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Question
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Robert
Pollack is professor of biological sciences,
lecturer in psychiatry at the Center for Psychoanalytic
Training and Research, and director of the Center
for the Study of Science and Religion at Columbia
University. His latest book is The Faith of Biology
and the Biology of Faith (2000). |
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Evolution is interesting to me because natural
selection explains certain facts of life that
touch on matters of meaning and purpose, and because
the vision of the natural world these explanations
produce is simply too terrifying and depressing
to me to be borne without the emotional buffer
of my own religion. This buffer is simple
to describe: a Jewish understanding of our appearance
by evolution through natural selection introduces
an irrational certainty of meaning and purpose
to a set of data that otherwise show no sign of
supporting any meaning to our lives on Earth,
beyond that of being numbers in a cosmic lottery
with no paymaster.
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I acknowledge there is
a wholly consistent alternative description of the
natural world and our place in it, which can lead
one to exactly the actions I may wish to
take or encourage others to take, all without any
belief in God. Nothing is wrong with that position.
It used to be my own, but as I have gotten older,
I find I no longer can honestly hold to it. When
I asked my teacher Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz how to
respond to this criticism of my position by non-believing
friends, he said, "If you know someone who
says the Throne of God is empty, and lives with
that, then you should cling to that person as a
good, strong friend. But be careful:
Almost everyone who says that, has already placed
something or someone else on that Throne, usually
themselves." |
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I find myself accepting
the God of my ancestors in part because it is my
way of discovering meaning and purpose without denying
or distorting the data of science, and in part
because otherwise I might put some person, some
ideology, some dream of completed science in God's
place. |
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(Boldface added.) |
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