Norbert M. Samuelson
for Science,
Religion, & Society: History, Culture and Controversy,
Arri Eisen and
Gary Laderman (eds.)
Ian Barbour diagramed four modes of possible relationship between science and religion – conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration.[1] His model was developed primarily to schematize the interaction between Christian churches and universities in Western civilization. However, the model is also adaptable to understanding how the Jewish people have related their own pursuit of wisdom through the use of human intellect in conjunction with both human experience and professed revealed scriptures. We can for our purposes call the intellectual striving for wisdom from experience “science” and the same endeavor out of Holy Scriptures “religion,” even though these terms were not used until the twentieth century.[2] With respect to the Jewish people “religion” refers to all study of professed revealed texts (scriptures) and their associated commentaries, or, what in terms of pre-modern Judaism is called the way of law (Dat) or the tradition (Halakha) or simply “Torah” in a very broad sense. Similarly, the term “science” refers to all study of texts of natural philosophy, both Jewish and non-Jewish, by Jewish thinkers with the intent to either interpret the meaning of the revealed texts or to interpret human experience of the world.
How Jewish intellectuals have understood the relationship between religion and science has changed as the cultural background of Judaism has changed. The earliest records are of the Judaism of the Hebrew Scriptures when the dominant cultural influences were the Ancient Near East. That understanding changes when the succeeding empires of Greece and Rome conquer the nation of Judea, and the system of Jewish belief undergoes an even more radical change when the Sassanid empire, whose dominant religion was Zoroastrianism, gains hegemony over the Jewish people. This then-new, post biblical understanding of the relationship between science and religion is contained in the collected writings of the Midrash and in the Talmuds.
In the case of the Hebrew Scriptures the discussion turns on the pursuit of what the text calls “wisdom” (“hakhmah” in Hebrew). In the early rabbinic texts of the Midrash and the Talmuds this biblical pursuit for wisdom becomes interconnected with the study of Hellenistic philosophy (“filosofia” in Hebrew). The combination of these two traditions – biblical and talmudic, wisdom and philosophy – constitutes what I would call the thought of “classical Judaism.”
The narrative of the Pentateuch speaks of certain people being “wise,” which seems consistently to mean people who have mastered an art or a craft. Notable examples are the carpenter, Bezalel, who designs the tabernacle,[3] and the “wise men” in Pharaoh’s court who attempt to duplicate the magic that Moses performs with his staff.[4] They have limited success, which means that what the craft that Moses can do through the power of the God of Israel is greater than the craft that the Egyptian wise men can perform through the power of their deities. It seems reasonable to infer, therefore, that the implicit model of the biblical authors of relationship between scientists (here meaning the wise men who master practical skills) and religionists (here meaning the prophets or priests who communicate with the deities) is integration. Both kinds of men serve the good of the nation through communication with the national deity. In fact, the two are the same. Those who learn the will of the deity are men of wisdom who, in virtue of their wisdom, are God fearers. “God fearers” would be in my judgment the biblical counterpart to what we would call religious people. Bezalel is the purest example of such a man. His task is a skilled service on behalf of the liturgical cult. That he performs this simultaneously artistic and religious commission with excellence is what earns him the appellation, “wise man.”
What is stated only inferentially within the narrative of the Pentateuch is made quite explicit in the Book of Proverbs. There “wisdom” is described as the goal of human existence. This “wisdom” is what fulfills a human being, what makes him both complete and happy. These two moral expressions of the end of human life – completion and happiness – are called by a single term in Hebrew (osher). It is this happiness (osher) that is identified with wisdom (hakhmah) which is the goal of the observance of “Torah,” which is the way that guides those who are religious, viz., “those who fear the Lord” (yirei adonai)
The understanding of an identity between wisdom and the fear of God becomes a guiding principle in the rabbinic literature.[5] The rabbis understood their detailed development of the political and liturgical laws of the Torah that comes to define the rabbinic Jewish state as a philosophy. Better, they understood it to be “the” philosophy, for they recognized that out of the Hellenistic world there has arisen other philosophies – notably Platonism, Aristotelianism, Megarianism, Cynicism, and, most importantly, Epicureanism and Stoicism. Of these philosophies the one that is closest to the values expressed in the earlier rabbinic literature is Stoicism, which at the time of the composition of the Mishnah was the leading philosophy of the Roman world. Hence, to the extent that Stoicism can be called “science,” the rabbinic understanding of science and religion is one of integration.[6]
The texts of classical Judaism provide the foundation for sophisticated, technical discussions of the relationship between science and Judaism in the middle ages. By “medieval Judaism” I mean the periods of the hegemony of the Muslim world (roughly from the eighth through the eleventh centuries in southern Spain, north Africa, and the middle east), followed by the hegemony of the Roman Catholic church in feudal, Western Europe. This medieval period divides intellectually as well as politically. It is during the earlier Muslim period that the dominant form of relationship is rationalist and integrative. However, as Jewish intellectual life develops in the later medieval, Christian period, the dominant form of relationship becomes mystical and conflictual.
