Study with Rabbi Perlin (5/21/2020)
The Debate: Religion vs. Science OR Religion & Science
A TBS Class with Rabbi Amy R. Perlin, D.D. on Thursday, May 21, 2020 at 1 PM
The Torah-Science Debates: Some Random Thoughts by Velvl Greene p. 25 f.
Chapter 4 in the book Science in the Light of Torah ed. By H. Branover and I.C. Attia, 1994
The Debate Continues
Most of the participants in the science-religion debate think that it is only about 150 years old and that it originated in the Europe of Darwin and Wellhausen. Indeed, much of the debate – as we identify it today – does contain elements that were newly introduced during the Darwinian era, such as biological evolution and cultural anthropology. But the basic disagreement predates, by far, this recent past. The science-religion controversy is a venerable and long chapter in the drama of world and Jewish history.
Galileo’s persecution by the Inquisition of his church occurred in the early seventeenth century, but Maimonides’ efforts to reconcile Aristotelian science with Torah were recorded five hundred years earlier. The debates described in the Talmud between the rabbis and the “heretics” (who depended on their own empirical observations rather than revelation and tradition) date back to the very early years of the common era, some eighteen hundred years ago. It does not require too great a flight of the imagination to visualize Moses’ appearance in Pharaoh’s court as an early science-religion debate: one side accepting the validity of tradition, revelation, and miracles, with the other side trusting only logic, reason and empirical “proof.”
For some reason, the centuries-old debate still continues. In Jewish life, it seems to continue with unabated intensity. For example, the mediocre Anglo-Jewish newspaper that tries to serve the social and informational needs of my small Diaspora community devotes an inordinate amount of front-page space to science-religion “news.” Sometimes an article on science appears by one of our more liberal rabbis trying to establish his credentials as a “modern” philosopher; at other times the paper reports on the dangers that accompany the efforts of “creationists” in America and Israel to challenge contemporary science curricula. Howsoever presented, the controversy is still viable. Attempts to defuse the issue and to resolve the disagreements in books, journals, and conferences have not really succeeded. The Torah-science debate, it seems is with us today as much as it was a century ago, or many centuries ago.
The Debate Continues – But the Debaters Change
This is not to say that the same banal arguments are repeated century after century and generation after generation. Both the actors and the script have changed. The arguments in ancient days pitted revelation against reason; religion and Torah were regarded as dogma while science was labeled enlightenment. One side represented conservative, reactionary authority, while the other side claimed to speak for liberalism, empiricism, and freedom. Today the debate actually deals with very different subjects. The labels may be the same (depending on which side uses them), but the arguments really reduce to the validity of the scientific method and the true meaning of the Torah. Much of the controversy is based on interpretation and misinterpretation of natural phenomena and probability and the relevance (even the feasibility) of Divine revelation. Paradoxically, the “science arguments” have become more and more dogmatic and the “science spokesmen” have become more and more authoritarian, while the “Torah spokespersons” become the challengers of the conventional wisdom and the advocates of free inquiry.
Perhaps the arguments strayed from the original because the participants in the argument have been replaced. Folklore would have it that the proponents of science are scientists: physicists, chemists, biologists, and engineers with lab coats and complicated equipment. Arranged against them – again according to folk wisdom – are the bearded, black-hatted rabbis whom the Jerusalem Post labels “ultra-orthodox” and whom most of us consider to be Torah scholars if only because of their dress.
It may have been like this as some time in the past. It is not today. The debate might be going on in the Jerusalem Post and in the Anglo-Jewish diaspora press, but it is not heard in the science lab where I work.
Rabbi Perlin’s summary of the rest of the article:
Dr. Greene proceeds to discuss the fact that he is both a scientist and a late-in-life Lubavitch Jew. He sees no contradiction in either spheres of his life and that true scientists and his religious community do not engage in this debate nor do they care. He believes that the science-religion debate has been generated in our time by three constituencies:
1- THOSE WHO REPLACED TORAH WITH SCIENCE: eg. A first-generation American Jewish immigrant population that replaced Torah Judaism with Science to be American and assimilated.
2- LIBERAL JEWS WHO WANT TO STAY CONNECTED TO THE PART OF JUDAISM THEY AGREE WITH AND USE SCIENCE TO SUPPORT THEIR CHOICES: eg. The modern religious establishment (eg. Reform Jews) who use their trust in science to reinterpret Torah. They don’t replace Torah, they use science to help transform it into their ideological liking. Science is accepted as unquestioned Truth and Torah is questioned and Torah becomes metaphor, contorted to make it relevant, modernly Jewish and digestible, and to maintain Jewish identity, but that is all subservient to the science.
