Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: Faith

[Music] our topic this morning is Faith and let me begin with one of my favorite stories set in a very crowded stuffy kosher restaurant in New York and in New York you know in the summer it gets very hot and very humid and one of the customers summons over the waiter and says waiter it's too hot in here put on the air conditioner the waiter goes out 5 minutes later the man summons the waiter back and says waiter now it's too cold in here switch off the air conditioning waiter disappears a second time 5 minutes later lo and behold the same man summons him over and says wait it's now too hot again put on the air conditioning for the third time the waiter leaves the room and just as he's about to leave if another Diner stops him and says waiter I feel so sorry for you this man must be driving you mad and the waiter says no actually I'm driving him mad you see there is no air conditioner from which I conclude that what we think in here affects what we feel out there now we may think that faith amuna is in the big empirical world out there a small thing a fragile thing in the immortal words of selton John a Candle in the Wind easily extinguished but I don't think it's quite so I don't know what the economic climate is in South Africa the physical climate is just beautiful but what the economic climate is I don't know but as you probably know Europe is in the middle of a financial crisis and an economic recession that has lasted now for 5 years and the reason for it has been a loss of confidence on the part of investors loss of trust in Banks and financial institutions and a drying up of credit now just think of those three things for a moment confidence the word confidence comes from the Latin fedas which means Faith the word credit comes from the Latin word CR which is the Latin for an I believe and as for trust well that's or or what have you you have something here called CSO am I right they look after security and I always say to the security guys we have one word in Hebrew that is pronounced two ways and means security and means trust so I always say to my CST people you look after Theon and I'll look after the but in other words the whole economy of the West right now depends on these deeply psychological you could even call them spiritual states of Mind faith belief and Trust so it is not just in Jewish restaurants in New York it is the market economy where what we feel in here affects the reality out there and that is a way of understanding that Faith or lack of it makes all the difference not just a little difference and not only just to those who believe now religious faith has come in certainly in Europe and America for some tremendous battering have the new a reached the short South Africa yet Richard Dawkins and people like that I I'm afraid I'm a little mischievous about these guys I wrote a piece in an English Journal The Spectator this week Arab Shas this week in which I said about the new new atheist what one Oxford academic said about another he said on the surface he's profound but deep down he's superficial so it's the new atheist quite minor but faith has been under attack ever since the 18th century from David Hume all the way to bertron Russell in fact Jews did pretty well at osis ourselves I mean let's remember that three of the world's the greatest aicos and three of the four in the modern world were Jewish Spinosa Marx and Freud the only one who wasn't Jewish was Charles Darwin why Charles Darwin wasn't Jewish I don't know had all the qualifications L be at total upar he should have been Jewish it must have been a random genetic mutation so let us therefore not bother with the minor challenges to Faith but with the really big ones the three great challenges to Faith in the modern world number one The Challenge from science do we really need religion to explain the world as llas put it in the 18th century when people asked him where was God in his scientific system he replied Jes I don't need that hypothesis God to explain the world so first is The Challenge from science second and this is a very deep challenge The Challenge from Evil if God is good and God rules the world how is it that bad things happen to good people to put it bluntly this is The Challenge from the Holocaust where was God at aitz and finally what I call the existential challenge who needs it to cure sickness nowadays you don't need a r you go to a doctor to cure poverty you don't need prayer you go to an economist to confess to do vid you don't need to do vid anymore you can go to a psych psychotherapist and if you're depressed you don't need Saum The Book of Psalms you can take a pill whatever religion once did today we have someone else doing something else so those are the three challenges so let's begin with the Challenge from science and here I want to tell you a story that happened to me some years ago see Cambridge University asked me about 10 years ago before Richard Dawkins published and Sam Harris and the late Christopher hin they asked me to do a public conversation on on religion and science with the then professor of the history of science at Cambridge it was a wonderful wonderful occasion very lovely debate and uh as we were leaving the lecture hall a man came up to me a very modest man you know just just somebody in the audience and said to me Chief R I have written a book that I think you may find interesting I'll send it to you I didn't know who he was and a week later the book arrived was called just six numbers and I suddenly realized who this stranger was he was Sir Martin now Lord Reese then astronomer Royal later master of Trinity College Cambridge later president of the Royal Society the oldest and greatest scientific Society in the world the one of which Isaac Newton was a member and the winner in 2010 of of the Templeton prize in other words one of the most eminent scientists in the world today and what he shows in his book just six numbers is that the entire shape and fabric of the universe depends on six mathematical constants like the force of gravity the strong and the weak nuclear force and so on