Religion and Science

Opening remarks

Moderator, Daniel Glaser: … So, his most recent book in English is “The Great Partnership - God, Science, and the Search for Meaning,” and I think this evening we'll be concentrating principally, for those of you who've looked at it, on the first section, in which he presents a very elegant account of the history of the apparent conflict between science and religion, and Chief Rabbi, if I may invite you initially to help us through that initial argument about the relation, as you have it, between Athens and Jerusalem, between these different kinds of thinking, and perhaps help us to understand where we've reached with that dichotomy, if you would.

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, I wrote the book because I enjoyed the sparring match between the angry atheists and the angry theists, and it was great fun, but it did seem to me that we ought to move the conversation onwards. So, here is roughly how it occurred to me over the decades. The first thing really puzzled me when I came to university and began to talk to Christian believers, and I suddenly realised they had a very different view of faith than we did as Jews, and one very important thing for them was to be able to prove the existence of God, and that didn't make sense to me as a Jew.

That wasn't how we looked at it, and so when I began studying philosophy, and we got all the demonstrations, Hume, Hart, all the people who showed that you can't, I gave a huge sigh of relief, because there really is a difference between scientific hypotheses and religious faith. There are different ways of thinking. There are different ways of using language.

Moderator: And so let me just check I've understood. When you started studying philosophy, you became aware that over the years, mostly Christians had been trying to give, as it were, logical proofs of the existence of God - Aquinas and so on - but then you realised that other Christians had refuted them, and you felt relieved at that point. 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, post-Christians.

Moderator: Yes, post-Christians.

Rabbi Sacks: Hume and Hart were kind of post-Christian. 

Moderator: Okay. 

Rabbi Sacks: And that was, for me, a very important step forward. It made sense to me. But then I began to think, what are these two different ways of thinking? And over the years, I came across a lot of different accounts of two ways of thinking that seemed to be very similar, that converge.

I don't mean Daniel Kahaneman's new book on “Thinking Fast and Slow,” which is a different dichotomy. I found Jerome Bruner talking about the difference between systems and storeys. I found Carol Gilligan talking about the different ways that men and women reasoned about moral issues - men always focussing on what is my duty, women always focussing on what are the relationships involved. I found Richard Nisbet talking about the difference between West and East. You show somebody from the West a picture of a lot of objects, and they pick out the objects, whereas in the East, they pick out the relationships between them, and so on. So there were a lot of things, Simon Baron-Cohen on autism, and so on.

And all of these things showed that there were two fundamentally different ways in which we thought about, on the one hand, scientific issues; on the other hand, meaning issues. What electrified me, I don't know why, but with a force of revelation was, in my early readings about right brain, left brain, when out of nowhere came this sudden revelation that all alphabets that don't have vowels are written from right to left, like Hebrew, and all alphabets with vowels, like Greek or like English, are written from left to right. Why so?

Because if you have an alphabet with vowels, you can look at a word and know what it means. An alphabet without vowels, you haven't got a clue what it means, because H-T, for instance, might be hit, or hurt, or hate, or height, or whatever it is. 

Moderator: Which is giving our sign language transcribers quite a challenge to see where that is.

Rabbi Sacks: I'm sorry, do they have vowels up there? Which way are they writing? 

So, I mean, this was really interesting, and I suddenly realised that that had to do with left brain, right brain. The alphabets with vowels could be serially processed. With the alphabets without vowels, you had to understand the whole context, the sentence, the context, and so on. 

And that became, for me, a metaphor of the difference between religion and science, which, to save everyone having to read 120,000 words, I summarise in two sentences, which say science takes things apart to see how they work.Religion puts things together to see what they mean. 

So that was stage two. Then I discovered that the first alphabet was Proto-Semitic. Did you know this?

Moderator: I did not know that. Well, until I read your book.

Rabbi Sacks: Until you read the book. So alphabet comes from Aleph-Beit, and the first alphabet was a kind of precursor of Hebrew, Phoenician, and so on. And it had no vowels, and written from right to left.

The first alphabet with vowels was Greek. But the interesting thing is, Greek, which derives from Hebrew - alpha, beta, gamma, delta, aleph, beit, gimmel, dalet - Greek added vowels. And the interesting thing is, for several centuries, it was written like Hebrew, from right to left.

Then for about a century, it was written both ways, boustrophedon, which is somewhat confusing. And then about…

Moderator: This is the old joke, isn't it? Under EU law, British drivers are going to be switching from driving on the left to driving on the right, but the changeover is going to happen gradually. 

Rabbi Sacks: Exactly so, yeah. So that may explain what's happening in Greece nowadays. (Delayed reaction.) And then finally, Greek stabilises at left to right, and at the very point, sixth century BCE, that you have the first left to right, i.e. left brain alphabet, you find the emergence for the first time in history, of the two great left brain activities of which the Greeks were the world's greatest, science and philosophy. So they suddenly emerge at the same time.

That was the second discovery. 

The third discovery, which I'm surprised has not been written more about, is that those two worlds of Athens and Jerusalem were brought together by Christianity. Everyone knows that.

But the really significant fact is that the founder of Christianity, Jesus, is a Jew who is reading the Bible in Hebrew and speaking Aramaic. Every direct speech we have of Jesus in the New Testament, he is speaking Aramaic, whereas all the early texts of Christianity, every single one of them, the Gospels, Paul's letters, every one of them is written in Greek, a language which it is highly doubtful whether Jesus understood. So even Tanach, even the Hebrew Bible was read by Christians in Greek until the fourth century when Jerome starts looking at the Hebrew.

So you have Christianity as a translation from Judaism into a Greek language into which it is impossible to translate the key words. So you have, all of a sudden, in Christianity, a religion, which is Greek in its sensibility and therefore believes it occupies the same world as science and philosophy. So you have the belief that science, philosophy and religion are all part of the same mindset.

Moderator: So just to recapitulate the argument, Jesus was a Jew, did not speak Greek, but Christianity was done in Greek and also science and philosophy were done in Greek. So Christianity, science and philosophy were existing in the same linguistic universe. 

Rabbi Sacks: They were all coexisting and Christianity had this whole branch of thinking called natural theology based on Aristotelian science that you could detect the purposes of things in nature. Teleological science.

And actually, that is what was refuted by Darwinian evolution. Darwin comes along and shows you cannot prove purposes in nature. So what actually Darwin did was to refute Aristotelian science, not religion.

But nobody really worked that out because they didn't realise you could distinguish between Aristotelian science and religion as being two different mindsets altogether. 

So it seemed to me that Judaism had something interesting to say about science and religion being - and I only use this as a metaphor - like the left and right brains, and we need both and we have both. 

Moderator: So just to be clear, would it be inaccurate to say that Darwin refuted Christianity but not Judaism?

Rabbi Sacks: I think he refuted a very simplistic understanding, a very, sorry, a very Greek understanding of science. I don't think he refutes Christianity. I think after Darwin, Christianity has to reclaim its Jewish roots.

