Enriched with countless anecdotes and stories drawn from the storehouse of Jewish spiritualty, Sacks's book glows from start to finish with luminous moral insights whose power the sceptical atheist will be hard pressed not to acknowledge. Nevertheless, many will ask why we need religious belief in order to support and validate these moral insights. Can we not rely on a purely secular moral system, uncontaminated with the problematic baggage of theism? In addressing this issue, Sacks is at his most nuanced and subtle. He makes it absolutely clear that he does not for a moment believe you have to be religious in order to be moral: "There is something profoundly self-serving and self-deceiving in thinking that ‘we', us and our fellow believers, have a monopoly of virtue...and faith should give us the humility to see that it is not so." But for all that, he insists that there is indeed a vital connection between religion and morality.
It is not that without religion morality would suddenly collapse. Dostoevsky was wrong to suggest people will suddenly conclude that without God all is permitted. What is to be expected instead, if religion dies, is a much more gradual erosion of the moral culture of a community; for religion provides, above all, an enduring tradition where "the virtues live, are rehearsed and are valued". Sacks reports that his doctoral supervisor, the eminent philosopher Sir Bernard Williams, once challenged this tradition-grounded conception of faith by asking, "Don't you believe there is an obligation to live within one's time?" — meaning that the traditional religious sources of meaning and value are simply no longer available to us today. In a way, Sacks's whole book is an answer to this fascinating question.
His answer is that for my life to have meaning, I must have a moral identity; and the great fallacy of contemporary thought is to suppose that I can construct that identity from scratch, by affirming my own autonomous "projects", grounded (as Williams once put it in his highly influential Shame and Necessity) in "the individual nature of the agent". The view that Sacks eloquently articulates is diametrically opposed to this: my moral identity is something I acquire by being born into a specific community with a distinctive history, "when I recognise a duty of loyalty to a past and responsibility for a future by living faith and handing it on to those who come after me".
None of this is to ignore the terrible wrongs committed in the name of religion, or the ever-present danger that religion will descend "into fantasy, paranoia and violence". Nor is it to shirk the classic puzzle of how a surpassingly loving and compassionate God can allow the amount and degree of suffering that we find in the world. Rightly, in my view, Sacks rejects the standard theological "solutions" to the problem of evil: theodicy, he argues, is a "comfort bought too cheaply". Instead, we must start from the world as it is, the world revealed by observation and scientific inquiry, not the world as we imagine it should have been if God had arranged things better. The hope that religion brings is not a glib optimism — it comes at a heavy price. But it allows us to find the meaning by which we can live.
In several passages Sacks quotes the ancient Talmudic blessing on the sages of the nations of the world, which he reinterprets for our own time as a blessing on scientists. His moving and powerfully argued book goes a very long way to establishing that there is no logical reason why science and religion should not join hands, and allow us to live better, with compassion and hope, in the world that has been entrusted to our safekeeping. It is a message that urgently needs to be heard.