By the tenth century what we are calling “science” but they called “philosophy” consisted of a synthesis of valued texts of Hellenistic schools of thought, interpreted by Muslim and Jewish commentators. Similarly, what we call “religion” they identified with “revealed texts”, namely the Hebrew Scriptures as interpreted by a recognized chain of rabbinic tradition. The generally accepted attitude to these two canons, one scientific and the other religious, was first explained by Saadia Gaon in his Book of Beliefs and Opinions in the tenth century as what we have been calling integration.
More specifically, Saadia argued that since reason is a gift of creation from a perfectly good deity, and since reason purports to present what is true, properly reasoned conclusions must be true. Similarly, Saadia argued that since the Hebrew Scriptures also is a gift of revelation from a perfectly good deity, then what Scripture says, when properly interpreted, also is true. Furthermore, since there only is one truth, just as there is only one God, so the proper conclusions of reasoning from sense experience (science) and the proper interpretations from reading the Hebrew Scriptures (religion) must be in agreement. If they do not agree, then an error must have been made, either in interpreting the Scriptures or in reasoning from sense experience.
Saadia also affirmed that the two domains of what is knowable through science and what is knowable through religion are identical. It is this latter judgment that becomes modified in the subsequent course of medieval Jewish philosophy. In general the realm of what is knowable from reason was increasingly seen to be narrower than the realm of the knowable through revelation, and, in those cases of separation, what was judged knowable through revelation alone became more valued.
There is one notable example to this generation. That was Levi Gersonides who, living in southern France in the fourteenth century, distinguished himself both as a commentator on the Hebrew Scriptures in his Jewish world and as an astronomer in Christian Europe. For Gersonides, there was nothing of reality that cannot be known both by reason and by revelation, and when both are properly understood, they will be seen to be in agreement. More representative of the late middle ages was the position of Maimonides who argued that the most fundamental doctrines of religious belief were beyond what human beings without divine help can understand. These doctrines include the origin and end of the universe, the nature of God, and the nature of Mosaic prophecy.
In terms of use of Barbour’s categories, the philosophies of some of the rabbis, notably Saadia and Gersonides, are almost pure examples of integration. Other Jewish philosophers, notably Judah Halevi (in eleventh century Andalusia) and Hasdai Crescas (in fourteenth century Italy) presented almost pure examples of conflict. For them there was little of value for human happiness that can be learned from science. Human well being was dependent solely on the teachings of the Torah, and while the meaning of those scriptures can be attained through the guidance of rabbinic commentaries, the interpretations of the philosophers were of no value whatsoever. However, the prevailing position among Jewish philosophers up to the modern period was that of Maimonides. For him most of the teachings of Judaism and science were integrated, while some teachings were not. However, in the latter case, the relationship is not, as it was for Halevi and Crescas, one of conflict. Rather, it was one of indifference. Science was not opposed to these teachings of Judaism. Rather, science simply had no basis to make a judgment one way or the other.
Where the positions of those philosophers who saw the relationship of science and religion to be one of conflict became most influential was in the increased popularity of Kabbalah in the intellectual life of Jews in the late middle ages and the early modern period. Whereas the philosophers had deprecated literature and imagination as a source for knowledge in favor of science and reason, the Kabbalists did the opposite. Hence, where the philosophical commentators showed that at its deepest level the words of the Hebrew Scriptures are to be understood scientifically, the Kabbalists in books such as the Zohar wrote fanciful and highly imaginative interpretations of the Scriptures, filled with elaborate emotive pictures rather than abstract logical arguments.
Despite their differences, what the mystics and the philosophers shared in common was the belief that the Torah, when properly understood, contains the secrets for living a fulfilled and happy life, and both advocated the interpretation of scriptures as the highest form of religious activity. The issue between them was the extent to which science contributes to this enterprise of spiritual text reading. In the modern period this controversy will be reversed. Science will become dominant, while the moral, intellectual value of the study of Scriptures will fall into epistemic disrepute.
