God v. Darwin

By HAIM WATZMAN

THE EMERGENCE OF ETHICAL MAN
By Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik
Edited by Michael S. Berger
214 pages. Ktav Publishing House. $25.00

The lines in the case of God v. Darwin could not be clearer. Counsel for the party of the first part claims that the principle of evolution by natural selection cannot be transcendentally true because it reserves no place for God. Counsel for the party of the second part does not dispute the fact that there is no place for God in biology. However, it draws a different conclusion—God at best simply does not exist; at worst, He is responsible for error and superstition.

Like a lawsuit, a public debate doesn’t encourage subtle reasoning. To win over public opinion, each side needs to present its case clearly and simply. Ambiguities are dangerous because they can be read as weakness or uncertainty. But philosophers of a scientific bent, and scientists of a philosophical bent, are aware that the terms that get thrown around in the disputation—“truth,” “reality,” “mind,” “God,” and so on—are not so easy to collect and reassemble afterwards. The greatest minds of every age have grappled with them, and no one has yet come up with a system that explains them consistently and beyond doubt.

One of the greatest minds of our age was Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who for some four decades in the mid-20^th century was one of the paramount leaders of Orthodox Judaism in the United States. He was one of the century’s outstanding Talmudists and a philosopher who struggled mightily with the issue of how we know what we know—not just how we know God, but how we know the world around us, and how a world that is merely physical becomes a world of meaning for human beings.

In his great works, among them Halakhic Man, The Halakhic Mind, and The Lonely Man of Faith, Rabbi Soloveitchik explored man’s place in the universe, the epistemological status of Talmudic discourse, and the meaning of tradition. He also considered, extensively, the position of science in human knowledge—the position of science in the halakhic discourse and the position of halakha in scientific discourse.

His works offer a number of possible ideas about the relationship between science and Judaism, but they all assume a priori that scientific inquiry is a valid and independent system through which man achieves knowledge of the world. In some of these works, he seems to accept the view of Maimonides that the purpose of science is to enable man to know God’s creation—in other words, that science’s ultimate purpose is a religious one. That being the case, he sees science as useful but hardly necessary for the serious religious scholar and for the observant Jew. In others, he sees science as largely instrumental—it is a way of doing things that need to be done, a way of making things that man needs.

But in The Lonely Man of Faith, he depicts science as a necessary form of achieving knowledge, worthy not only because it improves our lives, but also because it is a uniquely human activity. He divorces it both from its pragmatic aspect and from the religious purpose that Maimonides assigned to it. It is holy not in its content but in its process, even when it leads to a description of the universe from which God is absent.

Rabbi Soloveitchik died in 1993 after a long illness, leaving a number of manuscripts that his students and colleagues have since been preparing for publication. One of them, The Emergence of Ethical Man, was released in 2005. As its title indicates, it is primarily an attempt to understand how man becomes an ethical being. But to do that, Rabbi Soloveitchik first further explores the relationship between scientific and ethical knowledge.

According to its editor, Michael S. Berger, The Emergence of Ethical Man was written in the wake of The Lonely Man of Faith. It clearly builds on the assumption that scientific knowledge is valid independent of religion. So, in contrast to the fundamentalist view, Rabbi Soloveitchik accepts from the start that Darwinian evolution is an accurate theory of biology. In other words, it doesn’t bother him that the theory doesn’t need God. He frames the problem differently:

[T]he question does not revolve around divine creation and mechanistic evolution as such. We could find a solution of some kind to this controversy. What in fact is theoretically irreconcilable is the concept of man as the bearer of the divine image with the equality of man and animal-plant existences.

Rabbi Soloveitchik accepts that man is an organic creature just like plants and animals and that biology can therefore provide a full and accurate description of how the human organism functions without reference to God.

But the puzzle is that we are ethical beings. We encounter the physical world just as plants and animals do—that is, we have physical needs, desires, and instincts. Yet, unlike other beings, we can think about the world and consider our actions. We can resist our instincts, understand them, and understand the desires and actions of other human beings. It is this difference that Rabbi Soloveitchik seeks to understand, through a consideration of our biological characteristics, the biblical creation story, and the halakhic tradition.

Does he have the answer to the great debate? No, he doesn’t. The Emergence of Ethical Man has a rough, first-draft quality to it; perhaps the author didn’t publish it in his lifetime because he wasn’t really satisfied with it. Neither is this book for the casual reader—to understand his reasoning one needs at least a basic grounding both in the philosophy of science and in the halakhic discourse. But that same first-draft quality makes reading it a fascinating experience, because it takes you directly into a great mind as it considers arguments, analyzes concepts, and strives to develop a cogent account of how a transcendent God can act within a physical world that runs according to a set of natural laws that can be deduced through scientific activity.

But what’s most compelling, at a time when science and religion are putting each other in the dock, is to follow how a devout and scholarly man thinks through the questions of how scientific and religious knowledge confront, clash, and supplement each other while granting full respect to each way of understanding the human being.