Moderator: So in a sense, the move of Darwin requires Christianity to reinvent itself and to sort of detach from itself this Greek - you wouldn't want to say perversion - but this Greek element which had been central to it for…

Rabbi Sacks: I was trained in both schools. I mean, I love Greek philosophy. I love Tanach. They're different worlds and I think you need both. So I think separating them and splitting them and seeing that each shows us a genuine dimension of reality is tremendously important.

Once you can separate the two and show that they're answering different questions, they're thinking in different ways, you can stop seeing one as hostile to the other. 

Moderator: That's very helpful. And I must say I'm off duty as a neuroscientist this evening so we're not going to do the left brain-right brain thing. I mean, it's clearly a metaphor and a very powerful one, but I don't propose that we enter into the bones of that one despite the presence of many eminent neuroscientists in the room. Marcus, do you want to come back on any of those points before we get into the discussion? I mean, I can see you've got the book in front of you and it's marked up.

Marcus du Sautoy, mathematician: And I guess I would have some dispute with the statement that you make several times in the book about science is about taking things apart, see how they work. And religion is about putting them together to give them meaning. Because I think that's really, science starts with taking things apart, but actually I think that the main body of science, the most interesting thing is actually putting them back together to understand some consistent story, which explains why the things are the way they are.

It really is giving meaning. I mean, you have a very interesting section about meaning, which is that meaning always must exist outside the system, which I was trying to refute in some way, because it is almost your attempt at a proof of the existence of something outside of God, I think. 

Moderator: So let's be clear on this, there are two points. So your point, Chief Rabbi, in the book is that the Jewish God exists outside the world, but the polytheistic, the gods of the religions that have many gods are inside the world. Is that the point you're referring to, Marcus? And do you want to expand on that a little bit, Chief Rabbi?

Marcus: I think it's a very strong point, which is, you know, you made the point that if you see a game of football, you can explain the rules of football, but to understand the meaning of football, you have to put that football inside a society and understand its meaning. I mean, Wittgenstein also, you quote, as somebody who says, you can only understand the meaning outside it.

I think actually that applies to mathematics. I was trying to see whether mathematics could be actually a system where you have meaning inside it without having to put it in something larger, and I actually couldn't do it. So I think it's a very strong argument.

Rabbi Sacks: It's Gödel's Theorem that you can't prove all the elements of the system from within the system. 

Marcus: Yeah, I mean, I think there is some point there. But of course, it doesn't imply that there is meaning. Things may not have meaning, and that, of course, is, I think, either you say, well, it's rather miserable if you don't have meaning, and so I think it's a better standpoint to actually say there is meaning outside it, and that is where religion is coming from. 

That actually made me start to think about something in mathematics, which I think is really quite important here, which is you can have, in mathematics, two systems with actually contradictory axioms in them. So, for example, this relates to Gödel, which says that there are some statements within mathematics which will be true, but you cannot prove, and actually, one of them is about different sorts of infinity.

If you take all the whole numbers or all the infinite decimal numbers, one question in mathematics was asked at the beginning of the 20th century, is there a set of numbers between those two which is bigger than all the whole numbers, but smaller than all the infinite decimal numbers? And it turned out that in mathematics... 

Moderator: So, this is about infinity we think of as being a single thing.

Marcus: I mean, I think that actually really relates to, because, yeah, perhaps I should go back one stage and say, you know, infinity used to be something that, in mathematics, was something you couldn't understand. You just said, okay, well, there is something infinite. We cannot capture that because we are finite beings. How can we master the infinite? 

And I think this is where I would really differ with religion, that sometimes I feel religion gives up too easily, and actually, you write that that's not good enough in Judaism. It's quite why I'm drawn to your arguments.

No, that's not good enough. You must keep on questioning, and within, we can already prove that there are things that we cannot know, which is interesting. You know, in mathematics, I can prove, using Gödel's Theorem, that there are statements I will not be able to prove within the system, which the Greeks would hate.

You know, the Greeks believed, the ancient Greeks really believed that anything that was true should have a proof for it, so that's a really sort of exciting moment, I think, in 20th century science, that you can actually prove that there are things you won't know. Quantum physics as well. We know that there are things that we cannot know the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time. We must sacrifice one for the other, so there are limits to our knowledge.

But coming to infinity, you see, mathematicians wouldn't give up, and eventually, the mathematician at the end of the 19th century actually realised you could capture infinity. And that there were many different sorts of infinity, and it started to raise very interesting questions, which then led, in the beginning, about the 1930s, to the sudden realisation that you could have two different sorts of mathematics which were totally consistent. One where there was an infinite set between these two, and one where there wasn't. It's something we call the continuum hypothesis, 

And so I'm quite happy with two systems which have an axiom which says there is something and an axiom where there isn't, provided they don't have contradictions in them. And I think that's what I really loved about this book. It is your statement that, I mean, Maimonides is, I think, somebody who I have a lot of respect for, because he is, in a sense, somebody who combines both religion and science in a very intelligent way, so it's ‘accept the truth whoever says it,’ and I think that that's, again and again, Darwin, you know, we have so much evidence for Darwin. We have so much evidence for the fact that the universe is clearly older than 5,000, however many we are now.

Moderator: I'm going to slow you down, though, Marcus, so I think, first of all, to say the Jewish Book Week celebrates 60 years, I think we've covered more mathematics in the last five minutes than in the preceding 60 years, and well done. 

There are a number of points to pick up on there, and I think the one about how Judaism regards scientists, and the bracha that can be said around them, is one we should return to. But Chief Rabbi, if I may, this question about whether all things can be explained or not is, I think, a central one. And perhaps also this - if we may - in the first instance, deal with the question of whether God, in the Jewish conception, is inside the world or not inside the world, because I do think mathematics has some interesting things to say about whether meaning is completely within a system or whether you need something outside of that system to give it true meaning. And I wonder if you can help us through that a little.

Rabbi Sacks: One thing I say in the book, my doctoral supervisor at Cambridge, the late Sir Bernard Williams, truly believed there was nothing outside of the system and drew the consequence that life has no transcendental… life has no meaning, and so, you know, and it was so clear to me. 

Moderator: And you take that to be inevitable. 

Rabbi Sacks: You can live that way. You can live a coherent and, in many ways, admirable life, and this man was a man from whom I learned an enormous amount. And I really do believe that we have to live this, ‘accept the truth whoever says it,’ and I've learned more from, at least as much from atheists as I have from theists, and Bernard Williams was a classic example. 

But that is a real life choice. There is a universe in which you have the tragic sense of life, which comes from believing there is nothing outside the system, and you have the hope form of life, which is the Judaic system. It's a very pure system and says there is something beyond the universe, that God, the word for universe, olam, in Hebrew, comes from the same root as ne'elam, hidden, so that's the exact opposite of natural theology. Purpose is hidden in the universe. It's not visible, and it's not scientifically accessible, so there are two ways of life, which Athens and Jerusalem exemplified. 

