The Movement for Reform Judaism

3rd of a trilogy of related sermons for the High Holydays this year.  All three call on Reform Judaism to face up to cutting edge issues of our time - however challenging or painful. 
All three sermons refer to a lecture which Rabbi Bayfield gave to the Randall Division of Cell & Molecular Biophysics, King's College London entitled 'Science & Religion in the Age of Uncertainty' available here.

Rabbi Tony Bayfield

It turned out to be a salutary experience - salutary but painful.  I realised afterwards that it was salutary but wasn't quite sure what exactly salutary meant so I looked it up and it means beneficial.  A painful and beneficial experience.  The classic British combination.

A letter arrived out of the blue from the Director of the Randall Division of King's College, London inviting me to their annual academic retreat at the University of Sussex to give a lecture on religion and science.  Religion and science.  I showed it to my PA Philippa and said: "Early September.  I haven't got time, have I?"  "Well," said Philippa gently, "it might be a good opportunity for making yourself and the Movement better known.  It sounds interesting and worthwhile".

I went back into my office, muttering under my breath and re-read the letter.  I dictated a reply - in my usual witty and self-deprecating style - effectively saying that they must have got the wrong person and shouldn't they have addressed the letter to 85, Hamilton Terrace.  I smirked inwardly at my clever footwork. 

Back came the reply.  No, we haven't got the wrong person.  We like what you've been writing in the Times and the Guardian - it's you, Bayfield, whom we want to address us on what religion has to say to science and scientists.

I sat at my desk staring at the letter.  I quit science after O Levels and have not been back since.  Eighteen years ago I did try reading Stephen Hawking's ‘Brief History of Time' but it only served to convince me that I hadn't been thrown out of physics for repeatedly asking, ‘yes, but what is electricity?' for nothing.  This was a language, physical rather than metaphysical, which I was incapable of understanding. 

A couple of weeks later, I ran into an old friend of mine who's one of my most valued mentors.  His name is John Bowden, he's an Anglican priest and theologian, and until recently, John was the Managing Director of SCM Press, the largest Christian publishing house in the country.  John has read everything and translated most of it himself.  I asked him if he could suggest a short reading list on religion and science.  John grinned and said: "I've just finished translating Hans Küng's latest book."  (Küng is probably the greatest living theologian of any faith.  He's a radical Catholic and John is his official translator).  "It's on religion and science.  Would you like me to send you the disc?"  When the disc arrived and the manuscript turned out to be only 200 pages rather than Küng's usual 700, I realised that God was being unusually kind to me.

And that flippant and theologically incorrect remark takes me to the core of this sermon. 

Why have I been running away from the revelations of science for the last forty years?  There is some excuse in the reality of increasing specialisation, difficult language and concepts that are hard for the layman to grasp.  But this is Yom Kippur and time for confession.  There has been something else at work as well.  Fear.  Fear that science would undermine my belief in God.  Fear that science would reveal religion to be a hangover.  A hangover from the time when God was invoked to fill the gaps in human knowledge.  The God of the interstices.  The God of the unexplained.  Now redundant.

In passing, it's interesting to notice how little Galileo and Darwin - not to mention Einstein, Planck, Watson and Crick, and Hawking - have impacted even remotely on the 1,051 pages of the High Holyday Machzor.  There's the late Nick Carter's prayer right at the end of Minchah but it only gets read if the service is running early.  So maybe I'm not the only one who's been ducking and weaving out of laziness and fear. 

In trepidation, I sat down to read the Küng manuscript.  It was demanding but utterly brilliant.  Even the terror of writing and giving the lecture couldn't completely eradicate my sense of relief and excitement.  I thought I'd better take a look at some Jewish sources and references - Louis Jacobs on cosmology, Rav Kook on evolution.  A few weeks ago I wrote the lecture, gave it - and survived!

I'm not going to repeat the lecture now.  You should be really glad to hear that, since it lasted fifty-five minutes and was full of long words. I feel threatened by all academics but scientists are the worst.  If you're interested, you can read it on our website http://www.reformjudaism.org.uk/.  What I want to tell you about this morning is what happened after the lecture. 

The Randall Division turned out to consist of 120 professors, university lecturers, post-doctoral scientists and PhD students working out of a campus attached to Guy's Hospital.  They're an interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, physicists and biologists researching in the area of cell and molecular biophysics.  Ninety-five of them were present and after my lecture we all went to dinner in the cafeteria of the University of Sussex Retreat Centre.  The food was so disgusting that it's OK to mention it on Yom Kippur but I was sat with the Director and four of his most senior colleagues and we talked rather than ate. 

