Torn Between Torah and Science

By Tzvi Freeman

Question:

I am deeply perturbed by the conflicts between Jewish beliefs and science. My heart and at times my mind, too, lead me to Torah, but at other times, my minimal understanding of science causes me to wonder about it all.

Answer:

You speak of a conflict between science and faith and how this rips you apart in two directions at once. Let me provide a simple way to make this much easier for you:

The conflict really has nothing to do with science, nor with faith. The conflict has to do with purpose.

The standard materialist, empiricist, reductionist view that many scientists take has nothing to do with purpose. The trinity of this faith is Chance, Necessity and the Human Mind. From these supreme deities arise the demigods of Matter and Energy.

I call it a faith because not only has science itself never provided a logical basis for belief in this pantheon, but has demonstrated many times over the absurdity of it all. As the esteemed British theoretician of science, Alfred North Whitehead wrote in the 1920s:

"The state of modern thought is that every single item in this general doctrine is denied, but that the general conclusions from the doctrine as a whole are retained. The result is a complete muddle in the scientific thought, in philosophic cosmology and in epistemology. But any doctrine which does not implicitly presuppose this point of view is assailed as unintelligible."

I'll detail it out a little:

1. Prove to me that everything in the universe must make sense to the human mind? On the one hand, the scientist tells us that our mind evolved through the challenges of survival. On the other hand, he claims that this jelly-like grey-matter device that so evolved is capable of explain the basic truths and origins of all things. Could anything be more absurd?

2. Explain to me what is chance and what is necessity? The cosmologist chooses at whim which elements of existence are so because they must be so and which originated at the outset of the universe.

3. Explain why we cling to this anachronistic notion of energy and matter in the mechanistic, Cartesian sense after a century of scientific probing and discovery has demonstrated again and again how inadequate these notions are in explaining the phenomenon of the quantum world.

So science is also a religion of faith. But it is faith without purpose. It is faith that we are simply artifacts of a cold, indifferent universe. Nothing has meaning, other than being material to write yet another doctoral thesis.

The ancient faith of the Jew, on the other hand, is a belief that life itself is nothing but meaning. Reality is personal. The focus of life is my decisions, what I choose to do with life. Those decisions and their consequences are more real than any star or subatomic particle, any fact in Wikipedia or news on your TV screen. Whereas to the contemporary scientist, life is a phenomenon, to the traditional Jew, life is real.

As I promised, I've tried to simplify the matter by deconstructing the common terms in which we generally couch this conflict.

I hope this helps--mainly because I don't see why any of this conflict should get in the way of you adopting the entire beauty of Shabbat and bringing our rich heritage into your life with a complete heart.

39 Comments Posted

By Tzvi Freeman More articles... |

Rabbi Tzvi Freeman heads Chabad.org's Ask The Rabbi team, and is a senior member of the Chabad.org editorial team. He is the author of a number of highly original renditions of Kabbalah and Chassidic teaching, including the universally acclaimed "Bringing Heaven Down to Earth." To order Tzvi's books click here.

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Reader Comments
Latest Comments:

Posted: Apr 9, 2008

RE: Thanks for your feedback FC

<comedy noted and appreciated> ;-)
I especially like the "It's not my department" quote...and the "I'm quite capable of misunderstanding things on my own" statement. <grin>

I think R. Kaplan was on to something historically speaking, as well. I think that Judaism had the things that many people assume are Buddhism, long before Buddhism had them. My personal bent is that we need to look back at Judaism and history before we look to other sources of "relief". So many people seem to want to run off to something like Buddhism, when they can find the same things in Judaism, if they would only look more closely and at deeper and older roots within Judaism.

On the Earth age question, I saw an article by a Jewish Physicist that describes, according to Breshit, the age of the Earth in a manner that exactly matches the supposed age derived from science. VERY interesting article.

Posted By Anonymous, FC, CO

Posted: Apr 9, 2008

Thanks for your feedback FC

I was relieved to see that secular seems to mean approximately what I meant. My doubts are not really based completely on science, and using the term just seems to cause confusion, at least for me.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan was also a physicist and inspired me to consider Judaism as a medium for meditation as opposed to something like Buddhism.

He wrote an interesting monograph demonstrating that the universe could be 15 billion years old and still not contradict Halakha.

It surprised me that he didn't say a single word about the age of the earth. This reminded me of Alan Sherman's famous line "the rockets go up, who cares where they come down; it's not my department says Werner Von Braun."

My interests are in areas like history, archaeology, and textual analysis which may not technically be considered sciences.

Generally, I do not seek advice from Rabbis or Scientists. I'm quite capable of misunderstanding things on my own.

Posted By Josef I. Friedman, Hillsborough, NJ
via myjewishcenter.org

Posted: Apr 9, 2008

What is Torah

Joseph,
I don't agree that one can substitute the word secular for science. Secular has a specific meaning with respect to religion, and many scientists are not secular. I can think of one such 'scientist', a physicist to be exact, who is a very orthodox Jew, and who views physics through the light of the Torah, and not visa-versa. This is not accepting the world through secular eyes, quite the opposite actually...

Posted By Anonymous, FC, CO