Now, it seemed to me the great thing about Judaism is Judaism was open to the world of Athens, open to the world of science, and one of those ways of expressing it is the bracha, the blessing we make over seeing a great scientist. And it's a blessing I've had the privilege of making on many occasions, and I try and work out who were the scientists that the Sages were blessing? And they were either Greek or they were Roman. Now, the Greeks were the guys who under the Seleucids, Antiochus IV, had practically tried to wipe out Judaism altogether. The Romans were the guys who destroyed the Temple, so here were their cultural and, in every sense, military antagonists, and yet they still respected their science enough to make a blessing thanking God for them. And that seems to me the kind of open-mindedness that I think we have to stand for.

Marcus: One of the things I find interesting is that why is it that science and religion has… we talked on the phone before we came to this debate and said, ‘Let's hope we don't have some sort of confrontational thing,’ because it's kind of got a tired debate somehow this time, but why has science and religion sort of been clashing so much? I think that's quite interesting, and in some ways, I'd say that you're trying to push the two apart in your book. But for me, I feel that there is a natural connection between the two, because both are concerned with extremely big questions, the question of why is there something rather than nothing? I mean, and that's why…

Rabbi Sacks: I call this the best line in the book, and I didn't write it. It was the late Sidney Morgenbesser who said, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ You know, ‘And if there were nothing, you'd still complain.’

Marcus:  Yeah, exactly. But, you know, that is one of the biggest questions, and I think we have to, I mean, scientists are sometimes rather bad at admitting that there are lots of things we don't know. In fact, that's what makes science incredibly exciting is that there are lots of things that we don't know.

I mean, science and mathematics would be boring if we knew everything. 

Moderator: But Marcus, are you being too reconciliatory here? Because it does seem as if the Chief Rabbi is arguing that the thing that gives Judaism hope is the existence of something outside the system and which cannot be proved from within the system. And while science would admit that there are things which we don't currently know, science would always say that in the end, we could, in principle, know them.

Would that be right?

Marcus: That's my feeling, that there are things that scientists always hope that we will be able to understand. I mean, it is my belief that we will understand why there is something rather than nothing. And I'm after… and I will die trying to find that out. And it may be that we know from mathematics and science that there are things that we will not be able to know, and this may be one of them, but I'm not going to give up trying. 

Rabbi Sacks: I think that is the point at which science and religion do come very close to one another. We are willing to, I define faith as ‘The courage to live with uncertainty.’

Faith is not certainty. 

In Judaism, faith begins with this journey of Abraham and Sarah to an unknown destination, Moses and the Israelites to an unknown land. It's this belief that you somehow in life have to have the courage to travel beyond the visible horizon.

And at that point, science and religion converge. I think they will. 

Marcus: Well, I have a faith in the fact that there will ultimately be an explanation. And that's what, and I think we're getting closer and closer to this, is why it's an incredibly exciting time to be a scientist. I mean, already we're understanding actually how nothing can give rise to something. I mean, almost as a zero can become a one plus a minus one.

And that shows things when you have the void, actually the void is incredibly alive and out of that can become particles. So we're beginning to understand that. You see, and that's for me, exciting and that's giving meaning, the understanding and a grand story, which is not pulling the thing apart. It's actually trying to understand how the whole thing is put together. 

Moderator: But as a religious man or as somebody within a religious system, are there things, are there questions which you believe science should not address or at least could, cannot address in principle? Are there bits of territory, you know, knowledge of the world of ourselves, which you think it is either inappropriate or misguided for science to look at?

Rabbi Sacks: Well, look, there's something that scientists do all the time nowadays, which, you know, I was taught, first hour in philosophy, certainly the first year in philosophy, you cannot do, which is derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ You know, you will read, I don't know how many books by evolutionary psychologists, neo-Darwinians saying, you know, we've evolved this survival strategy or that survival strategy and implying that just by looking at our evolution from hunter-gatherer to homo sapiens, that we know scientifically what works. The fact is that when all the science is done, we still have moral choices.

We are still, as individuals, going to be faced with moral dilemmas and moral temptations. The fact that we now know of these two, Daniel Kahneman’s, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” we have this very fast emotional system, the fight or flight thing, and the slow rational one. So every one of us, I think, is now in a much better… I've got to say, all this science, it's religious music.

I mean, just work out how long people thought the world was eternal because something can't come from nothing. And now all of a sudden, we have creation at a point in time. It's true it's a bit longer than we thought it was.

Marcus: We're in the right direction. 

Rabbi Sacks: Most things religious take longer than you think they will. So we had to move from 5,700 to 13.7 billion. But you know. 

Moderator: What's a few orders of magnitude between friends? 

Rabbi Sacks: I suddenly, I say in the book, you've gotta admit that God is a lot more patient than we thought He was. He's waited a long time for us to emerge. But all of a sudden, suddenly creation is back in the cosmological scheme. Suddenly free will is back in the psychological scheme.

Suddenly, all sorts of stuff that had been regarded prior to the 19th century in very mechanistic terms, Laplace, here's the system which works mechanically and I don't need the God hypothesis. All of a sudden, almost everything from cosmology to neuroscience has reopened the great science, the religious questions from creation to free will. 

Moderator: So we're catching up.

Marcus: Well, that's why I think there is actually a real debate, sometimes unhealthy, but can be a really healthy debate because they're actually interested in the same things. I think free will, for example, is a very interesting one. I mean, in neuroscience at the moment, I did a programme about consciousness, consciousness for the BBC and trying to understand consciousness, I would say is probably the other big question other than why is there something rather than nothing? And that I think relates very much to our belief about who we are and what we're doing here. 

But I did an experiment in Berlin, which really questioned the idea of whether there is free will, because in this experiment, I had to just choose whether to put my left finger down or my right finger down. And whilst my brain was being scanned, I would say when I consciously made a decision to press my left or my right finger down, the person doing the scanning knew six seconds before I was consciously aware what I was going to do, which finger I was gonna put down.

Now that six seconds is a shockingly long time, that I was only able to, I only became conscious of my decision to go left or right. Actually, the experimenter's consciousness knew before I did what I was going to do. 

Now, I think that that's what's so exciting about this time and why I think there are just real issues with science and religion, because that sort of thing really raises the question about well, do we have free will or is consciousness our idea of ourselves actually a very secondary thing to our active biology?

Moderator: But Marcus, I mean, again, it's a lovely sofa conversation in a way, but there are certainly voices within science which are not nearly as open as you appear to be to the notion that religious thought can answer questions. And I do sometimes think, you know, with Jewish jokes, it's all right for Jews to tell Jewish jokes, but when somebody else is telling one, we start to get a bit uncomfortable. I often think that scientists sort of feel the same.

Amongst themselves, scientists are willing to debate any question. In fact, the whole of science is about trying to prove the other guy's wrong. But as soon as scientists are in public or engaging, shall we say, with people of belief or other sorts, and the people of belief try to say something that's within scientific territory, the scientists get very upset and try to rule out those positions from the debate.

Marcus: That’s why I think that this is a very healthy contribution to this whole debate, because most of the other books, it's not healthy. I mean, I succeeded Richard Dawkins as a Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. And, you know, this is the first time I've actually engaged in a debate about religion and science because I really wanted to distance myself from what I thought was an incredibly unhealthy debate.

