Sacks Great Partnership

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ The Great Partnership: Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning depicts Sacks’ understanding of the relationship between religion and science. In the first part of the book, Sacks’ differentiates between religion and science and discusses some of the reasons why people believe that science and religion are incompatible. The second part of Sacks’ book is primarily about the importance of religion and the effect on the world if religion was lost. The last and final part of his book goes over some of the major challenges that science and people pose to faith. The main thesis of Sacks’ book is that science and religion are two ways of thinking that are necessary and compatible with one another. According to Sacks’ science
According to Sacks, Christianity is “a religion whose sacred texts are written in what to its founder would have been a foreign and largely unintelligible language” (61). The founder of Christianity, according to Sacks’, is Jesus. By asserting that Jesus would not have understood some of the beliefs that Christians have, Sack’s implies that some Christian beliefs are not correct. Sacks’ makes it clear that he believes that these incorrect beliefs originated from the Greek background of western Christianity. He asserts that because of the fact that the Christian bible was translated into Greek, “it contains strands that were undeniably Greek” (62). This statement shows that Sacks’ believes that Greek philosophy influenced and impacted western Christianity. The influence that the Greek origins of Western Christianity had on Christianity is summed up in five areas; universality, dualism, the interpretation of the Adam and Eve story, the understanding of faith and works, and the meaning of God’s I am who I am phrase. In his introduction, Sacks’ explicitly states these distinctions leads “to endless confusion about what religion and faith actually are” (4). Sacks’ implies that the confusion resulting from the Greek influence on Christianity is one of the reasons that people
In his introduction Sacks’ states that he wants “to argue that we need both religion and science; that they are compatible and more than compatible” (2). He uses his discussion on Darwinism as a way to illustrate how science and religion are compatible. Sack’s states that “the question is neither does ‘Darwinism refute religion?’ nor ‘does Religion refute Darwinism?’ Rather: how does each shed light on the other?” (215). Thus, he asserts that science can broaden our understanding of religion and that religion can broaden our understanding of science. He uses his analysis of Darwinism to show the different ways that science is consistent with religion. According to Sacks’ Darwinism shows that: God loves diversity, God made his creations creative, all life comes from one source, life is linguistic and all life is connected. He states that “Darwinism biology does not entail the absence of design”