It is with some trepidation that I touch upon this God business again. The last time, as you will recall, ‘Deogolwulf’ marched in, gave me a sound thrashing and then stalked off haughtily – and no-one does ‘haughty’ better than him, except, perhaps, his hero, Edward Feser! Anyway, this is not primarily concerned with God – much to His relief, no doubt – but to a book about Him. The sick friend I visited yesterday loaned me a book and I was about to place it on the wobbling pile of ‘waiting-to-be-read’ when I thought that perhaps I would just read the Introduction. Oh dear, within a few paragraphs I was well and truly hooked! So, yes, this is another ‘rave review’ for a book of which I have only read the Intro and Chapter #1 but you are used to my extravagant enthusiasms by now.
It is written by a man whose name, Jonathan Sacks, is familiar but about whom I know nothing else except that he is the Chief Rabbi. The book is entitled The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning. It is simply superb! Based on considerable erudition it is written with enormous enthusiasm in clear but eloquent English; I put it up there with Ferdinand Mount’s book Full Circle about which I raved a few weeks ago. What I would not give for a chance to share a dinner with those two men! To give you a taste, here are two extracts. The first, quoted in the book, was written by Bertrand Russell:
That man is the product of the causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast depths of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s salvation henceforth be safely built.
Then Sacks neatly inverts the argument to illustrate his way of thinking and belief:
That man, despite being the product of seemingly blind causes, is not blind; that being in the image of God he is more than an accidental collocation of atoms; that being free, he can rise above his fears, and, with the help of God, create oases of justice and compassion in the wilderness of space and time; that though his life his is short he can achieve immortality by his fire and heroism, his intensity of thought and feeling; that humanity, too, though it may one day cease to be, can create before night falls a noonday brightness of the human spirit, trusting that, though none of our kind will be here to remember, yet in the mind of God, none of our achievements is forgotten – all these things, if not beyond dispute, have proven themselves time and again in history. We are made great by our faith, small by our lack of it. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding ghope, can the soul’s salvation be safely built.
Sacks sums up his philosophy thus:
Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.
I am intrigued, I shall follow where he leads and when I have finished it I shall return to the subject but in the meantime, do yourselves a favour and go buy a copy!