Rabbi Sacks: Did you know that as we are speaking, Richard Dawkins is debating the Archbishop of Canterbury in Oxford? So if anyone has the halftime score, please let me know. 

Marcus: But I think what gets Richard really angry is when you have people coming with theories which contradict the evidence, contradict what is said, which is true, regardless of who's saying it.

And your book is saying, well, okay, yeah, there's now a huge amount of evidence for Darwinian evolution, but we can incorporate that into, and it's a little bit like that idea of the two axiomatic systems of mathematics. I mean, I don't mind if yours is different to mine, provided they both produce, there's no inconsistencies between the two. Because once you start to say things which actually contradict my evidence, then I'm going to get up in arms and fight my corner.

But actually at the moment, it feels like, well, you've got a hypothesis which doesn't impact terribly much on my view of the world. So whether you want to have that or not…

Rabbi Sacks:  But I mean, take that very interesting neuroscientific experiment you just mentioned. Very interesting that an observer can actually detect several seconds before you know what you're going to do. Although my wife always knows what I'm going to do long before I did. 

But I mean, that is such a fascinating subject because it is telling me, as a religious believer, that free will is not a given. You know, a lot of Judaism is about, you've actually got to work to acquire that. You've actually, because there are subconscious, unconscious impulses which, you know, we don't have conscious control over.

And actually, Freud was far more correct than we think he was. There is an unconscious. And free will is not a given. You have to sort of consciously, I mean, Judaism is consciously distancing yourself in a calibrated distance from contemporary culture so that you can step back and say, no, I'm not automatically going to do this. So free will is a kind of accomplishment. It's not a..

Marcus: Yeah, exactly. I mean, people say there's now a free won't. I mean, you know, that you can actually stop yourself doing that action.

Moderator: But Chief Rabbi, are we in this situation where there is this thing called free will and both science and religion can discuss its nature? I mean, are we talking about the same thing? 

Rabbi Sacks: We honestly don't know how it all works out. But neuroscience is, you know, just as cosmology and particle physics and all the rest, we're dealing with huge paradigm shifts. And all of this is in a state of uncertainty which is what makes it incredibly exciting. But I find a lot of the neuroscience today is, you know, it's very suggestive so that, you know, I mean, I don't know, where, for instance, instead of using the word religion, take a word like poetry.

You know, where does science and poetry interact? There is an interaction. The way we see the world scientifically is going to affect the way we write poetry. The way we see the world scientifically is going to impact the way we respond to it as religious individuals. 

And I find every new scientific discovery deepens my understanding of my faith as a Jew.

Moderator: But personally, I'm very comfortable then with the notion that, you know, there's the science strand and the religion strand and they all help us think about poetry. Did you have an answer to that, Mark, because you twitched when the question was raised?

Marcus: No, well, I did twitch because I think, for me, it comes back to the idea of meaning in mathematics because I can get a computer to churn out true theorems. I mean, but the act of the mathematician is to pick out those which have meaning, those which excite my fellow mathematicians when I talk about them.

Those have elements of surprise and twists and turns, those that have poetry and music in them. And there is a huge amount of aesthetics, which I think people don't kind of understand in mathematics. They think, well, if it's true, that gives it value.

But that's not the case. I mean, and it's interesting that mathematics, I think, is different in some sense to the sciences. 

Moderator: But I did want to ask you that. As Professor of Public Understanding of Science, are you a bit masquerading as a scientist, as a mathematician? Are they the same or not? 

Marcus: Well, that's very interesting. I think actually why mathematics was a very good choice for this chair, the Professor of Public Understanding of Science, is that mathematics is the language which helps you to understand the sciences. 

So it does underpin, and it came out of trying to understand the physical world. But actually, I'm quite happy to create different systems, and only one of them… I mean, for example, we have different sorts of geometry - non-Euclidean geometry, Euclidean geometry, sort of hyperbolic, and positive curvature.

Only one of those fits the universe. 

But I'm quite happy to have the others as well. So I'm, it's part of a mathematician is to create different worlds, one of which will fit reality.

So, and another thing actually, I think, which I did want to raise here is the idea of Creation, actually. Because for me, you know, if you say, well, who created the numbers, for example? Well, that is a totally meaningless question to me. I mean, numbers don't need…

Moderator: So more meaningless than the question of who created the world? 

Marcus: Well, I'm saying that it might be very related. 

Moderator: Okay. 

Marcus: That, you know, the numbers have always been there. I mean, I suppose it goes back almost an Aristotelian sort of… 

Rabbi Sacks: There is no doubt that this was common ground between the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Jews. A sort of very early intuition that reality has a mathematical structure.

Which, you know, it's sort of something we lost until the rise of science in the 17th century. But they were all convinced. You can see this. I pointed out, for instance, the extreme mathematical precision of Genesis, of the Creation account in Genesis. The whole thing is written in multiples of seven. There's seven words in the first verse, 14 words in the second verse, 35 words in the Shabbat thing. All the key words appear in multiples of seven. The word ’good’ appears seven times, ‘God,’ 35 times.

Moderator: What does this mean to you? I mean, it's a pleasing regularity, but does it speak of something more than just a number pattern? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, it tells me God's a mathematician, which is one of the reasons I'm so impressed by Him.

Moderator: But I mean, because, Marcus, you see these regularities. I do just have to ask you, I mean, you're on record as being an atheist as such. 

Marcus: I am, yes.

Moderator: But when you look at these patterns, and there is beauty in mathematics, and perhaps, arguably, the more mathematics you understand, the more beautiful it seems. Do you sometimes, in moments of reverie, does this beauty give you pause as an atheist? Does it mean something more to you than just the shape of things?

Marcus: No, I mean, actually, it explains why things have to be the way they are. And that's, it's not sort of random. I mean, I think that's what, when you understand the fundamental laws of physics, and when we ultimately do, it will say that things have to be the way they are, and they have to be mathematical for things to work.

So, and I get a sense of wonder from that, and magic from it. I mean, I think that's something that, you know, there's a feeling like scientists are taking the poetry out of, you know, by understanding.

Moderator: Unweaving the rainbow.

Marcus: Unweaving the rainbow, but of course, actually, by understanding the way things work, one can get even more wonder than, I think, for them just accepting them for what they are. 

Rabbi Sacks: The thing that fascinates me, and I don't know how this work plays out, but, you know, physics has a mathematical structure, whereas biology has a linguistic structure. I mean, that's the other great conceptual leap, that DNA is written in a language. It's not mathematical. It's actually an extremely long piece of code. 

Marcus: Well, I would say that that's mathematics as well.

Moderator: Well, everything's mathematics as far as you're concerned. 

Marcus: But I'll claim everything…

Rabbi Sacks:  Well, actually, it's a form of language, and that life has a linguistic character, and inanimate material substance has a mathematical character.

And, you know, I mean, you get a sort of glimpse of transcendence here. There are mysteries here which we hope will be resolved, and science will be the thing that resolves them for us. 

But I hope religion will always be open enough to weave that into a form of meaning that gives us hope.

