Three interesting articles this past week on the anti-religious books of Richard Dawson (“The God Delusion”), Daniel Dennett (“Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”) and Sam Harris (“The End of Faith“).
1. David Novak, who holds the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, has a lengthy review of Dawkins’ book in the Spring Issue of Azure: “Dawkin’s Demons”. He says the book is “continually insulting its subject with rhetorical overkill”:
[T]he immediate historical occasion for Dawkins’ jeremiad against Judaism and her Christian and Islamic “daughters” is the “Intelligent Design” argument being so hotly debated today, an argument being put forth by some Christian natural scientists who believe in the creator-God first taught by Judaism, and who at least want to allude to a cause operating within nature, a cause who looks very much like the God of Israel. . . .
The advocates of Intelligent Design, unlike anti-Darwinian “creationists,” in no way reject the account of biological evolution first put forth by
. Their argument, if I understand it correctly, states that certain evolutionary developments cannot be explained as being the result of random selection, that is, by evolutionary trial and error. . . . Instead, proponents of this theory reason that the evolutionary data seem to imply an intelligent cause, who brought about these developments intentionally. . . . Darwin Without attempting to judge the merits of Intelligent Design, it seems that the dogmatic, at times hysterical, response of orthodox Darwinians to its very utterance in public causes one to wonder whether they really do have conclusive arguments against it so as to permanently refute it. . . .
2. Rabbi David Wolpe raised a similar concern in last week’s Los Angeles Jewish Journal, writing in “Atheism du Jour” that:
Atheism has become chic. In itself, this might be a helpful thing — after all faith, like every other system, strengthens itself by intelligent challenge. But too much of the contemporary attack on religion is just that — an attack fueled by grievance and not by careful consideration.
Instead of a grappling with faith, recent books by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and to a lesser extent by Daniel Dennett, are two-fisted, clumsy attacks. The recent
Times editorial by Harris, "God’s Dupes," is illustrative. Its tone is incredulity, and its fuel is venom. . . . The ideals that Harris says we could easily arrive at without religion (now that religion has already given them to us) are not valuable as ideals simply lying on a page. They have to be realized in people’s lives. . . . To write, as he does, "compassion is deeper than religion," is to ignore the historic role religion has played in promoting compassion. . . . Los Angeles Fanaticism is not limited to faith. Fanaticism of any variety is an unwillingness to lend one’s opponent dignity, worthiness and seriousness. Atheism that seeks truth invites dialogue; fire and brimstone atheism does not.
3. Leon Kass, in “Science, Religion, and the Human Future” in the current issue of COMMENTARY, also looks at Dawson and Dennett’s books and describes them as “assaults from an aggressive scientific and intellectual elite eager to embarrass” Biblical religion. He concludes that, even if scientists were to “prove” that human consciousness and emotion were mere electrochemical activities of brain matter, it would not contradict the fact that “we have inside knowledge that cannot be denied”:
[To be human beings] is to recognize, first of all, that we are here not by choice or on account of merit, but as an undeserved gift from powers not at our disposal. It is to feel the need to justify that gift, to make something out of our indebtedness for the opportunity of existence.
It is to stand in the world not only in awe of its and our existence but under an obligation to answer a call to a worthy life, a life that does honor to the divine-likeness with which our otherwise animal existence has been — no thanks to us — endowed.
It is explicitly to feel the need to find a way of life for which we should be pleased to answer at the bar of justice when our course is run, in order to vindicate the blessed opportunity and the moral-spiritual challenge that is the essence of being human.
The first chapter of Genesis — like no work of science, no matter how elegant or profound — invites us to hearken to a transcendent voice.
Those who think that Kass’s last sentence is hyperbolic should consult his magnificent 700-page book, “The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis” (Free Press: 2003), representing more than 20 years of teaching Genesis at the
Kass, who holds a B.S. in Biology with honors from the University of Chicago, a Ph.D in Biochemistry from Harvard, an M.D. with honors from the University of Chicago, and has served as both a surgeon with the U.S. Public Health Service and as Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, may have best captured the immense knowledge of science and its inherent limitations in this passage about eating, from his book “The Hungry Soul” (University of Chicago Press: 1999):
When the scientist looks at eating, what does he see? An objective fellow, he sees coolly from the outside. Generally speaking he sees animal movements to gain food, the movement of edible material from the outside in and down, the physical and chemical breakdown of food, the energetics of the process, and the maintenance of a steady internal environment of sugar, nitrogen, salts, and the like. More specifically the anatomist may show how the powerful masseter muscles at the angles of the mouth cause the lower jaw to move, enabling the teeth to grind the ingested food, or how the tongue and the pharyngeal muscles are coordinated with each other and with the closure of the epiglottis to ensure the successful act of swallowing without aspiration into the lungs. The physiocologist can show how the sight of food stimulates the psychic phase of gastric secretion through the vagus nerve or how rise in blood glucose after a meal releases insulin from the pancreas to facilitate the transport of sugar into the cells. The biochemist studies how sugar is oxidized and its energy trapped by the process of oxidative phosphorization or how stores of glycogen in the liver are released during a period of fasting. The molecular biologist can demonstrate how a certain genetic mutation produces the inborn metabolic disease phenylketonuria (PKU) or how the supply of mesanger – RNA – is regulated to increase the desired protein synthesis. The psychologist will show how certain stimuli ordinarily presented with food can come on their own to induce salivation or how certain childhood traumas give rise to special food aversion or to eating disorders. And the anthropologist will study how different cultures eat different foods, in different manners, and with different rituals.
And even taken together, anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, psychology, and anthropology will not produce the transformative understanding contained in a simple prayer before the meal. It is part of the “inside knowledge that cannot be denied.”
Or as Saul Bellow wrote in the immortal, prayerful last paragraph of “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” speaking in Sammler’s voice about Elya Gruner, who did “what was required of him:”
“Remember, God, the soul of Elya Gruner . . . . He was aware that he must meet, and did meet – through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding – he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms of which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it – that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.”
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach.