During my seven years in the congregational rabbinate, I had so many people say to me, “I don’t believe in God, and I don’t feel connected to my Judaism. Instead, I believe in science.” Or they would approach me and explain that they saw Judaism and science as separate realms, with no connection between the two.
The way this was framed saddened me, but I could understand where it came from. Since the media portrays religion as anti-science, many Jews would say, “I don’t want my science and my Judaism mixed. And if religion is opposed to science, then I don’t want any part of Judaism.”
Yet are those statements representative of the Jewish community as a whole? How do Jews perceive the relationship between Judaism and science?
Recently, my organization Sinai and Synapses partnered with the Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion (DoSER), a part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), to run a workshop exploring those questions. DoSER had joined with Rice University to create the Perceptions Project, an initiative to increase understanding between religious and scientific communities. They ran a comprehensive survey of 10,000 Americans — Jews, Evangelical Christians, Catholics and more — to provide a snapshot of religious communities’ views on science, and how we can create a healthier relationship between the two.
Last month, DoSER and Sinai and Synapses ran a workshop for the Jewish community, bringing together rabbis and scientists to delve into the data, so that we could uncover both the challenges and opportunities surrounding Jewish responses to science.
The first finding that surprised me is that I had always thought that Jews didn’t feel the same conflict between religion and science that, say, the evangelical Christian community feels. But in fact, about 25% of Jews do see religion and science as being in opposition — about the same number as the American population as a whole.
Yet while most of the Christians who see religion and science as being in opposition view themselves as on the side of religion, those Jews who see science and religion in conflict come down on the side of science — and by a huge, huge margin. For those “conflicted Christians,” about 3 out of 4 opt for religion, and about 1 out of 4 choose science. But for that 25% of conflicted Jews, 15 out of 16(!) would see themselves on the side of science — and therefore, anti-religion.
Now, on one level, that number is a real positive. Jews are clearly deeply in favor of science. But just as religious fervor and opposition to science can thwart scientific research, scientific fervor and opposition to religion can hinder religious living.
So that’s the first challenge for the Jewish community when it comes to science — while the Christian community grapples with how to embrace science, the Jewish community has to figure out how to relate to Judaism.
But there’s a second, more subtle, challenge for the Jewish community. Besides “conflict,” the Perceptions Project also offered respondents two other frameworks to describe the relationship between science and religion. People also had the option to say that these two realms were “independent (referring to different aspects of reality)” or “collaborative (they can help support each other).”
And that led to the second finding that surprised me — among all religious groups, Jews were both most likely to pick “independent” and least likely to pick “collaborative” to describe the relationship between religion and science.
In other words, every other religious group was more likely to find that science could enhance their religious outlook than the Jewish community. Instead, Jews were much more likely to separate their religious and their scientific outlooks and keep them siloed off.
Here, then, is a great opportunity — after all, if Jews tend to have a positive outlook on science, why not use science to help people enhance their connection to Judaism?
That’s the inspiration for Sinai and Synapses, and how we are striving to bridge the religious and scientific worlds. We want to look at questions using the best of science and the best of Judaism in the service of making people’s lives more meaningful and our world more just.
We want people to understand how memory actually works in our brains, and what that means for how we observe Passover. We want to study the role of online activism in effecting real social justice change. We want to use science to teach us about how to act more compassionately.
And so that’s why, when people ask me, “Do you accept science, or Judaism?” my answer is, “Yes.” Because not only can science and Judaism co-exist, they can help us bring out the best in each other — and in ourselves.