Moderator: But I just, can I repeat the question I asked Marcus to you, too, for a moment? When you see these regularities in the world, Marcus claims they don't trouble him as an atheist. Do they reinforce your belief in God? I mean, is it the case that these regularities... 

Rabbi Sacks: Every new scientific discovery makes the words of Psalm 104 resonate for me. You know, “Ma rabu ma'asecha Hashem, kulam b'chochma asita,” - “How wondrous are Your works, God, You have made them all with wisdom.”

That kind of, and Maimonides says the word ‘wisdom’ means, among other things, absolute precision in craftsmanship. So it's the actual precision of the universe that is astonishing. I mean, and that, of course, I learned from Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society, Master of Trinity College. You know, his book, “Just Six Numbers,” how incredibly finely tuned the universe is for the emergence of life, which is something he, as an agnostic, finds quite difficult to explain. 

Moderator: Marcus. 

Marcus: Well, I think that that's, I think that scientists should not be satisfied with that. And I think scientists are trying to understand, well, why are things so finely tuned? And it's not just, so I think there are rather weak arguments, which are kind of multiverse arguments. There are many other universes where things just don't fit.

Rabbi Sacks: And of course, we happen to be lucky enough to be born into the universe that contains us.

Well, we could only exist in one where it is. And so there are many where electrons don't even get going in sort of bonding together. And I kind of find that a weak argument. I mean, that's kind of giving up for me. 

Rabbi Sacks: At the moment, religion has a better argument than the scientists.

Marcus: Well, on that one, I would say that, especially, and I think this is the thing for me where there is a big difference, which is the testable side of things. One of the kind of criticisms of…

Moderator: It's the Freudian joke, isn't it? The Freudian joke about the scientists who said the problem with Freud's theories is that they're not testicle, sorry testable… Is that right? 

Marcus: Okay, well, you slipped that one in.

Moderator: Waiting all evening for that one to come up. 

Marcus: But I think that, you know, that's one of the criticisms at the moment of string theory is that string theory at the moment does not, is quite an untestable theory. It's not giving, it's a beautiful mathematical description which could describe the way things are, but it's not giving rise to any predictions.

And so that's why a lot of people say, well, it's religion, not science. And I think, well, that's a fair point, but I think string theorists are working their damnedest, actually, to produce some predictions, because they know that that's what science is about. And I think that that is always key for me, that we have to risk the fact that things might be wrong and we have to be able to test things. That's how science works. I mean, even mathematics. I have axioms which seem blatantly obvious about numbers.

If I add six plus seven, it will be the same as seven plus six. It doesn't matter what order. That's an axiom.

But who knows? Maybe there's some really large numbers where suddenly that, when you put them the other way around, it doesn't work. I mean, I don't believe there are, but that is an axiom of mathematics that I'm prepared to take as a starting in my system.

But it's open to being proved wrong. And I think that that's…

Rabbi Sacks: Wouldn't you say, Marcus, that the world, whether we look at cosmology or biology or neuroscience, is looking a whole lot more wondrous now than it did a hundred years ago? 

Marcus: Absolutely.

I mean, I think that every, as you say, every step we make sort of really creates a new story for the way the world is. I mean, I think that it's such an evolving story. The idea of time. I mean, the time might… Gödel proved that Einstein's equations have a solution where time is circular. So one doesn't have to talk about a beginning, because it's just in a circle. I mean… 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, it was like the first sermon I gave. Somebody said, ’That was really quite divine.’ I said, ‘How?’ He said, ‘Well, it had no beginning, no end, and no visible substance.’

Marcus: No, but I think just, but I think there are a lot of discoveries that are beginning to challenge. I mean, I think that we have this idea of beginning and end because of our lives that we look for… And also cause and effect.

That we also might have to throw out the window, cause and effect. If it turns out that particles, these particles coming out of CERN are going faster than the speed of light, it will mean that causality will have to be thrown out. And maybe we, you know, we've had to throw away a lot of really things that we thought were intuitively obvious.

And that's a dangerous thing, to use our intuition. 

Moderator: So- Now, we've reached lots of points of consensus on the sofa and I'm going to come to the floor to try and break that in a few minutes. But I just wonder if we can speak to the contemporary debate a little bit.

Chief Rabbi, you haven't engaged with the question of the new atheists this evening so far. And I know you do discuss in the book their role. And I wonder, perhaps some comments on that question, the sort of rather vituperative debate which is taking place in popular culture at the moment.

And also the question of whether, as a scholar of comparative religions, whether there is a sort of distinction between the way that Judaism might handle the question of scientific truth and scientific progress as compared to other religions. I wonder if you'd be willing to comment on either of those questions. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, I mean, Judaism is so full of sceptics that, you know, to find a Jew who actually believes it, you know, you make a blessing of al hanissim over that.

So we're used to atheists. I mean, we did a pretty good job. 

Moderator: In a way that perhaps Christians or Muslims aren't? Is that the point? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, we got three out of four, didn't we? We got Spinoza, Marx, and Freud.

The only one we didn't get was Darwin. I don't know why Darwin wasn't Jewish. Long beard, total apikoros. He had every qualification to be Jewish. Why he wasn't, I don't know. It must have been a random genetic mutation.

So we're kind of used to this. 

I mean, Steven Pinker, who, forgive me, I call the thinking man's atheist, who's a professor of neuroscience at Harvard, is married to a wonderful lady called Rebecca Goldstein, who wrote a novel last year called “36 Arguments for the Existence of God,” subtitled “A Work of Fiction.” Now, Rebecca and Steven are tremendous.

I mean, I mention in the book, they were around at our home for coffee, and I said, “Steven, can an atheist use a prayer book, a siddur?” He said, “Of course an atheist uses a siddur.” So I gave him a siddur.

I didn't ask him why. And I speculated in the book that it was like Niels Bohr and the horseshoe. You know, it's a great story.

Apparently, somebody was visiting Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, and saw that over his front door, he had a horseshoe. And the visiting scientist said, “Niels, what have you got a horseshoe over your door for? You can't possibly believe that, can you?”

And Niels said, “No, of course I don't. But the thing about it is, it works, whether you believe it or not.” 

So I kind of thought that was Steven Pinker and the siddur. So, and as for Rebecca, she was voted World Humanist of the Year in the States in 2011. And I wrote to Rebecca, wishing her mazaltov, and saying she is now His Majesty's loyal opposition.

She emailed me straightaway back and said, ‘Well, actually, it's Her Majesty.’ And then said, ‘Actually, this opposition is so loyal that I'm not sure whether it could be called opposition at all.’ So here you've got Judaism, which was used to a lot of questioning and disagreement.

It's there in the book of Job. It's there in Ecclesiastes. You have these dissident voices, Acher, Rabbi, you know, Elisha Ben-Abuya in the Talmud.

These heretics, who somehow or other stay within the system. They're part of the conversation. Einstein is part of the conversation. He could believe in Spinoza's God, but not Abraham's God, let's say. 

