Those who are trained in the art of philosophy can spot logical fallacies a mile off. From politicians to talk show hosts, debates will often be peppered with the most deceptive and disingenuous language dressed up to look like meaningful argument.

One of the classic fallacies is that of the false dichotomy in which the provocateur presents two alternative positions as both exhaustive and mutually exclusive. Take for example George W. Bush’s famous “you’re either with us, or against us” speech in November 2001. While this was an understandable and persuasive comment in his efforts to garner support for the fight against terrorism, it deliberately left no room for the likely possibility that some of those being addressed held neutral positions which neither sided with terrorists nor supported his response to them.

The nature of a false dichotomy is that it oversimplifies complex issues, which in turn hinders meaningful debate. This has been especially problematic regarding the debate between scientists and theologians.

Since the dawn of time mankind has tried to understand the workings of the Universe. During the last millennium, this insatiable quest for knowledge has yielded the greatest minds known to mankind. Against the backdrop of an ever growing enlightenment, those minds have forged their theories in the crucibles of our greatest academic institutions, which stand like temples to philosophy, mathematics and the sciences.

From Galileo to Darwin, the immutable dogma of religion has been scrutinised and disputed, whittling away at the intellectual monopoly of these ancient doctrines. While the battle between science and religion is centuries old, in more recent years the front line has often been fought in the courtroom with both sides struggling over the right to educate our children in their own way.

From the Scopes trial in the 1920s to the landmark ruling in the Kitzmiller trial in 2005, this has only served to polarise the discussion even further. There is little choice; we are forced to either submit to an evidence-based scientific view of reality with its decidedly anti-religious aftertaste or subscribe in faith to religious dogma.

While both sides partly bear responsibility for the current climate, modern thinking has at best relegated religion to the status of a curious lifestyle choice to be tolerated but not encouraged and at worst casts religion as a sinister and often dangerous source of division, propagated by those whose backward thinking minds have not yet caught up with the enlightened intellectual elite.

By drawing on their academic credentials, some scientists who also advocate a rambunctious form of secularism have adopted deeply strident positions against religion. Presenting themselves as the Sultans of Sense, their writings have been highly popular and influential. Yet while their erudition and expertise in regards to science is indisputable, their failure to grasp the complexities of religion and philosophy lead to the schoolboy errors which result in this false dichotomy.

Their arrogant declaration, rooted in the dogmatic adherence to scientific materialism, maintains that since God does not exist, religious texts must have been written by man to record his primitive way of trying to explain the world. While this is understandable given that the scientific process demands evidence, it is not necessary or correct to dismiss God simply for lack of a means of detecting Him.

In addition, centuries of biblical commentary have shown that a literal understanding of the Torah which only engages with the plain reading of the text does not convey the depth of meaning hidden in the subtleties of the Hebrew language, further obscured by successive translations. Consequently, the intended messages which have nothing to do with science are often lost. Incidentally, many Christian proponents of Intelligent Design have also failed to grasp the intricacy of the Torah and lack the Jewish tradition to fathom it.

The latest offering guilty of these mistakes is a recent book by the renowned geneticist Professor Steve Jones called ‘the Serpent’s Promise’. He writes:

“Science is its [the Bible’s] direct descendant and the factual, if not the spiritual, questions asked long ago can be explored with the latest technology. This volume is an attempt to do just that, to scrutinise the biblical pages from the point of view of a scientist.”[1]

The Torah narratives are not there to teach us about science, nor are they mere fairy tales about talking snakes and magical trees. Each element of Torah conveys the most profound observations about the human character; our interpersonal relationships and our relationship with God. As the late Chief Rabbi JH Hertz[2] put it, The Torah is “not to serve as a textbook of astronomy, geology or anthropology. Its object is not to teach scientific facts; but to proclaim highest religious truths respecting God, Man, and the Universe.”

