Science and religion have long had a complicated relationship. Though they ask some of the same questions, one attributes things to God and the other to mathematical laws, often resulting in claims that are at face value mutually exclusive. But religion can be seen to operate within a different domain, serving to fill in the gaps left by science. Though the reductionism of science is useful, it still leaves us without purpose or meaning.
1. Conflicts between Science and Torah: Does science ever contradict the Torah?
2. Religion and Scientific Advancement: How have science and religion influenced each other over history?
3. Faith and Reason: What is the relationship between scientific inquiry and religious growth?
Two of the greatest explicators of the boundaries between Jewish thought and western thought of this era were Rabbis Jonathan Sacks and Norman Lamm, two great thinkers that we lost in 2020. To better appreciate the contributions each thinker made on the questions of science and religion, read Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s instant classic, The Great Partnership, and Rabbi Lamm’s great Torah Umadda. In The Great Partnership, Rabbi Sacks looks at the relationship between science and religion with deep respect for each. He considers science the search for an explanation, but religion the search for meaning. In Torah Umadda, Rabbi Lamm provides a powerful presentation on the broader dynamics narrating the Jewish relationship with Western thought.