So I think Judaism has had this much more relaxed thought, that all the best conversations are arguments. And if you've got the new atheist offering, you know, a really good argument, can any Jew possibly resist joining a machloket or a farible [yiddish: petty grudge] or a broyges [yiddish: quarrel or feud] when you see one?

Obviously you can't. So I don't think we get as uptight about the whole thing as some other religion. 

Moderator: I'll take your question as an invitation to the audience.

If we can have the lights up, are there any Jews or others here who can resist joining in? And if you wouldn't mind waiting for the microphone to come to you, and when it comes, please hold it to your mouth, pointing at yourself. Gentleman there, yes, thank you.

Questioner: Yes, good evening. It seems to me one of the characteristics of science is that the more it progresses, the less people understand. More questions are raised as we progress in science in a very healthy way.

But religion, on the other hand, is very complacent. It's based on a given set of creeds, a book, and that's where it sits. So the very heart, the very essence of the two are quite different.

Moderator: Marcus, I mean, surely your role in Oxford is to, I mean, the point is well made that as science progresses, it becomes less comprehensible. Presumably your job is to counteract that. 

Marcus: No, I don't think that's what he said, actually. I don't think it becomes less comprehensible. I think that we understand that we don't understand, the more you understand, the more you realise you don't understand.

Questioner: Yes, that's it.

Marcus: I think that's more your point. I mean, yeah, it is also becoming difficult, the ideas of quantum physics, which if you want to understand how the world works, you really do need to understand. There are very few people in the world who really understand it.

But I think that the interesting thing is that we aren't complacent. Every time we discover something new, generally it opens up many more questions, which is what makes it exciting. But I'm sure the Chief Rabbi will probably say that the same is true of religion, that I found this wasn't a complacent book. This is a book about that you must still always keep on asking questions, and that's your duty within Judaism to do that. But I've just asked, maybe you'll say something different. 

Rabbi Sacks: How about you being the next Chief Rabbi?

No, I mean, the truth is, as far as I can hear it, you're saying there is progress in science. Is there progress in religion? And I think the part of the charge that I have, and I suppose all of us have, is what in Judaism we call the Oral Torah.

How do you relate this timeless text to this very time-bound situation, which is always new in each generation? And I think that's the ongoing challenge of religion. How do we preserve those eternal truths in the midst of time?

And the fact is that each time our paradigms shift, our understanding of those texts shift as well. So a lot of what I'm doing is ongoing Bible commentary in a sense, trying to keep that dialogue going and letting us see new insights into ancient texts. So I think religion progresses at roughly the rate that anything else progresses.

Moderator: But can there be a paradigm shift in religion? I mean, clearly there can be a new observation in science or perhaps a new theory, and we could debate that in detail if we wanted, which can really overturn previous understandings completely. To the extent that, for example, the electron, Niels Bohr, the sun and planets electron, the electron whizzing around the planets, the nucleus, that there's no way of even describing that in modern physics.

That view of the world has been completely overturned. We don't even have language to describe what a sun and planets would look like in modern quantum physics. Can there be such a revolution in religion, or are we not actually bound to the same, as it were, forgive me, old truths from the Torah?

Rabbi Sacks: Look, it's quite dangerous to do, I'll be blunt with you. I tried a paradigm shift in a phrase, the phrase, “The dignity of difference.” I mean, that was actually a paradigm shift in understanding what it is to talk about chosenness in Judaism.

Because I suddenly realised, you know, it doesn't play in the world that we inhabit to really say, ‘We're chosen, but you're not.’ And could we universalise particularity? And I did this for a very real reason, because I could see Judaism over the last 200 years - and this is another book I wrote called “Future Tense” - having split into the universalists, you know, who are like everyone else, only more so, and who engage with the world, but turn their back on Judaism.

And the guys who, you know, make their home in Judaism, but turn their back on the world. So you had the universalists and the particularists, and the whole Jewish people splitting apart for 200 years. 

And I was trying, through that phrase, “The dignity of difference,” to universalise particularity.

Now, that is a real paradigm shift, and it did cause a bit of an earthquake, I have to say. But, you know, in the immortal words of Sir Elton John, “I'm still standing.” 

Moderator: Gentlemen in the third row. If you have questions, do raise your hands now. I'll try and take a count of you as we go along, yeah. Sir.

Questioner: It's a real pleasure to be here tonight with two great minds. The Chief Rabbi, you know, I was born a Christian, raised a Christian. I've got to say, I think you're one of the most cogent thinkers, you know, certainly I've ever come across, ever heard in the media, anywhere.

The way you bring across ideas is an absolute joy, and I mean it's a joy to hear. There's been a lot of... 

Rabbi Sacks: You can tell he's not Jewish, right?

Sorry about that. 

Questioner: Possibly my great-grandmother. There's been a lot of metaphor used tonight. A lot of image, imagery, and a lot of analogies used. So I'm going to humbly paint another one here, which is that I think religion can be painted or considered to be, if you like, the teacher, because religion came first.

And in ancient Greece - and this is where I defer to greater minds here - my understanding is that in ancient Greece, religion gave birth, first of all, to philosophy, and then to science, as we have it today. The pupil, science, has now gone on to show that religion didn't understand the world outside humanity. And I think, you know, science has gone a long way to show that.

However, I think science has really failed, as a pupil, to replace religion's teachings when it comes to the inside, if you like, of humanity. So the outside of humanity, religion painted a picture; science, the pupil has said, no, that's wrong. But the inside of humanity, in other words, the values that we have, I think science has failed to give an explanation for those and to replace religion as a means of giving us value and meaning about ourselves as humankind.

Moderator: OK, thank you. If I may, gentlemen, I'm going to buffer that observation, because I think it's a very cogent one, and take a couple more comments. But thank you very much for that. Anyone else want to chip in as we go forward? 

Sir, gentleman there. 

Questioner: Chief Rabbi, how do you read the biblical narrative? Do you read it symbolically, literally, the seven-day Creation, encounter with Jonah and the whale, and so on, the story of Noah? And do you regard it as heretical to suggest that the words are the creation of Man, the mind of Man? 

Moderator: The words are the Creation or the mind of Man?

Questioner: Of the mind of man, that it is a man-made document. 

Moderator: So do you read the creation story literally, and do you regard it as heretical to consider the Bible to be a set of words created by men? Would that be a fair paraphrase, sir?

Questioner: Yes. 

Moderator: Chief Rabbi. 

I think those are two very distinct questions. Do I read Creation literally?

I don't know anyone who did in the Jewish tradition prior to the 20th century. I honestly don't know. This biblical literalism is something we never had.

You have not only Maimonides, but also Yehuda HaLevi and Saadia Gaon saying in the early Middle Ages that anything that conflicts with science has to be read non-literally and either metaphorically or what have you. You had Saadia Gaon, Yehuda Halevi, and Maimonides actually saying that if Aristotle was right and the universe was eternal, we would have to reread Genesis 1 and say there never was Creation from nothing. So everyone read Genesis metaphorically, symbolically, and so on, and this literalism is so alien to Judaism.

