They Aim At The Stars
Dec 21st, 2010 | By admin | Category: 2010-2011, Archives, E-geress 3rd Article
It is often argued that religion, despite its teachings about peace and brotherhood, has been a major cause of war and hatred throughout history. The Bible itself is hardly a pacifist document. Christian Europe excelled in religious persecution and religious wars; witness the Crusades, the Reformation, the Inquisition. The more recently-founded Islam made up for a lot of lost ground with its world-conquering ways, and then the Sunni-Shiite schism. More recently, Islamic fanaticism made a comeback as a source of global conflict in 9/11. Indeed, even before that, the Mideast conflict, once you get past the political and legal arguments, is at bottom, a religious conflict, over the historical-religious connection to Jerusalem and the Land of Israel.
The standard response has been to say that while religion has been used by man to promulgate war and hatred, that does not negate the essentially peaceloving message of religion. Man has free will, and it is up to him to assimilate religious ideas in the right spirit, or to distort them to suit his own agenda. Abraham Lincoln made the point most eloquently in his Second Inaugural, when he said, regarding the North and South: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”*
Critics of religion aren’t much moved by this argument. But an interesting parallel occurs to me, regarding science. Those who criticize or reject belief in God, fervently recommend science as a force for progress. Think of all the diseases, like polio and smallpox, for which science has provided cures; the transformative inventions of the past two centuries—the telephone, the automobile, the computer—which have made life so much easier and opened up so many opportunities for mankind to progress ever further.
However, it is no less true that science and scientists have been a powerful instrument in the hands of war-makers from time immemorial. Every technological advance, from the first time a plowshare was beaten into a sword or a pruning hook into a spear, has been used to make more efficient and fearsome weapons. The Nobel Peace Prize is a case in point. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, hoped that he could atone for all the suffering his invention had caused by offering the Prize as an incentive for peacemakers. Einstein was chosen Time magazine’s Man of the Century for his revolutionary ideas. One of those ideas, encapsulated in the most famous formula in science—E=Mc²—led directly to the atom bomb.
As C.P. Snow said, scientists are “the most important military resource a nation state could call upon.” That’s why, at the end of World War Two, as Germany was invaded on all sides by the Allies, Werner Von Braun, the designer of the V2 rocket, which nearly brought London to its knees, was, along with his colleagues, intensely sought after as a spoil of war. The German scientists surrendered themselves to the Americans, figuring rightly that their prospects in the West were significantly brighter than they would be in the hands of Joseph Stalin’s Red Army. Von Braun eventually became a U.S. citizen and the architect of the Saturn V rocket booster, which propelled the Apollo moon shot. Von Braun portrayed himself as a space age visionary, whose true desire, to enable the exploration of the cosmos, was only temporarily hijacked by the Nazis for their infamous purposes. As for his rank of major in the Wehrmacht, he explained that it was either that or give up his scientific career, and maybe worse.
In the 50′s, a Hollywood movie was made about his life, called “I Aim at the Stars.” As the satirist Mort Sahl quipped, “I Aim at the Stars—But Sometimes I Hit London.”
This, in a sense, is the story of so many scientists. They aim at the stars. Their goals are visionary, idealistic, seeking to serve mankind with the wonders of science. But all too often they miss their target, and their dream of better living through science is transformed into a nightmare of the most destructive weapons imaginable. They aim for the stars—but sometimes they hit London.
What do the advocates of science say to this? Yes, they admit, there is no denying that politicians and generals have misused science; but that is not the fault of science. The centuries-old effort to probe the secrets of nature is a noble one which, unfortunately, gets co-opted by the war-makers. Nor does this necessarily come as a surprise to the scientists. Shortly after Hiroshima, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant director of the Manhattan Project, was asked about the morality of the atom bomb. “A scientist cannot hold back progress because of fears of what the world will do with his discoveries,” Oppenheimer answered.** Von Braun also knew exactly what Hitler was doing with his beloved rockets.
So that is my argument. If it can be made for science, it can be made equally well for religion.
There is a difference, though. Science is value-free. It takes no position on matters of war and peace, freedom and oppression. E=Mc² merely defines a law of nature; it takes human beings to extrapolate a bomb from that formula. Religion, on the other hand, is a source of values. And there is no doubt which side Lincoln thought the Bible was on. As he said, it is a strange idea that men invoke God’s blessing in the exploitation of others.
* South Africa supplies a similar example: the Dutch Reformed Church supported apartheid, but the Anglican Church helped end it.
** Later on, though, he was the most guilt-ridden of the creators of nuclear weapons, confessing “I have blood on my hands.”
by Rabbi Yisrael Rutman
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