It was immediately clear that, as usual, anxiety had driven me to a wrong assumption.  Just because someone is working in the area of brain function or communication between cancer cells or the human genome, doesn't mean that they confront the ultimate questions about the reality (or illusion) of free will, or the why of human suffering or the meaning and purpose of life.

These weren't people who thought that their knowledge provided the answer to everything.  They duck and weave too.  I wasn't confronting people with answers I didn't want to hear, I was opening up questions that some were really interested in addressing, particularly in the context of religious openness rather than disapproving dogma.

At one point - over the plates of dried-up, mixed carbohydrates - one of my hosts said something that I found stunning.

He said that nowadays there is a strong tendency in British science to focus on the middle.  "We've been to both ends", he said, "but now we concentrate on the middle.  Your questions about the Big Bang and the world of quantum theory are a long way from the middle ground of research in cell biology - for which we can only get funding if we can show there will be material benefits".

Leave aside what that says about research funding today, and let me take you on a short trip into one aspect of the lecture.

The Jewish world was not terribly bothered when the Catholic Copernicus and, 100 years later, the Catholic Galileo shifted our understanding from the sun moving round the earth to the earth moving round the sun.  The Catholic Church got its birettas in a twist but Judaism didn't.  We took it in our stride and adjusted our cosmology.

However, when the Jew Einstein told us that Space and Time are flexible entities which can no longer be thought of separately and that mass warps space and time, I think we reacted rather like most parents would react if their child published a book on, say, cutting edge mathematics.  We were proud that one of our boys had made such a huge contribution to science - and relieved that he still believed in a God of sorts.  But, did we understand?  Did we look at the implications for our theology?

And then came the Big Bang - and I, for one, took evasive action until the fateful letter from Professor Gareth Jones and some frantic reading.

Let me just tell you a bit of what I think I've grasped.   There are lots of people here who know much more than I do and will be able to correct some of the things that I'm saying.  I'd love you to do so - preferably by email rather than during or after the service - it would really help.  But here goes.

The standard, accepted view of the beginning of the universe today is that "all energy and matter was compressed into an unimaginably tiny and hot primal fireball of the smallest dimensions and the greatest density and temperature".  13.7 billion years ago it exploded - the Big Bang - and space, time and the universe were born.  As I understand it, the discovery of background radiation by another Jew Arno Penzias is crucial verification, a vestige of that Big Bang. 

So, should I, as a Jew who believes in God, have a problem with that?

I didn't think so.  I can't see why I should.  But its the scientific debate - the scientific debate, not the religious debate which tends not to happen - that is really scary, with a few scientists, quite unlike the people at King's, being given their own documentary on BBC2 making not only authoritative statements about science but about God - and Her demise - as well.  There have been a number of prominent Jewish physicists who have moved from their scientific discoveries to atheism.  But perhaps the best known figure in this country is not a Jew but Stephen Hawking, the Oxford scholar with motor neurone disease and the artificial voice. 

‘A Short History of Time' was a best seller but even Hans Küng found it almost unreadable which made me feel much better.  But what in essence Stephen Hawking was searching for was a Universal Theory or a Theory Of Everything - which would bring together all physics and maths, Big Bang and quantum theory in defining a closed universe, a universe completely explicable in itself.  And therefore with no place for God.  Unless, of course, you equate Hawking's Universal Theory or Theory Of Everything with the mind of God.  Which isn't God in the metaphysical sense - for God, by definition, isn't a theorem proposed by an Oxford scientist. 

Then, fascinatingly, in a lecture Hawking gave in Cambridge in 2004, Hawking said that the quest for a Theory Of Everything or a Grand Unified Theory has gone forever.  He recanted and said: "There are mathematical results which cannot be proved; there are physical problems which cannot be predicted; we are not angels, who view the universe from outside; [all of our physical theories are] self-referencing ... our search for understanding will never come to an end". 

Of course there is much, much more to be said - about not being able to get back to the Big Bang, t=o, itself; about that which unfolded from a millionth of a second after the Big Bang according to laws which led, so unerringly, to us.  But that's the lecture.  Focus on Hawking's acknowledgement that there are results which cannot be proved, that there are problems which cannot be predicted, that we cannot escape from us, from the self-referencing to objectivity, that the search for understanding will never come to an end.  Openness, uncertainty, unpredictability, things that cannot be proved, realms that cannot be penetrated, dimensions that cannot be accessed.

