Atheism

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Kol Nidre - Friday, September 21, 2007

This summer, when I picked up several of the recently published books about God, I didn’t really know what to expect. I was surprised that books on theology were on the best seller list month after month and, if not quite as popular as Harry Potter, were still finding their way into millions of homes. I read Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and looked at Christopher Hitchen’s book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. There are a number of other books popular right now focusing particularly on science and religion.

Unfortunately, these books have generated more heat than light and while their aggressive tone may contribute to their popularity, having a temper tantrum on paper does not advance the argument very far. Describing Hanukah for example as “vapid and annoying” and insulting other world religions, including Islam, Buddhism and all Eastern spiritual discourse, may make the author (Hitchens) feel better, but it hardly constitutes a rational argument.

It is not that I am unsympathetic to the concerns these authors express or that I don’t understand where the frustration is coming from.

Looking at the world around us today, how can one help but be disturbed by some of the effects of religion on our society and world community. Where there are conflicts in the world today, they often seem to have a religious basis. Where there is irrational and self-destructive behavior, it often seems to be motivated by religious thinking. Dennis Prager in a radio interview with Christopher Hitchens suggested that on meeting a group of men on a dark street at night, one might be comforted by knowing that they were coming from a prayer meeting. Not so, responded Hutchens. In recent years in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem and Baghdad, religious men might be exactly who you are trying to avoid, and those are just the B’s.

When I talk with our teens and college students this is not a laughing matter, as many genuinely believe that the world would be better off without religion. Their associations with religion as a political force are not positive. For the generation finishing school and heading out to work right now, the first major world event they remember was the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yizchak Rabin, a symbol of hope, shot down by a Jewish religious fanatic, Yigal Amir. For those slightly younger, it was the attacks of September 11th , and the bombings in London and Madrid, again motivated by religious ideology, that marked their coming to political awareness. There is also the nagging question in some of our minds as to how much of the course chosen in the war on terror and other policies since Bush’s election in 2000 has been prompted by the president’s sense of religious destiny. The concerns about the breakdown of the separation of Church and State, and the effects of religious fundamentalism on America’s ability to function as a multicultural society expressed by some of the authors I mentioned, are shared by many in the Jewish community.

The strength of religion around the world, and especially of fundamentalist religion today is a great shock as many people expected that religion would peter out gently or become more moderate over time. Science would provide more and more information about the origins of our universe and the physical processes that create thought and feeling and even what we might call the soul. But instead of people finding contemporary scientific information significant for their lives, we find many Americans turning away from science and from rational inquiry, with more Americans believing in angels, devils, and poltergeists than in evolution. We seem as a nation to be adopting a post modernist mind set in which science is just one type of truth, no worse and no better, than any other system one might adopt.

Still while I felt some sympathy with issues being raised in these books, their presentation of religion did not speak to me nor was it particularly relevant to how most Jews think of our Judaism.

In the books I looked at, religion was presented only in its most literalist and fundamentalist form, and religious communities were described, as one critic put it, as “celestial North Korea’s.” The excesses of non-religious extremism were downplayed or totally absent. Many conflicts that today are viewed as religious have strong nationalist or economic components. They have their roots in other factors. Religious differences which are viewed today as inevitable sources of conflict such as the Jewish Muslim divide, were less contentious at other times, and conflicts that had been unbridgeable at other times, such as those between Christians and Jews, are quite manageable today. Clearly it is not the religions alone which create the conflict.

The 20th century was a time when religion took a back seat to other forces, yet it was one of the bloodiest centuries in human history. Nazism was not a religious movement, and Stalinism outdid religious conflict in its destructive power. We might also mention the slaughters of Pol Pot in Cambodia and the “disappeared” in Latin America: in neither of these were the killings motivated by religion. Misery has also been heaped on humankind when scientific theories have been inappropriately applied: think of Social Darwinism and the scientific eugenics of the 20th century. None of these were dealt with at all in any of the books I mentioned.

Finally, liberal non-fundamentalist religion was either ignored, misrepresented, or viewed as an enabler of religion’s more virulent forms.

Though I haven’t seen any statistics, I suspect that the Jewish community would be overrepresented among those who hold to a more scientific world view. We have a long tradition of viewing the ability to think and reason as a gift from God, and therefore valuing the gifts of human intelligence. The response to Darwin’s theories by the Orthodox Jews of his time, was to see this as just another working out of the wonder of the world of creation, and in general Jews embraced the Enlightenment with great hope and optimism.

Jews, though classified in America as a religious community, are heavily secular. The growth of Chabad and other forms of Orthodoxy, which receives a lot of attention perhaps for being so unexpected, is not a statistically significant phenomenon. More noteworthy is the finding from the year 2000 Jewish population survey that 1 in 5 of those who identify themselves as Jews, see themselves as having no religion and that of the other 4/5th who do see themselves as Jewish by religion, only about half feel the need to belong to any kind of religious organization.

Consider this. The first half of the 20th century was noteworthy for its theological productivity. Great figures including Martin Buber, Emil Fackenheim, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Mordechai Kaplan, grappled with the challenges of God and modernity, but there has been no correspondingly rich late twentieth century outpouring of Jewish theological writing. Jewish creativity more recently seems to be expressed more in other forms. In literature and music, we have had a whole new generation of young Jewish artists, and in the last decade have seen the rebirth of the desire to find a Jewish identity separate from one’s relation to God.

