JUDAISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CRISIS OF MODERN SCIENCE1

Menachem Fisch

Introduction

From the advent of the in the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the ethos and mindset of modernity and of modern have evolved hand in hand, bringing in their wake a mounting secularism, and with it the now familiar tensions between science and . By the end of the nineteenth century, the strained relations between science and religion had acquired the dimensions of a full-blown crisis. Many tend to ascribe the crisis to the marked discrepancies between what were willing to say about the world and what devout Christians believed their religion required them to believe. Discrepancies of this sort certainly did emerge, some quite dramatic, but it is extremely hard to imagine that they alone could be held responsible for the full extent of the crisis. What developed was far more than mistrust, or even condemnation expressed by devout Christians toward developments in the life and cosmol- ogy. In , the late enlightenment witnessed far less religious suspicion of science, than a mounting, scientifically motivated exasperation with religion and religiosity. And it is this latter tendency that strongly suggests that much more was, and remains at stake than a mere conflict of claims. Modernity’s scornful dismissal of religion and religiosity, along with the reciprocal reaction to which it gave rise, runs much deeper than any prosaic disagreement as to, say, the validity of geological dating can reason- ably account for. In the first part of this chapter, I offer, in very brief outline, a different kind of explanation for the emergence of the modern tensions between

* This chapter first appeared in: and Scripture in the Abrahamic : 1700– Present, in Brill’s Series in Church History and Religious Culture 37 (2008). Koninklijke Brill NV. 1 Various versions of this paper were presented as the Selig Brodetzky Annual Lecture, Leeds (May 2002); at a conference on scientific and religious interpretation, Haverford College (June 2002); as Templeton Lectures at Bar-Ilan University (March 2003) and Utah State University (October 2004). An early version was published in Hebrew in Halbertal and Sagi 2005. 74 judaism and the religious crisis of modern science

science and religion—one that stresses its philosophical and theological dimensions, centering on the conflicting conceptions of human rationality that the work of prudent ‘interpreters of nature and Scripture’ were seen to premise, rather than on the conflicting pictures of the world that they came to paint. I shall be interested, therefore, less in what scientists were saying about the world during that period, than in the philosophical attempts to understand the nature of the enterprise and achievement of science; less in the , that is, than in the history of the . And it is against this backdrop that in the second, and main part of the paper, I shall turn to consider how Judaism can be said to fare in this respect.

The Newtonian Moment

A crucial turning point in the history of the relations between early modern science and religion was the publication in 1687 of Sir ’s great work of : Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The Principia was by all counts an astonishing scientific achievement, but its importance for the story I wish to tell lay less in its scientific content than in the acute challenge that it posed to philosophy, for Newton’s Principia changed the very nature of philosophizing about science. Prior to Newton, philosophy was primarily concerned with the project of establishing science properly. ’s Novum Organum (1620) and René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations (1641) stand out in this respect. Each pre- sented a radical, and meticulously argued (yet very different) appeal to begin the study of nature from scratch, and to establish it anew upon sound philosophical foundations. But with the publication of Newton’s physics, the project of establishing science was rendered obsolete. From that point on philosophy of science was rendered an essentially interpretative rather than a constitutive undertaking. If for Bacon and Descartes the task of philosophy of science was to legislate epistemologically and methodologi- cally for a reliable (and as I shall argue, religiously viable) interpretation of nature, after Newton, famously for Kant, the question for philosophy became that of making philosophical sense of the particular interpreta- tion of nature that Newton had fashioned. The interpretative turn in phi- losophy of science reached completion in William Whewell’s monumental Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) significantly subtitled Founded on their History, referring to his three-tome History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time published three years earlier. My thesis