When science appears to contradict the Torah, it does not inevitably imply that the Torah itself is wrong, but that perhaps our interpretation of it requires further thought. Far from being a fly in the religious ointment, in the right hands modern scientific discoveries can help to stimulate a deeper understanding of the Torah’s timeless message, bringing greater understanding and deep satisfaction from our own intellectual honesty.

A version of this article first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle.

It was early February 1971. The three man Apollo 14 crew had just completed their mission and were returning home. Edgar D. Mitchell, the Lunar Module Pilot gazed out of the window of the command module Kitty Hawk as it hurtled towards its landing target in the Pacific Ocean. As he stared at the Earth suspended in the immense cosmos, Mitchell experienced an extraordinary epiphany.

On his return he said “When I went to the moon I was a pragmatic test pilot. But when I saw the planet Earth floating in the vastness of space the presence of divinity became almost palpable and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes.”

This inspiration convinced him that reality is more complex and mysterious than conventional science had led him to believe. The 18^th century psychologist and philosopher William James[1] described this type of mystical state as having a ‘noetic’ quality, from the Greek noēsis meaning inner wisdom.

Rather than viewing his scientific background as a threat to this encounter, Mitchell hoped to reconcile conventional science with his new-found spirituality and established the field of noetic sciences. Today its researchers aim to scientifically substantiate a wide range of supernatural phenomena, such as extra-sensory perception, precognition and mind-matter interactions.

The noetic sciences were recently popularised in Dan Brown’s 2009 novel, ‘The Lost Symbol’ in which one of the leading characters, Dr. Katherine Solomon claims to have used noetic science to categorically prove that ‘human thought, if properly focused, had the ability to affect and change physical mass[2].’

If it is indeed possible to apply scientific methods to verify or falsify supernatural claims such as the power of prayer, then perhaps these studies could remove the need for faith which, from a scientific perspective is an anathema to rational thought. ‘Faith,’ as Professor Richard Dawkins put it ‘is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.’[3]

Since the late 19^th century, scientists have made a number of attempts to test the efficacy of intercessory prayer by assessing whether praying for the recovery of an ill patient has a measurable effect. In 2003 the American Psychological Association concluded that while there was some statistical evidence to support the success of intercessory prayer, given the absence of a plausible physiological mechanism which could have been influenced coupled with contradictory studies, the researchers remained predictably sceptical of their results.

This should not be surprising. The Torah relates that after leaving Egypt and arriving in Massah, the Jewish people complained of thirst and dissatisfaction with the manna that God had provided. They claimed that if God could not provide water in the desert, it would prove that He was not with them.[4] Later the Torah recalls this episode and explicitly prohibits this sort of behaviour: ‘You shall not test God as you tested Him at Massah’.^[5]

Many commentators explain that the problem is less to do with testing God, and more about the erroneous presumptions that will inevitably be made. Whereas a treatment or medication is both scientifically explainable and can be assumed to act through a mechanism of cause and effect, prayer simply does not work that way. Since the veracity of scientific research is only as reliable as the pre-experimental assumptions, when those assumptions are mistaken then no matter what the results, the inferences drawn will be wrong.

Does this mean that we must rely simply on faith? Are we left to bamboozle ourselves into ‘believing’ in God no matter what?

While science cannot engender faith, it is wrong to suggest that it must therefore have no rational source. Many draw on the unique revelation at Sinai as a foundation of their belief in God. For generations of Jews to assert that the entire Israelite nation witnessed God firsthand is such a unique and all-encompassing claim, it would effectively be impossible to fabricate. While individual claims of personal revelation found in other religions are neither falsifiable nor verifiable, it is unrealistic to suggest that Moses was able to convince the entire nation that they had collectively experienced revelation when they had not. Although it is impossible to authenticate such a claim scientifically, it is at the very least rational and perhaps even reasonable to believe that God exists and revealed the Torah to our ancestors at Sinai over 3,000 years ago.

Jewish faith does not require the sort of epiphany described by Edgar D. Mitchell to comprehend God, nor can the supernatural be detected through scientific research. For the Jewish people the real test of faith cannot be resolved in the laboratory, but must be played out within the confines of our hearts and minds.