Yet Jews have to a large extent adopted this secular outlook without the harsh rejection of religious identity found in the books with which I began this discussion. We understand that a religious outlook does not need to be steeped in superstition and reaction, and that we can talk about God without becoming fundamentalists. Dr. Arnie Eisen, the new chancellor of the Conservative movement’s rabbinical school, The Jewish Theological Seminary, and up until this fall a professor at Stanford University, recently completed a study of contemporary Jews. He was surprised by the large numbers of Jews who expressed a belief in God, given what he knew about their level of religious practice and knowledge. In follow-up conversations he discovered that the expression of belief in God today, does not mean what it meant a generation ago.

Contemporary Jews are less likely to base their approach to God on traditional philosophical arguments and more likely to approach the subject based on their upbringing and personal experience. A generation ago, many would relate to God as the ultimate explanation for the improbable leaping into existence of the harmonious bio-friendly cosmos in which we find ourselves. Today Arnie Eisen found that many Jews were more interested in God as a force or spirit that promotes commitment to good deeds in the world, and as something to turn to, yet without holding traditional beliefs about a God who commands or demands. He writes; “Rationales for faith hold little interest. It is enough for our subjects that they find personal meaning in what they are doing. If they do, arguments about God’s presence in the sanctuary are beside the point.”

It is not fair to criticize religion for the pain it causes without also praising it for the harm it prevents. Religion can inflame other conflicts, making nationalistic or economic conflicts that much more difficult to resolve, but it can also restrain the human tendency to murder and mayhem, especially when it is able to teach a sense of common humanity. We know of those whose religious passion lead to assassinations and slaughter, but there are others who develop religious fervor for humanitarian goals like curing cancer, educating the world’s children, and bringing people into dialogue with one another.

Further, what evidence really could verify or falsify God? As Abraham Joshua Heschel liked to say: “For the believer, proofs are irrelevant; for the nonbeliever, proofs are unconvincing.” Many scientists have accepted the position that religion is a separate domain, asking very different questions. Science may ask how the universe came into being, but it cannot answer the question of why, the questions of purpose for which human beings long to find an answer. Or to put it differently, science can help us ascertain what is, but not what should be. Adopting scientific methods in archeology, history and philology can help us as religionists, as we weed out falsehoods in our understanding of the history of our own religious traditions, but scientific methods will not provide us with answers to ultimate questions. Perhaps that is why, even as scientific information proliferates, it is hard to get the average citizen engaged and why many people continue to search in other places for answers to their heartfelt questions.

Over the summer, I ran across an interesting article a Jewish publication out of Chicago, the World Jewish Digest. They edited and published the sections of Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Albert Einstein concerning Einstein’s Jewish identify and his religious outlook.

There were two interesting things in this article that I would like to share with you. The first, is perhaps familiar to you from other sources, that Einstein considered himself a religious person. Now what he meant by religious was much more in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, than Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, but it included fierce criticism of the aggressive atheists of his time. He wrote: “The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who in their grudge against traditional religion as the opium of the masses cannot hear the music of the spheres.” Einstein experienced awe at the physical universe and expressed this transcendent wonder many times in his life. Just after his 50th birthday, in an interview, he expressed it thus: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced, there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly; this is religiousness.” Further he saw this “cosmic religious feeling” as “the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.”

Isaacson, also writes about the importance of Einstein’s religious stance in tempering his egotism and unkindness, something I had not learned of elsewhere. It not only motivated him to work on behalf of refugees and the oppressed but also moderated his behavior in everyday life. Isaacson writes: “For Einstein, as for most people, a belief in something larger than himself became a defining sentiment. It produced in him an admixture of confidence and humility that was leavened by a sweet simplicity. Given his proclivity toward being self-centered, these were welcome graces. Along with his humor and self awareness, they helped him to avoid the pretense and pomposity that could have afflicted the most famous mind in the world.”

I am not worried about those who declare themselves atheists or agnostics with regard to a belief in a particular construct of God, but am much more concerned with those who are agnostics or atheists with regard to being open to awe and wonder at our world. Religion and science are both trying to make sense of the world, and if 50% of the world’s scientists can be religious, according to surveys quoted by Stephen Jay Gould, one of the greatest of paleontologists, then perhaps 50% of those whose religion is secular science, can open themselves up to broader horizons and consider that there is something greater than themselves in this universe.

Scientists continue to explore the empirical evidence for the benefits of religion, with today’s studies finding religious people living longer and feeling happier while they are alive (though not necessarily acting in more moral ways- something for us to discuss during the year). Religion even plays a significant part in helping us to move from being Type A unhealthy personalities to the more relaxed and healthy Type B’s, but it is more than that. Religion is the human desire to find meaning and purpose, to create a narrative, a story that helps us navigate in the world. It helps us tune our personal transmitters to the voice of conscience within, and helps us find, amidst all the distracting ambient light and pollution, the true star by which to guide our lives. Yirat Adonai, Awe is the basic religious feeling. It can moderate many of our more negative qualities, while keeping us young in our openness to the wonder of the world.

Einstein wrote: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle.”

On these High Holidays we pray: zachreinu lechayim, restore us to life, to a life of wonder and joy to the radical amazement that opens us to the life of the spirit.