The last time I mentioned a book by Jonathan Sacks called “The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning” I had just finished chapter #1 and already I was jumping up and down with excitement. Now I have finished chapter #3, and yes, it is slow going but I am both savouring the words whilst simultaneously trying to ensure that I understand them correctly. The result of all that effort is that I am even more enthusiastic for both the book and the author - and my brain hurts!
Sacks, who is, as it happens, the Chief Rabbi, puts forward in quiet, elegant and civilized English the notion that: “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.” He then sets out to support this proposition. He begins by returning to that esoteric specialty, the study of ancient texts. He reminds the swots amongst you, but actually teaches me because I never knew it, that whilst the Old Testament was written in Hebrew the New Testament was almost certainly written in Greek. In other words, the teachings of Christ were eventually written and saved for us in a language which Christ himself probably did not speak. It was at that point that two very different influences were brought to bear on the whole fractured and fractious business of God and His nature and purpose.
Sacks suggests that these two differing ways of thinking about our existence is mirrored in the natural make up of our brains in which the left hemisphere tends to be the basis of rational, analytical thinking whilst the right is more concerned with empathy and relationships and emotion. Thus, he concludes, the left side of the brain will concern itself with seeing how things work whilst the right will search for meaning. In early times when written language was just evolving most languages, certainly Hebrew and Aramaic, had no symbols to denote the vowel sounds and the written language went from right to left. Later, beginning with the Greeks, a written language evolved which included vowel symbols and the writing switched to left to right. The coincidence, Sacks points out, that this revolutionary change occurred during the period in which Greek philosophy and science also began is more than just a coincidence.
To begin with, Sacks tells us, the two very different approaches to the mystery of existence – the Greek scientific approach and the Jewish/Christian mystical approach – went along hand in hand and with mutual respect. The Rabbis of the time never questioned Greek analytics, in fact they frequently agreed with them, but they remained steadfastly to the view that whilst it explained the ‘hows’ it failed to explain the ‘whys’. For ‘meaning’ to become clear it was necessary to look into men’s hearts. This happy synthesis continued until the 16th century when the truly amazing explosion of scientific knowledge began which drove a wedge between the two that remains more or less unbridged right up to this day. In fact many of the scientists in their arrogance are now positively hostile to any idea of a remaining mystery.
But not all of them! If you need your sense of wonder to be re-ignited turn to the book written by Lord Rees called “Just Six Numbers”. These are the six ‘prime’ numbers, if you like, that simply had to be met – exactly and independently of each other – before our universe could exist in the form we know it and they are, therefore, the absolute bedrock for our existence. Rees puts it thus:
These six numbers constitute a ‘recipe’ for a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitiveto their values: if any one of them were to be ‘untuned’, there would be no stars and no life. Is this tuning just a brute fact, a coincidence? Or is it the providence of a benign Creator? I take the view that it is neither. An infinity of other universes may well exist where the numbers are different. Most would be stillborn or sterile. We could only have emerged (and therefore we naturally now find ourselves) in a universe with the ‘right’ combination. This realization offers a radically new perspective on our universe, on our place in it, and on the nature of physical laws.
It is astonishing that an expanding universe, whose starting point is so ‘simple’ that it can be specified by just a few numbers, can evolve (if these numbers are suitable ‘tuned’) into our intricately structured cosmos.
“Astonishing” is an astonishing understatement, in my view. More later as I read further but why wait – get out there and beg, borrow or steal a copy – er, but not mine!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Partnership-Jonathan-Sacks/dp/0340995246