and he shows in this book The extraordinary fact that if any of those six constants had been different even by a millionth or a billionth or a billionth of a billionth degree then we would never have had a universe or at least Universe from which life might emerge for instance had the force of gravity been weaker then after the big bang the universe would have expanded and continued to expand and no matter would ever have coalesced to form stars and then planets and then us if the force of gravity had been even slightly stronger then after the big bang the universe would have expanded and then contracted resulting in what they call a big crunch in other words if the force of gravity had been even slightly different we would never have had a universe and so it is with all the other five constants the likelihood of those things happening by chance is as somebody has said as likely as you or me throwing a dart and hitting Bullseye in a dart board at the other end of the universe 13.7 billion light years away it just could not have happened by chance now reys is not a religious believer he is an agnostic but he acknowledges that his own findings as a scientist challenge him as an an agnostic how can I possibly explain that this universe came about by chance it is impossible that it could have come about by chance and there is only one way that this scientist indeed many scientists but Reese is among the very greatest of the great there is only one way he can explain it without invoking God namely by assuming an infinite number of parallel universes in other words it's just an Infinity of universes and our muzzle is that we just happen to be in the universe that contains us or as they used to say this is a Yiddish joke but you need a PhD to understand it let me try it on you you know the guy in Helm says you know seeing all the suffering in this world maybe it would have been better not to have been born but how many are so lucky not one in a thousand anyway so so our muszle was we were born on the universe that contains human beings and us anyway the only trouble with this as a scientific explanation is that there is no evidence whatsoever for any other Universe than this one there may well be an Infinity of parallel universes but outside of Science Fiction there is no evidence of them whatsoever and there is a principle in logic called oam's razor which says that if you have two alternative explanations to choose from choose the one that involves the fewest possible number of unexplained entities in other words if you have a choice between believing in an Infinity of universes for which you have no evidence at all or believing in one God who created the world finally tuned for the emergence of Life the god hyp hypothesis has to win on logical grounds alone so that is the first issue of contemporary science that there is no plausible way of explaining the physical Universe without invoking an an intelligent Creator or some wild hypothesis that we have no evidence for secondly life itself despite all the scientific conject cures we still have no idea not even the hint of an idea of how life emerged from inanimate matter even the simplest life forms are so complicated in relation to the chemic basic chemical and physical building blocks of the universe that there's no way of getting from here to there and the only way for instance a complete really from atheist like Francis Crick the late Francis criek co-discoverer of DNA the structure of DNA the only way Francis criek can explain the emergence of life on Earth is to say it came from Mars from this he makes a living I mean how did it begin in Mars go figure you know so so problem one the existence of a finely tuned Universe problem two the emergence of an animation from inanimate matter or take life number three as it is today there are at least 3 million species of living things and what is fascinating is that since Crick and Watson uh de uh identified the structure of DNA in 1953 all the way to the decoding of the human genome in 2001 we now know this for which we never had any knowledge before we now know that all life from the simplest bacterium to us comes from one single Source all of life is composed of the same DNA of the same four letters of the genetic code all lives in other words everything that lives everything that lives is structured in the same script carries the same handwriting and the idea that every form of living thing comes from one source is the most religious idea that science perhaps has ever come up with so powerful is this that the leader of the team to decode the human genome Francis Collins began that project as an atheist and ended it as a religious believer and of course every year new discoveries emerge that are more and more challenging for the atheist or the agnostic for instance there was a wonderful Discovery last September I don't know if you know this when they decoded the human genome they discovered that only 2% of these 3.1 billion letters of the genetic code only 2% of the genome coded for protein which is what the DNA does in other words 98% of the human genome performed seemingly no function whatsoever and they called this junk DNA 98% of the human genome said the scientists in 2001 is junk DNA now I had a conversation with Richard Dawkins last September and Hashem brought it about little bit of hash pris that five days before that conversation the results were published of one of the largest collaborative scientific experiments was published this is a series of experiments conducted over over 10 years involving 450 scientists 160 experiments and 34 scientific institutions and you know what they discovered that the 98% of junk DNA that was thought to be junk isn't junk at all every bit of it is absolutely essential for life among other things that 98% codes for the production of 4 million switches that switch on and off the bits of the DNA the bits of the genes that we needed any given moment it is a series of instructions for genetic switching genetic expression so it turns out that 98% that was dismissed as junk isn't junk at all so I said to Richard Dawkins is it true that scientists believed