The final period of major change in the Jewish understandings of the relationship between science and religion takes place in the modern period, first where the dominant cultural influence is the European Protestant nation, especially in the Netherlands and Germany, and finally where the dominant cultural influence is the post-French revolution secular nation state, especially in North America. In the modern period the understanding of science and religion becomes primarily a political issue, where the earlier modern focus on the relationship between the synagogue and the state in Protestant countries becomes transformed into a concentration on the distinction between the so-called secular and religious, especially as it is related to the question of the pursuit of happiness in ethics.
Our prime example of a Jewish theologian who deals with the relationship between science and religion is Spinoza. The text where he discusses that relationship is his Treatise on Religious and Political Philosophy, which is the only book he himself published during his lifetime (in 1670). If Spinoza himself were to locate his thought within Barbour’s four classes of ways to relate science and religion, he undoubtedly would opt for independence. For him the purpose of religion is to promote good citizenship within the state, and clergymen are masters of political rhetoric, which has nothing to do with the pursuit of truth. Conversely, for Spinoza the purpose of science is to discover truth, and in that pursuit politics, religion, and other imaginative activities are irrelevant. However, the way Spinoza in fact experienced the relationship between science and religion in his own life was in terms of conflict. He suppressed his own writings from the public precisely because he feared religious and political condemnation. In fact many of the people Spinoza respected intellectually were condemned by their specific churches and he himself was excommunicated by the Amsterdam rabbinate.
However, in many respects the case of Spinoza is sui generis. First, his Jewish community was composed largely of Spanish Conversos who had several generations earlier lost any real contact with more representative European Jewish communities. Second, Spinoza’s own thought was centuries ahead of his time, especially in Jewish history, for it would not be until the nineteenth century that we will again encounter a significant number of individuals educated both in Judaism and modern science who will attempt to determine the relation between the two.[7]
Nineteenth century German Jewish intellectuals sought to reconcile their identity to the Jewish people with their desire to be accepted as citizens in a German nation state, and the argument for acceptance often turned on the ability of these Jews to demonstrate that in their professed age of enlightenment, Judaism qualified as a rational religion. The most important Jewish theologian to make this kind of an argument was Hermann Cohen. Grounding himself in his own interpretation of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant on the basis of a method of reasoning he developed from his work as a philosopher and logician of science, Cohen formalized the characteristics of an ideal religion whose doctrines were in accord with the best science of his age, and then he argued that properly understood the classical texts of rabbinic Judaism in fact constitute a paradigm of his idealized religion of reason.
In so arguing, Cohen explicitly had Spinoza in mind. His goal clearly was to integrate at least Judaism and science to serve any number of political and religious ends – to support an understanding of Judaism compatible with the pursuit of science as an ethical commitment and to support the emancipation of the Jews in Germany at a time of growing prejudice against the Jews as a people.
Despite the efforts of Cohen and Jewish theologians like him, the dominant model for a relationship between science and religion in the twentieth century was independence, bordering on conflict. The position of separation adopted by the overwhelming number of Jewish-born intellectuals who became scientists was the position of Spinoza.[8] This independence, which would be better described as indifference, was based on three primary factors. First, their own negative experiences with the authoritarian quality of rabbinic education when they were children. Second, on their acceptance of the prevalent historical myth on academia, focused around the trials of both Galileo and Scopes, that religion is the constant enemy of honest scientific research, and that progress is made in science despite religion. Third, based on the experience of religious persecution and minority identity of most of the immigrants, the United States has developed a radical interpretation of what the principle of separation of church and state means, which requires no reference to religion in anyway whatsoever in public education. Hence, there is in this century, especially in America, an ignorance of every aspect of religious unequaled in any other time and place in history.
However, this situation of independence/indifference may now be changing. As departments of Religious Studies expand across America, an increasing number of American students, no matter what their intended professions, are taking university level courses in the history, thought, and practices of world religions. As this knowledge expands, many American intellectuals seem to be reassessing its prior negative judgments about the role of religion in society and are reassessing their own religious commitments. With this reassessment there is beginning to emerge a significant body of literature that adopts an integrative stance towards science and religion.