I don't know how it ever came to be. I really don't. I think the literary style of the Bible is incredibly complex. I think the first 11 chapters have a different literary style to Genesis 12 to 50, which in turn have different... We're still trying to decode some of these literary styles. It's a very, very subtle document.

But I think Genesis 1 to 11 are what I call ‘philosophy in the narrative mode.’ They're a particular way of trying to discern meaning that's not systematic philosophy in the sort of Western Enlightenment sense. It is not myth because myth is all about conflicting elements. Myth is essentially cosmological and polytheistic. So Genesis is sui generis. 

As for Jonah, nobody read Jonah literally. I mean, but nobody. 

Moderator: Is it Louis Jacobs… 

Rabbi Sacks: Man eats fish.

Moderator: Indeed. 

Rabbi Sacks: No news. Fish eats man. News.

Moderator: Louis Jacobs commented that the arguments about what kind of a fish the whale was, it says in the end the whale in the Jonah story is a red herring. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, and you know the story about in the time to come, the Almighty will slay the great beast Leviathan and the great fish. And, you know, the Talmudists all ask why. 

And they say, ‘Well, the fish is for the people who don't trust the Almighty's kashrut.’ So, I mean, truth is nobody has ever read these stories within the Jewish tradition literally. And there is even a statement in the Talmud that a person who interprets the Bible literally is a blasphemer because that denies the oral tradition.

So we always had that multiplicity of commentaries surrounding the biblical text. And I think that is tremendously important for us to recognise that our interpretation of Torah is an ongoing thing. 

And the 19th century yielded new commentaries. The 20th century did. Soloveitchik, for instance, brilliant new insights into biblical narrative. And I think it's ongoing.

Moderator: In the interest of time, can I direct the second half of the question to Marcus? I think there's a sort of traditional sense that religion is intolerant and trying to rule the world and science is open to everything. But isn't it the case that scientists are very ready to cry heresy when people, you know, outside science especially, offer comments about the world which don't agree with scientific orthodoxy? Is science tolerant of heretical positions? 

Marcus: Well, there's a real tension that goes on here because I think when scientists get angry,  - and I think which is why Richard Dawkins gets very angry - is because, you know, there are a lot of people who are just proposing theories for evolution which just go against all the evidence. And that's what gets the scientists angry.

And they then start to get pushed into a sort of almost dogmatic position. And of course, as scientists, we always have to recognise that, and I think this is the difference between actually science and mathematics. In mathematics, you can prove things with 100% certainty. But in science, I mean, it's always that you have to be open to the possibility of new evidence appearing, which means you have to rewrite your story. 

And I think we're all, there's a kind of good cop, bad cop, I think, in a scientist, that you have to be open to, you know, you have to trust what, back what you believe. But on the other hand, you have to be very critical of it at the same time and be open to a new discovery, which is why, you know, something like if these particles are going faster than the speed of light in CERN, we will have to rewrite that story.

That's the most exciting moment in science when you get that happening. But I think sometimes we get so hooked on our world view that we sometimes forget that we're meant to be questioning it as well. 

Moderator: It's almost unscientific.

Rabbi Sacks: But that is the answer to your question before. I mean, there are undoubtedly times when religion tried to invade the territory of science, trial of Galileo and so on, when the teacher really tried to inhibit the disciple, as it were. And now I think it's working in the opposite way, where science is trying to invade the territory of religion.

And I think, in the end, there is an intellectual ecology the way there is a natural ecology. And we do need these different perspectives on the world, each to counterbalance the claims of the other. And you're absolutely right.

For a scientist to be dogmatic is just a contradiction. 

Moderator: I'm happy to say that we have microphones in the gallery as well. I'm eager to take a few more positions before we close. Anyone want to twitch? So there's a gentleman at the front of the gallery there. It's a luxury to have people upstairs to hand microphones.

Questioner: Thank you. This is a wonderful debate, wonderful evening. But I have the feeling that we have two non-representative gentlemen for either side. I recall that when I had my interview with the rabbi who was going to marry us, Rabbi Unterman, said to me, ‘I suppose your view of God is the same as all scientists.’ I have to say that I didn't answer. 

Can I also, as a second point, say that history is littered with people who try to bring the two sides together within themselves. And one that I would like to bring to your attention is Cantor, obviously Jewish, who was the person who did all this work on infinities.

And according to his biographer, another mathematician, he was on a religious quest. He was doing this analysis of infinities because he felt it was bringing him closer to God. Also, he used the symbol of Aleph for infinity.

And I believe that in all current papers on infinities, the symbol is still used. 

Thank you.

Moderator: Yes, thank you very much. Any more comments before we return? Sir, yes. I don't know where you're pointing. Gentleman, yes, indeed. There are also women in the audience, but feel free to comment.

Questioner: I just wanted to address the emphasis on politicisation of the Bible, for example. Zionism and aspects of the politicisation of religion. And my view is that even the current debate, atheists versus believers, is actually a political division based around pragmatism, about funding and policies and things like that.

And I just wanted to ask, you know, there are a whole lot of sciences which are actually to do with social sciences, political science, economic science. And in mathematics, there's a whole thing of strategic, you know, in the business world, strategic game theory and all that. And I'm wondering if really, looking at things from a bigger picture, looking at science in a more sort of economic, strategic way, games theory, you know, theories of conflicts, and how that can also infuse religion as well, because a lot of religions are, you know, even the Jewish religion is split up into many different parts.

Moderator: So is there politics at play here? 

Questioner: Yeah, that's probably what I was asking. 

Moderator: You point to the 20th century, Chief Rabbi, as being the first time it's happened. Is the account of why that's the case a political story, or is it a religious story? 

Rabbi Sacks: No, I mean, look, I... Sorry, that was another book I wrote called “The Politics of Hope.”

Moderator: We're ticking them off, though. 19 more to deal with this evening. 

Rabbi Sacks: Which has, I think, in the paperback edition, has rather a nice chapter on games theory. I mean, games theory is absolutely enthralling. I think it's the interaction with all these sciences that... You know, new insights are created when different disciplines come into contact with one another. 

I think Judaism... The Hebrew Bible has a lot to say about political theory, but I would advise rabbis to stick with the theory rather than the practice, because I think religion and actual party politics do not mix at all.

Moderator: Briefly, Marcus, cos we do want to take some more voices. Is there a political element to the current debate, in your view? Because we're couching it very much in theological...

Marcus: Well, I think that's why this professorship for the Public Understanding of Science is an essential role, because so much of the debate requires understanding the science in order to engage in it. So I think that we are having to make a lot of political decisions based on science. And if we don't know what a stem cell is, how can you have a debate about whether it should be admitted or not?

So I think that there is a... You are disenfranchised if you don't understand the science, because how can you have a debate on these fundamental issues? 

Moderator: Very good. We've got two microphones in place. Yes, you'll go first. 

Questioner: One thing that's very special about science is that it has a clear method, so that we know what's true by a particular process where we have our policies, experiments, find out what's right and OK, that might change.

And that seems very different from religion, and it's not clear to me... One thing that's missing from this debate is it's not clear to me how you know what's true in religion. 

Marcus: I would question whether you can really know whether something's true in science.

