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January 8, 2010
An old but relevant controversy
Maimonides' Guide fueled debates by exploring links between science and religion.
EUGENE KAELLIS
It was said of Moses ben Maimon, commonly known as Maimonides (or by the rabbinic acronym Rambam), that, "From Moses to Moses, there was but one Moses," giving some indication of the esteem with which ben Maimon was held.
Today, his name is rarely mentioned. Its last prominent public appearance was during the commemoration of his birth in Spain by Don Carlos, the liberal-constitutional king who replaced Franco after the dictator's death in 1975. Carlos was evidently sincere in trying to make some historically necessary amends to the Jewish community. The irony is that Moses did not live in Spain for any considerable time. He was little more than a bar mitzvah boy when his family suddenly left Andalusia, after it was overrun by the Almohades, a North African Islamic group, far less tolerant toward Jews than their predecessors.
After years of wandering, the family ended up in Cairo. There, ben Maimon, now an accomplished young man, became personal physician to the sultan and wrote his major work, A Guide for the Perplexed. He died in Egypt at the age of 69. His body was moved to Tiberias, where his gravesite is still visited by Israelis and other tourists.
In 1135, the year of Maimonides' birth, about half of Spain, including Cordoba, his birthplace, was in Muslim hands. Until the arrival of the Almohades, the position of Jews under the caliphate was, by any measure, far better than under Christian rule, especially after the Catholic re-conquest of Spain, which was almost immediately followed by the Inquisition and the mass expulsion of Jews, many of whom fled to the Low Countries and further east. In mistreating Jews, Isabella and Ferdinand, the new "most Catholic majesties" of Spain, acted not only on religious grounds but to punish the many Jews who had preferred Islamic rule.
Maimonides' Guide attempted a fusion between Judaism and classic Greek philosophy, much as Catholic scholars were doing for Christianity after the discovery of remnants of classical Greek civilization during the Crusades.
Maimonides took a typically Aristotelian approach to Judaism, subjecting his religious inquiry to the rules of logic, something for which he was to be taken to task many years later, most prominently by another Spanish Jew, Don Hasdai Crescas. In one of those timeless talmudic arguments, Crescas, born 136 years after Maimonides' death, took passionate issue with Rambam as if they were contemporaries sitting in the same yeshiva, their "pilpulistic" thumbs vigorously agitating the air around them, proving once more, as if further proof was necessary, that no matter how persuasive and profound arguments are about God's will, they may convince but they can never overwhelm: one believes or disbelieves based on assertions inaccessible to logic.
And this is precisely what so riled Crescas and prompted him to write his "rebuttal."
In the early days of Judaism, faith was so central to Hebraic life that there was not even a word for religion; it simply reflected what was undeniably obvious to all adherents: awe. There was also no concept of natural law; everything happened because the will of God, in constant, unremitting attendance, made it happen. As primitive technologies were developed, although created by people, they too operated inexorably under divine will, so there was never conflict between science and technology on one side, and the will of God on the other.
Critics of Maimonides, of whom Crescas was the most prominent, were displeased with his "logic." He had fallen under the sway of Aristotle, they claimed, writing about the "properties" of God, when, to no one's surprise, Maimonides found none. God, he agreed, was neither material nor immaterial; His characteristics were simply beyond anyone's purview. Rambam foreshadowed by five centuries by RenΘ Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." So, just as one's thoughts validated one's person, the thoughts of God were reflected in the order of the universe, thus certifying His godliness.
Crescas was happy to include himself among Jews decrying Maimonides' concept of God as "too cerebral," a far cry from the impassioned viscerality of the psalms and the prayers in which Jews express their profound love of God with all their hearts and every sinew and bone of their being. For Maimonides, it was more a pre-nuptial arrangement than a passion of desire. For Crescas, God does not exist in a web of properties or even, as Maimonides maintained, non-properties. God is simply beyond all material comparison. All other approaches, Crescas felt, were a diminution, a constriction, of God. For Crescas, God was not the Great Intellect, but rather the Ultimate Mystery, simply inaccessible by either sense or thought. Only the nurtured spiritual part of our being could resonate with Him and then only during occasions of genuine piety.
Science and religion over long periods of time often traveled parallel courses, science usually as a consequence of moving on to its "strong form," failing to accept the limits of the intellect. To many scientists, God now resides in the "God gene," an alleged DNA particle embedded somewhere in our brain. Richard Dawkins, the most prolific of contemporary Darwinians, writes in his God Delusion, that the universe is "blind, pitiless [and] indifferent."
But this belief isn't limited to Dawkins. In 1989, scientists, mostly physicists, displayed their own overweening pride in a symposium, The End of Science? – meaning that science had reached its apogee and could go no further, except in extending the precision of its quantitative findings. This might be a joke when one considers that scientists made precisely the same arguments more than a century ago, on record.
To add still more, in John Horgan's 1996 book The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, there appeared interviews with some of the world's most distinguished scientists, many of whom expressed more or less the same terminal prognosis for science. The "end of science" would also mean the "end of religion," since science would already have explained everything, thereby making any more of its efforts redundant, and religion, no longer bearing the shreds of mystery to hide itself, superfluous. There would no longer be the mystery in which God resides.
The argument now taking place at the highest levels of science and religion, with the latter mostly on the defensive, runs parallel to the unacknowledged Maimonides-Crescas dispute. It is between reason and faith in religion and science. There is little opportunity offered to people to engage in this dispute in a public way. But by internalizing it and letting the contest take place within, they can nonetheless arrive at, not a satisfying solution, (that is impossible), but a vexing one. And vexing it should be!
Only after Jacob had wrestled with God was he named Israel, one who has wrestled with God. Jacob insisted on a blessing and it was granted, however reluctantly. To remind him that being blessed was not being perfect, Jacob was rendered lame.
Dr. Eugene Kaellis is the author of Face Off or Interface? (2009), a book dealing with the relationship between science and religion. It is available at lulu.com.
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