3- THOSE WHO FORCEFULLY USE SCIENCE TO ERADICATE RELIGION: eg. Soviet Russia is cited as an example of “state sponsored science” to the exclusion of all else and all choice. “In order for communist ideology to win, it must not only eradicate the Ten Commandments; it must also destroy, completely the idea that there is a Creator and that there was a Creation.” p. 33
His conclusion as a scientist and Lubavitch Jew is that the answer is Science AND Judaism. The need for a source of truth that guides human behavior (religion) does not negate the need for scientifically investigated and verified truths about our natural world. And so he says, “There can be no inconsistency between truth and truth, reality and reality.”p. 35-36
Questions:
1- ALL – Are we able to hold two truths at the same time?
2- NOTHING – What happens when science and religion are rejected? What are the dangers?
3- SOMETHING – The Humility of NOT Knowing – Let’s discuss the fact that there are unknown truths and unknown answers in both science and religion.
Velvl Greene (July 5, 1928 – November 21, 2011) was a Canadian–American–Israeli scientist and academic – PhD in Dairy Bacteriology from the University of Minnesota. Specializing in public health and bacteriology, he was a professor of public health and microbiology at the University of Minnesota from 1959 to 1986, teaching over 30,000 students. He developed the first university-level curriculum in environmental microbiology in response to an outbreak of staph infections at American hospitals in the late 1950s. In 1961 he began working for the NASA Planetary Quarantine Division in an exobiology program that sought to determine the presence of microbes in outer space. He immigrated to Israel in 1986, serving as chair of epidemiology and public health and professor emeritus at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and director of that school’s Lord Jacobovitz Center for Jewish Medical Ethics until 2009. Coming from a secular Zionist background, Greene became a baal teshuva and Lubavitcher Hasid in the 1960s. He conducted a three-decade-long correspondence with the Lubavitcher Rebbe discussing the compatibility between Torah teachings and scientific knowledge.
Science (gsn) by Hillel Levine
published in 20th Century Jewish Religious Thought (Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements and Beliefs,
- Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr, 2009, p.855
Beyond providing techniques for coping with life, science also constitutes a means of conceiving life. As such, it can be part and parcel of the efforts of the religious man to make the cosmos meaningful in human terms. Until the modern period, in method and in substance science was not wholly differentiated from other modes of knowing and explaining such as philosophy, mysticism, and astrology. It has been argued that in the late Middle Ages in Western Christendom theological as well as institutional changes within the church spurred the growth of empirical science. In the modern period, as the belief becomes more pervasive that science can solve a growing number of vexing problems and as new technologies actually begin to change the contours of day-to-day life, science, its constructs, its admissible facts, its canons of evidence, and its plausible hypotheses attain a privileged position. The “cult of useful knowledge” is fostered by, as it instructs, those who seek to shape society.
Perlin Summary of the rest: Levine argues that Jews were not involved with the early advances in science from the middle ages on, because they were a part of a gentile world and world view, with perhaps some exception in medicine. The defense of Torah truths hindered even those who has an inclination toward science. As an example, he cites:
“Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague defend the study of astronomy but treats it as subordinate to the study of Torah.” P. 858
He also makes the claim that persecution turned Jews inward, especially since they were prevented from being a part of universities and academies of science and as science was used to further discriminate against Jews. In addition, he believes that movements such as Lurianic Kabbalah surfaced just as Europe was engaging in scientific development, took many Jews in a different direction. He goes century by century to show how Jews were not at the forefront of science in the pre-modern world as a function of belief, accessibility, and assimilation concerns.
Hillel Levine, Emeritus Professor of Religion – Boston University
Hillel Levine (b. 1946) is the author of The Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and its Jews in the early modern period (Yale U Press 1991) and of In Search of Sugihara: the elusive Japanese diplomat who risked his life to rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1996), co-author of The Death of an American Jewish community: a tragedy of good intentions (New York: Free Press, 1992), and co-editor (with Robert S. Cohen) of Maimonides and the sciences (2000). He has a PhD from Harvard and rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary.
He is the president of the International Center for Conciliation, a non-profit group The International Center for Conciliation, which is dedicated to fostering dignity and cooperation in conflict ridden communities through reconciliation and community preparedness. Hillel Levine received his rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and his Ph.D. in Sociology and Jewish History from Harvard University. From 1973 to 1980 he taught sociology and Jewish history at Yale University, where he founded the program in Judaic Studies. From 1980 to 1982 he was Deputy Director for Museum Planning of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in Washington. Since 1982, he has been Professor of Religion at Boston University. He has held visiting professorships in Japan, China, Poland, the Soviet Union, Brazil, and Israel. At Boston University, Prof. Levine served as the first director of the Center for Judaic Studies and taught courses in American Judaism, Antisemitism, the History of Judaism, the Holocaust, and most recently Religion and Film.
Prof. Levine describes himself as a student of Erik Erikson, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Elie Wiesel, Hannah Arendt, and Peter Berger who applies his theoretical knowledge and experience in the social sciences, from psychoanalytic theory to organizational development and business administration, to a broad range of domestic and international strategic planning processes and public programs.