Just a brief reminder of where we've got to - the Professor of Cell Biology remarking that science in Britain today has been to the two ends and is now focusing on the middle.  One end was the macro, the universe, the cosmos, the origins of the universe in the Big Bang.  The other end, the micro takes us into the question of what holds the world together at its innermost, to Max Planck and quantum theory.  Both time and my difficulties in getting my head round the subject make the case for being very brief and for you who do understand far more than me correcting my understanding through email.  But what I think I've grasped in this area is this:  the law of fuzzy or indeterminate relationship formulated by Heisenberg is very important.  As you go smaller and smaller and smaller, you enter the realm of the tiniest constituents of the universe where there is no physical certainty, only statistical probability and an element of future unpredictability and chance.

So, at the other end to the Big Bang we encounter once again indeterminacy, uncertainty and impenetrability as well.  Both ends of the spectrum are open rather than closed, uncertain rather than certain and, by definition, ultimately inaccessible. 

So, said the King's scientists, we've been there, done that and we're now focusing on the middle.  For instance on understanding how the cells of the body work and the implications of this for medicine.  Another of my hosts joined in at this point and started talking about his work on how cells communicate.  He said: "Even working as part of an interdisciplinary team the issues are so complex that we don't have the tools to enable us to do all that we want to do and understand all that we want to understand".  I jumped in at this point and asked, "Do you mean that you don't have the tools now or that you, perhaps in principle, will never have the tools?"  He paused: "That's a very interesting question", he said, "I'm beginning to think it's the latter.  I'm beginning to think that there are limits to human understanding". 

I called the lecture ‘Religion and Science in the Age of Uncertainty'.  I hope that what I'm about to say doesn't sound like evasive jargon.  We live in a post-modern world.  Modernity was characterised by a belief, inherited from religion, that the Truth with a capital T and Truths with capital Ts were accessible through mathematics, physics and biology, through research and verification.  We now know - at least those of us who are neither religious nor secular fundamentalists - that such certainty is not possible.  All that is available to us is truth with a small t or rather fragments of truth with small t's.  Fragments of truth gained through reason and religion.  Fragments of truth gained through reason and science.  Truths, usually expressed in different languages, with a small t that are not in conflict but complementary.  Or should be.  And only together can we continue the quest for the meaning of life and the ethical principles by which that life is to be led.

Back to the invitation to lecture, salutary but painful.

It was salutary, beneficial, to face up to my fears and find that they were groundless but painful because I realised how much I'd been running away from - intellectually and spiritually - for so much of my career. 

This sermon has being the third of a trilogy.  The first questioned the kashrut of smoked Icelandic puffin and wondered whether we could reframe kashrut in a way that would symbolise our readiness to think about the religious response to the enormous environmental challenges of our age.  The second questioned whether retreating into interpretation was sufficient response to the challenge of dark, Godless texts, so open to abuse these days, in the sacred scriptures of Christianity, Islam and Judaism.  This, the third, questions my failure, perhaps our failure, to face up to the challenges that advances in science have brought about.

It's pretty painful and challenging out there but it's also exhilarating and rewarding.  Isn't it time we repented for our failures to tackle the cutting edge issues of our time?  Shouldn't that be the very raison d'etre of Reform Judaism?  On this Day of Atonement I wish us all both courage and faith.

Rabbi Tony Bayfield

Yom Kippur 5767
Monday 2^nd October 2006

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3rd sermon in trilogy relating to science
written by a guest , October 10, 2006

Dear Rabbi Bayfield

I am writing to correct the reference you made to Dr Stephen Hawking being an Oxford scholar and scientist. In fact, he is based in Cambridge, and is a fellow of Gonville & Caius College. I had the great fortune to be his neighbour on West Road for some years, when I was an undergraduate there.

Caius also boasts 2 other fellows (both Honorary) whom you mentioned in your sermon: namely, the occupant at 85 Hamilton Terrace, Rabbi Dr Sir Jonathan Sacks, and Professor Francis Crick.

I am not sure this has much relevance to any part of the content of your sermon, but I did feel that I ought to correct your source reference on Dr Hawking.

With best regards

Michael Simon