This general change in intellectual life, at least in the English speaking world, has its parallel in Jewish life as well. Among the factors that turned many intellectuals hostile to science was the experience of the great harm to humanity that science’s handmade, technology, had produced in the form of modern weapons of mass destruction, ranging from repeater rifles (in the American Civil War) to machine guns and tanks (in the First World War) to planes and bombs (in the Second World War). For Jews that experienced was magnified by the Holocaust. Judeophobia[9] was not new, but the use of the work of nineteenth century evolutionary biologists such as Darwin and Lamarck provided the conceptual foundation for a new form of Jew hatred, called anti-Semitism, that increased the venom of the belief exponentially. Older forms of Judeophobia were based on religion or culture, both of which could be changed. However, the new form, anti-Semitism, was based on race, and for a perceived racial deformity the only cure could be extermination. Again, it was science that provided the means to carry out that extermination to a degree that in previous ages was not imaginable. The consequence is that twentieth century German Jewish theologians of the post-World War One variety – notably Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig – adopted a romantic form of anti-rationalism that fueled the adoption by post-World War Two theologians of an attitude of hostility toward science far beyond the medieval sources in Halevi and Crescas and their separatist model for understanding science and religion.
There are as yet few signs of this attitude of indifference/independence among religiously committed Jewish theologians.[10] However, there are some signs of change among trained scientists who are beginning now to explore the parallels anew between rabbinic Judaism and modern science – especially in terms of big bang cosmology in correlation with the doctrine of creation, of evolutionary psychology in correlation with traditional conceptions of humanity, and of principles of uncertainty in quantum mechanics in correlation with issues of human volition in rabbinic ethics.
[1] In Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. (San Francisco, 1997), Chapter 4 “Ways of Relating Science and Religion” pp. 77-105.
[2] The term “religion” in its modern sense was introduced by Protestants to identify the aspects of medieval European government that fall within the domain of the Church. Here the opposing term used is “secular” to identify the proper domain of the political state. The term “science” in its modern sense is much later. Some historians of science have attributed its earliest usage to the Oxford natural theologian, William Whewell (1794-1866) in his History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840). See John Hedley Brooke. Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. (Cambridge, 1999) Pp. 19 and 286-289.
[3] Ex 31:2-3; 35:30-31; 36:1-2.
[4] Ex 7:11.
[5] In what follows I accept, in its most general outline, the arguments of Jacob Neusner that the rabbinic Judaism of the Mishnah should be understood as a philosophy, as well as the conclusions of Henry A. Fischel that identify at least parts of rabbinic thinking and practice with Stoicism. With reference to Henry A. Fischel, see Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy: A Study of Epicurea and Rhetorica in Early Midrash (Leiden, 1973). With reference to Jacob Neusner, see Jerusalem and Athens: The Congruity of Talmudic and Classical Philosophy (Leiden 1997) and Handbook of Rabbinic Theology (Leiden, 2002).
[6] If by “science” we mean Aristotelianism or even Platonism, then the relationship between science and religion in the early rabbinic period would be one of indifference, since, at this stage of development, the rabbis exhibit little knowledge of these philosophical traditions. If, on the other hand, we identify science with Epicureanism or even Cynicism, then clearly the rabbis saw what they believed to be in conflict with science. However, I think to treat the relationship as one of integration with the science (i.e., philosophy) of Stoicism is more accurate than the other alternatives. All rationalists who affirm the value of science do so in terms of what they judge to be good science, and, based on that judgment, they are in conflict with what they would call bad science. Particularly if the analyses of Fischel and Neusner are correct, for the rabbis it is Stoicism that is both good science and good religion.
[7] I am not saying that there were not Jews before the nineteenth century who, like Spinoza, worked in science. On the contrary, several Jews wrote on subjects as diverse as astronomy, human physiology, botany, zoology, and mineralogy. Among the most important of these figures are David Ganz and Joseph Solomon Delmedigo. However, they, like Spinoza, in no way reflect the age in which they lived. Yet, unlike Spinoza they were committed to rabbinic Judaism, and, also unlike Spinoza, they made no known intellectual effort to correlate their two intellectual backgrounds.
[8] The key difference was that these contemporary Jewish scientists in no way had Spinoza’s knowledge of Jewish texts, from the Bible to its major medieval Jewish commentaries. Most of these scientists had/have even less knowledge than Albert Einstein. Einstein had studied Bible at the age of twelve but gave it up after he learned something about modern source critical theories about the Bible. His own thought about science and religion is close to Spinoza’s, but he did not learn it from reading Spinoza’s writings, to which he was introduced for the first time when he was seventy one years old.
[9] A term coined by the Zionist ideologue, Leon Pinsker. It is an irrational fear of the Jew, comparable to an irrational fear of high places or of spiders.
[10] My own writings constitute an exception to this generalization. See my Judaism and the Doctrine of Creation (Cambridge, 1994) and Revelation and the God of Israel (Cambridge, 2002)