What you can have is a hypothesis which is tested and then confirmed, and then you have so many things that you admitted as part of the theory. 

Questioner: But there's a method by which you... There's a method by which you can… move towards the truth. 

Marcus: Move towards the truth. 

Questioner: And so in religion, how does it work that you… What is the method by which you know what's true in the Torah? 

Rabbi Sacks: That's a very, very good question. It really is. But I think, you know, religion is tested through time. I mean, I think one of the things that fascinated Blaise Pascal and, you know, Tolstoy and Nikolai Berdyaev, is how on earth did Jews survive? I mean, it goes against every law of history you can think of.

And they were very struck by this as a kind of sign that religion is true somehow. I wouldn't go that far, because I don't think you can prove it that way, but it is clear that there are certain false turnings in human history. I think we've seen, you know, the fall of Soviet-style communism, the 20th century, the fall of fascism.

I think liberal democracy is being tested right now. Can it generate a strong enough sense of values and meaning and loyalty and respect for authority and all… concern for the people who are less well-off than we are? 

So I think history is a constant testing of what works in the human situation, and I see that as a deeply religious issue. I don't say everyone has to see it as a religious issue, but that is, for me, the biggest religious issue. 

Does this lead us to acts of graciousness and justice? Can it bring peace? Can it bring reconciliation? 

And there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that after the Holocaust, due to a great deal of courage on all sides, Jews and Christians today meet as respected friends, not as estranged people, suspicious and even hostile to one another. I think that's a great, great achievement. 

I think our relationship with Islam is going through a very stormy phase. So, you know, there are points where you can look back and say that was the right direction to take in history, this was a wrong one, and that is one way of testing our religious sensibilities.

Moderator: I'll ask you briefly, Marcus, we are almost out of time, but, I mean, do you share what is commonly expressed, a sort of optimism about science as a force which can make the world, as it were, a better place? Or do you think that's... is that a question which you would recognise as having value as somebody concerned with the public engagement with science?

Marcus: I think one has to be careful about how much science can do. And I think it actually relates to a point which came up about physics and biology, that biology is about language and physics is about... Because, in fact, if you… you know, I'm quite a reductionist at heart. I believe that you could reduce everything to Schrödinger's wave equation, but actually that's not very helpful. If you want to try and understand why...

No, I mean, in a serious sense. If you want to understand why birds migrate, well, you could reduce that to Schrödinger's wave equation, but it's not a very useful narrative to understand that. So we create different narratives which… you know, biology is a narrative which helps actually to explain these things. And, yes, I do believe it could all be reduced to something very basic, but that's not helpful. And I think, at the moment, the issues of morals and things like that, it's not something...

You know, that's a consistent story which helps to... and I think religion is very good at that, and I'm not sure science is particularly good at creating... a good society in the way that religion is, so...

Moderator: Gentleman there in the green. Yeah. 

Questioner: My understanding is that science progresses by setting up hypotheses and testing them, discarding the ones that don't work. How does religion work in this sense? Can we choose between religions? This seems to have been science versus Judaism tonight.

Can we talk about Judaism as an explanation or as a way of living against the other religions? Is that a process? 

Moderator: As we're in the last phase, I'll buffer that question. I'll take a couple more, and then I'll ask our speakers to write up. Indeed, sir, at the back there, yes. 

Questioner: Thank you very much. My question was, as in Judaism, we believe in the God of Avraham, so we don't believe in justifying God through philosophy. And this idea that God is outside the system isn't really a philosophical truth in itself. So my question is, with that sort of faith, how can we then say that the Torah is divine and God knows what He wants us to eat or what He thinks of us, or how we should pray?

And all of these rules and obligations, how do we get from the sort of faith that the God of Avraham has to all of these rules and obligations? 

Moderator: Excellent question. I think I'll probably take one more and then we'll close. I'd be delighted if... Yeah, all right. Yes, go on then.

Questioner: Yeah, I guess as to the Chief Rabbi, you had mentioned all the Jewish sources that speak positively of science, Maimonides and the various statements in the Talmud. But if you think about it, Maimonides, for instance, is living in a time when science was basically frigid. He's describing… his biology is the biology of Galen, which was, who knows, I don't know, 500 years before him. It wasn't a dynamic science. And you wonder whether… were the Rambam or were the rabbis alive today, whether they would look at such a dynamic science that changed it so quickly, you know, medical protocol changed within weeks, within months. Would they look at it the same way? Would they look at it as some sort of ultimate truth or something more ephemeral?

Moderator: Very good. So we're drawing to a close. And before I ask the Chief Rabbi to engage with those questions, Marcus, I have a final question for you along those lines.

I mean, the cosy, as we may say, the reconciled situation we have now, is that vulnerable to scientific progress? Are there discoveries we might make about the essence of belief in the brain or about the origin of the universe which you think would have a different character, which might upset, as it were, the apple cart of consensus between you? 

Marcus: Well, I… I mean, it's very interesting. I suspect not, in a way, because that's... the Chief Rabbi has laid out the position that when you have the evidence, then you incorporate it into your world view.

I mean, I think, you know, for me, the ultimate success of science will be to explain something like, why there is something rather than nothing. And I think that is why one gets back to God. I mean, it's interesting. The first debate I ever had after becoming... succeeding Richard Dawkins, was on a Belfast radio station on a Sunday morning, and I said, ‘I don't want to talk about religion, I want to talk about science.’ But I got sucked in by the interviewer.

And, you know, at some point I said, ‘OK, look, you're asking me this, but define what you mean by God, and then we can have an…’ And, of course, that's not something that's possible. It is something that is not within the system, so actually we can't engage in it.

And I think there's... actually, I got recommended by a philosopher in Oxford this book called “God Matters” by Herbert McCabe, which sort of actually says, “To assert the existence of God is not to state a fact within an established intellectual system, but to claim the need for exploration. It is to claim that there is an unanswered question about the universe, the question, how come the whole thing instead of nothing?”

So that way, you know, it's not a thing. And that's the trouble. We often personify it and say… you were saying, why does He do this? That's... It's actually an idea.

And that's one that, as a scientist, I am trying to answer. And I won't give up until I've got an answer. 

Moderator: Very good. Now, Chief Rabbi, in the time available, I'm sure it will not be possible for you to put every question that's been raised to bed, but I wondered if I could give you the opportunity to have some closing remarks and address some of the points raised. 

Rabbi Sacks:  Oh, sorry, I've forgotten what the questions were.

How does... How do we get from the God of Avraham to... ..who stands out, who exists outside the universe to the Torah and to all the laws? And, of course, the answer to that is that in Judaism, revelation becomes suddenly problematic. You know, if you thought that God was the sun or the storm or the lightning or the sea or what have you, you could see God. In Judaism, once God is beyond the universe, you can't see God. You can only hear God. 

And you suddenly get this understanding of language as the one thing that bridges the abyss between us and God. And that suddenly also shows that language is the bridge that crosses the abyss between us and another human being.

And suddenly language is invested with this extraordinary weight. Judaism is really a religion of language. More than anything else.