day for continuing to be Jews. They regarded with love their Torah, their teaching, grateful for its guidance and wisdom, inspired by its continual challenge to be more and better and higher than they were.

            They saw a profound unity at the heart of the cosmos – the unity of all being, the unity of all life, the unity of all humankind. They insisted that behind the complexity and diversity of life’s expressions in this world, there is a great oneness – an insight remarkably confirmed in our own day by the genetic code. They proclaimed this unity in the Sh’ma as the central teaching of their faith. They felt commanded to honor this unity in all their acts.

            They felt at this autumn season an especially keen sense of the fragility of life, how quickly it passes, how suddenly it leaves us. They believed that we should use our fleeting time to do more than satisfy our own appetites. They believed that all of us, no matter how rich or powerful, are accountable and responsible to a moral law beyond ourselves.  They taught that we are summoned to lift up our lives to a great purpose, to work to repair what is broken and wounded, to live with righteousness and holiness.

            In a dark world where ignorant armies clash by night, they believed passionately in peace, yearned for peace, strove to understand how to make peace.

         They believed that in the end, goodness would prevail. They believed, like the Reverend Martin Luther King, that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Even in the darkest times, they defiantly declared their commitment to hope. 

            They pledged themselves to remember those whose lives had ended, feeling themselves connected forever to those they had loved. They stood up, even at the shattering moment of a loved one’s death, and affirmed that it is good to be alive.

            Can you affirm these things? Can you say these prayers? Can you sing them in the ancient language of our people, feeling in the joining of our voices, a sense that we are part of something greater than ourselves? That, after all, is the central purpose of our religion: to expand our awareness and lift us out of the closed circle of self-concern.

            In one way, perhaps, the essential teachings of Judaism may conflict with science and reason.  Richard Dawkins says that if you believe in evolution you cannot also believe in moral order or a higher purpose.  He writes: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference”  [River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life].

         This, of course, does not constitute a proof. Dawkins is simply telling us what he believes is likely, probable and reasonable. Science cannot help us decide if Dawkins is right or Einstein is right or Francis Collins is right. Here, it seems to me, we have to make a choice.  Does our own experience of this world lead us to wonder, gratitude, and commitment to God’s moral law, or to a cold, amoral universe that asks nothing of us at all?

         I will cast my lot with my people, whose way of thinking and living has produced a brave, resilient spirit – one that confronts the world as it is, and responds not with apathy or despair but with a call to bring about the world that should be.

         My religion does not give me absolute certainty, and it does not always give me peace. It gives me, more than anything else, a sense of challenge and hope in what people can do, guided and instructed by the highest truths we know.

         Babies are born into the world gravely damaged; strong men and women are cut down in their prime. Our lives may be subject to random, unpredictable destruction, but our deeds can be grounded on stable foundations of honor and justice and love.

            My religion says that in a world where the very earth quakes under our feet and solid structures fall into the sea, we can be steadfast and constant in our care for one another. It says that the whole world is a narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.