that 98% of the human genome was junk he said yes I said have scientists now discovered that it's absolutely essential for life he said yes I said Richard you think that 98% of religion is junk might you not be wrong about that as well and do you know what his answer was no neither do I he didn't answer at all so there you are that is The Challenge from science that the more more science we know the more we understand how wondrous are your works you have made them all in wisdom today science challenges The Atheist not the believer that is number one number two though is a much harder challenge the argument from Evil and I'm not even going to try in a few minutes to attempt to answer the greatest questions question of faith of all the question of sadic verallo why bad things happen to good people in the space of a few minutes it is sufficient to point out one remarkable feature of Judaism in other religions the question about evil is usually asked by the people at the fringes of Faith the Skeptics the radicals the doubters in Judah this question is asked not by the doubs but by The Heroes of Faith themselves abam says shall the judge of all the Earth not do justice Moses says why have you done evil to this people Jeremiah in the beginning of chapter 12 says Hashem you win every argument that I have with you but I still want to know why is it that the wicked Prosper the entire Book of Job is dedicated to this question so this is a question of questions and there can be no fasile answer to it however I do want to say something about the Holocaust the Holocaust is not in and of itself a new challenge to Faith exactly the same question could have been asked about the first two human children Cain and Abel why did her let Cain kill Abel he knew that Cain was angry with Abel he knew that Cain was harboring murderous thoughts he asked K why are you angry you know that sin is crouching at the door you can dominate it but it wants to dominate you why did God let Cain kill ab and the truth is that that is the Jewish equation we believe that God gave us freedom it is the most faith ful decision he made in the entire universe Freedom means that if we do well we are little lower than the Angels but if we do bad we are lower even than the beasts that is our world God teaches us what is good and what is evil what we should do and what we should not do but it does not intervene to force us to do good or to prevent us from doing evil in 1995 the BBC asked me to do a make a film at aitz for the 50th anniversary of the end of the second World War I had never been to aitz before I didn't want to go I went and I stood there in the middle of B aitz bur Canal for the first time and I suddenly knew where God was at our aitz he was there in the words L you shall not murder in the words foret do not oppress The Stranger In the words your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground but in one sense the Holocaust changed the whole human equation let me explain why the culture that produced The Holocaust was not at some distant place or time it took place in the heart of the most sophisticated culture the world has ever known a culture that had reached the very Heights of human achievement in science in philosophy in rationalism in democracy this was the culture of Kant and Hegel and n and shopau the culture of Gerta and Shila and B and Beethoven the culture the people who signed the van declaration in January 1942 the final solution aimed at the elimination rahmanan of all of Europe's 11 million Jews of the people sitting around that table resolving on that plan half of them more than half of them carried the title doctor they were either medical doctors or they had doctorates and that was just Germany France the country that gave us the revolution in 1789 the universal Declaration of Human Rights l that country was the country that produced Louie drumar who wrote one of the most anti-Semitic books ever written laf in the 1880s which went through 200 editions between then and 1945 it was a bestseller for 60 years France was the country of the draus trial France was the country that actively collaborated with the Nazis and rounded up Jews for deportation without even being asked by the Nazis as for Vienna Vienna the cultural capital of Europe was the epicenter of anti-Semitism its mayor Carl Luger in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the man who turned Adolf Hitler into an anti-sea when the austrians voted on the anelas 97% of the population voted in favor of Hitler and that was the country that made its Chief Rabbi Rabbi Dr tgl get down on his knees and scrub the Pavements of Vienna while the vienes stood and laughed Austria was the country where in March 1938 at the time of the Angelus 500 Jews committed suicide no what was going to happen they played string quartets at aitz Buren there one and a quarter million Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals were gassed and burned and turned to Ash after the Holocaust some people lost their faith some people kept their faith and some people found faith in God but after the Holocaust it is morally impossible to believe in man I say this not likely the Holocaust is the final decisive refutation of the idea that you can have a Humane civilization without sh without the fear of heaven and without a belief in sanctity of Life the Holocaust may make some people lose their faith in God but it must make all people lose their faith in humankind without yat chayim homo homm lupus EST man is like a wild animal to man after aitz you have to be either very ignorant or very naive to believe in secular humanism the real challenge of the shaah is not to Faith but to lack of faith and finally at the existential level do we still need religion well in Europe they've decided we really don't Europe is the most secular civilization that the world has ever known and of course for 50 years since the 1960s Europe has by and large lost its religious Faith the only trouble is this certain things began to happen when people stop believing in God number one in those those same 50 years the family and marriage have comp collapsed almost