From Templeton:
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth who has spent decades bringing spiritual insight to the public conversation through mass media, popular lectures and more than two dozen books, has been awarded the 2016 Templeton Prize.
…
He also boldly defends the compatibility of religion and science, a response to those who consider them necessarily separate and distinct. “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean,” he wrote in his book, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning.More.
Naturally, we wondered, so from our files, we found: Britain’s chief rabbi on the Brit riots: Restore civil society (but that means less Dawkins) [Bereft world weeps rivers.]
From elsewhere: Jonathan Sacks: Darwin pointed the way to an unselfish evolution:
Without fully realising what he had done, Darwin was pointing us to the central drama of civilisation. Biological evolution favours individuals, but cultural evolution favours groups. So, as Judaism and Christianity both knew, there is a war within each of us as to which will prevail: self-regard or concern for others, egoism or altruism. Selfishness is advantageous to individuals, but disastrous to groups, and it is only as members of a group that we can survive at all. As Darwin himself put it, “Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected.”
There are three ways of getting individuals to act in a way that is beneficial to the group. One is power: we force them to. The second is wealth: we pay them to. The disadvantage of both is that they leave selfishness untouched. They use external incentives. The danger is that strong individuals will outwit the system, using power or wealth for their advantage.
The third alternative is to educate them to see that the welfare of others matters as much as their own. No system does this more effectively than religion, for an obvious reason. Religion teaches us that we are part of the whole, a thread in the fabric of God’s creation, a note in the symphony of life. More.
But this, of course, is high-level, well-intentioned nonsense.
Darwinists are currently in a pitched battle among themselves over the selfish gene vs. group selection. Darwinism points in no particular direction and isn’t even well-evidenced today. The followers are mostly pure naturalist atheists. How can Rev. Dr. Sacks’s view be correct if the people most knowledgeable and concerned simply don’t feel it describes them or their views?
Oh well, it’s Templeton after all, and the rabbi will doubtless use the money for good.
See also: Natural selection: Could it be the single greatest idea ever invented?
Could we all get together and evolve as a group?
Remembering philosopher of biology (William Provine 1942–2015): Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent. “Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life” (1998 Darwin Day Keynote Address) Incidentally, the ID theorists respected and spent time with him because in a world where many consider it their duty to lie for Jesus about Darwin, he was a refreshing voice for honesty about naturalistic evolution.
and
Conclusions: What the fossils told us in their own words
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