Notes on the The Great Partnership Book

The premise of the book: Both science and religion are compatible. Science analyzes and explains and religion integrates. Science breaks things down to their component parts. Religion binds people together in relationships of trust.

The founders of modern European politics were religious, and their key text was the Hebrew Bible. Using it as their warrant, they developed three revolutionary principles.

1. All legitimate constitutions are republican.
2. One of the tasks of the state is to fight poverty, if need be by redistribution of income and the widening of land ownership.
3. Principle of toleration, that it is no business of the state to legislate in matters of religious belief.

All three propositions were based, not on Plato or Aristotle, but on Leviticus and Deuteronomy and the books of Samuel and Kings.

Politics is about power, and at the heart of of the Abrahamic vision is a critique of power. Power is a fundamental assault on human dignity. When a person exercises power over another, the exerciser denies freedom to the other person, and that is dangerous to both. A free political order is possible only when the fundamental political act is a mutual promise between governor and governed [author’s emphasis]. But no human being can be trusted to keep his or her word when he or she has access to power – a power not available to opponents. Sooner or later, if not in the lifetime of the ruler, then in that of his/her descendants, there is an inescapable risk of tyranny.

Darwinism has immense religious implications:

1. It tells us that God delights in diversity.
2. This is Darwin’s wondrous discovery: the Creator made creation creative. We already knew that he made man creative. Now, thanks to Darwin, we know that is applies to nature too.
3. We know now that all life derives from a single source. The three-letter words of genetic code are the same in every creature.
4. Science and Genesis have now converged, in an utterly unexpected way, on the same metaphor. Life is linguistic.
5. The interconnectedness of all life – the fact that plants, animals and humans have a common origin – helps us understand in new depth the Bible’s phrasing, ‘Let the Earth bring forth…’ and its generic name for Homo sapiens, Adam (from adamah, meaning ‘the Earth’).

If there is no Judge, there is no reason to expect justice. If there is no God, there is no transcendental ‘Thou shalt not.’ Lose belief in God, and sooner or later you may lose belief in the possibility and necessity of justice.

Source: The Great Partnership. Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (2011) by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.