completely today in Britain 40% of children are born outside of marriage 50% of marriages end in divorce the result is among other things an entirely new phenomenon in Britain of child poverty in Britain despite its affluence 3.4 million children live in poverty in Britain and in Europe in 50 years among young people there has been between a 300% and 1,000% rise in alcohol and drug abuse in Eating Disorders in suicides rlan and attempted suicides in depressive illness and stress related syndromes lose God you lose the sanctity of marriage you lose the family and children are the victims secondly communities have collapsed it's very interesting I don't know if you have the same phenomenon here in Johannesburg but in January 2012 a British medical the McMillan cancer research charity did a survey and discovered that the average Brit Brit between the ages of 18 and 30 has 237 Facebook friends when asked on how many of those could you rely in a crisis the average answer was two one quarter said one 1/8 said none I compare that with a young American Family who joined our community in St John's Wood in London in the summer of 2008 it was a huge wrench for him his wife their young family to leave New York and come to London but you see he just landed a terrific job head of Leman Brothers Europe within less than a month there was no Leman brothers and three years later this young man stood up in our sh on the brink of his return to New York and he said I don't know how I or my family could have survived at all without this community you supported us all the way through you helped us through the most difficult years of our lives in a Sho you have real friends not just Facebook friends then there's something they call Social Capital you know the good that we do one another there is a Harvard sociologist called Robert putam the world's greatest expert on this this subject who wrote a famous book called bowling alone he discovered that more Americans than ever are uh are going temping bowling but fewer than ever are joining bowling clubs and we're bowling alone two years ago you published a book called American Grace saying no social capital is still alive and well if you go to a house of worship religious people are more likely he showed by radical Empirical research much more likely than secular people to give to charity even a secular charity to volunteer to help someone in distress to offer somebody a seat in a bus to allow another driver to cut in front of you in a queue that obviously these weren't Jewish drivers so so it turns out that without religion you lose all the little many of the little acts of kindness that make Society a human and Humane place and and then finally there's that little thing called trust in Europe one after another of our institutions we've lost trust in Bankers CEOs politicians parliamentarians journalists police and media personality somehow when people lose faith in God they lose faith in people also and even Health did you know that one of the largest ever Health survey in America involving 28,000 people in a longitudinal study discovered that regular attendance at a house of worship adds seven years to your life expectancy did you know this I said to elain if you go regularly to Sho you live 7 years longer or maybe it just seems seven years longer so friends if you don't mind losing families communities the kindness of strangers trust and seven years of your life then you can give up Faith quite easily but if you care about those things religion matters so I hope that I've shown that we do need faith and that science is not a challenge the holoc course is not a challenge and personal life is not a challenge they really are challenges to people who have lost their faith however speaking personally for me and with this I end the thing that finally prompted me to write a book about faith because what I've been talking to you is the subject of a book of mine called the Great partnership was a few years ago the atheists in London decided to take out an advertisement on the London buses I don't know if you read about this they paid for London buses to carry the message probably God doesn't exist I thought this you know this was a very famous thing I thought it was so funny it was terrific I love that word probably let's think about the word probably as I've tried to explain to you if probability were the rule the universe wouldn't exist life wouldn't exist Homo sapiens wouldn't exist you wouldn't exist I wouldn't exist I have to tell you nothing interesting is probable how probable is it that one man whose name was Abraham who ruled no Empire commanded no Army performed no Miracles delivered no prophecy would turn out to be the most influential human being that that ever lived still followed today by 2.4 billion Christians 1.6 billion Muslims and a few of us most of whom I think are in this room today how probable is it that a tiny nation of mere fraction of a 1% a fifth of 1% of the population of the world should be assaulted by some of the greatest Empires the world has ever known Egypt of the Pharaohs Assyria Babylon uh the alexandrian Empire the Roman Empire the med evil empires of Christianity and Islam all the way to the Third Reich in the Soviet Union every one of those that seemed invulnerable in its day has died disappeared and has been consigned to history and this tiny people called us can still stand and sing Amel how probable is that friends nothing interesting is probable and that is how I Define faith faith is the defeat of probability by the power of possibility and that is what the Jewish people have shown time and again in history that we defy probability by showing ourselves and through us the world that if you have faith nothing is impossible lack faith and you you find it's hard even to change yourself have faith and together we can change the world thank you very much [Music] indeed

Channel: Sinai Indaba

Views: 109,367

Keywords: Judaism, Torah, Shiur, Inspiration, Positivity, Growth, Israel, Chief Rabbi, Love, Neshama, Soul, Spirituality

Id: 0ixGCAe58_A

Length: 35min 26sec (2126 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2015