Notes

  1. . George Steiner, review of Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1971), New York Times Book Review, November 21, 1971, p. 5.
  2. . Jacques Monod, Le hasard et la nécessité (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), p. 92 rhough I have translated cited passages, page references are to the French edition. Where I judged the rhetorical force relevant to the point under consideration, I have included the original in a note.
  3. . Ibid., p. 102.
  4. . Ibid., p. 110.
  5. . Ibid., p. 131.
  6. . Ibid., epigraph, quoting Camus, Le myth de Sisyphe.
  7. . Ibid., pp. 92–93.
  8. . Ibid., p. 92.
  9. . Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968).
  10. . Monod, v, 189. p. 96.
  11. . Ibid., p. '191.
  12. . Some would orefer to sav that the result is existentialist ohilosophv, and the I, choice is obviously made simply by defining terms. However, in regarding “religion” as the plainer term and “existentialism” as a kind of veil, I have the support of Sartre in the honesty of his old age. He writes in his autobiography, The Words: “As I was both Protestant and Catholic, my double religious affiliation kept me from believing in the Saints, the Virgin, and finally in God Himself as long as they were called by their numer. But a tremendous collective power had entered me. Lodged in my heart, it lay in wait. It was the Faith of others. All that was needed was to rename its customary object and to modify it superficially” ([New York: George Braziller, 19641, p. 250; emphasis added).
  13. . Monod, p. 190.
  14. . As auoted in Robert H. Pfeiffer, A Histon, of New Testament Times (1949; revrint 2., ed., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), p. 133. Harper & Row, 1962), p.315.
  15. . Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Architecture qf Matter (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 315.
  16. . Monod, p. 161. Empirically, the metaphor has something in common with Heidegger's famous Verworfenheit, but how different is the mood!
  17. . Ibid., p. 181.
  18. . Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms ofthe Religzous Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915), p. 2.
  19. . Monod, p. 127 “Il s'nsuit nécessairement que le hasard seul est à la source de toute nouveaute, de toute creation dans la biosphere. Le hasard pur, le seul hasard, liberte absolue mais aveugle, à la racine m6me du prodigieux edifice de l'tvolution: cette notion centrale de la biologie moderne n'est plus au.jourd'hd une hypothkse, parmi dautres possibles ou au moins concevables. Elle est la seule concevable, comme seule compatible avec les faits d'observation et experience. Et rien ne permet de supposer (ou d'espérer) que nos conceptions sur ce point devront ou même pourront être révisées.”
  20. . Translation by James Wilson in James B. Pritchard, ed., The Ancient Nea.r East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Princeton, niversity Press, 1958), p. 229. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University press.
  21. . Monod, p. 155.
  22. . Ibid., p. 173.
  23. . Gunther Stent, “An Ode to Objectivity: Does God Play at Dice?” Atlantic (November 1971), p. 130.
  24. . Lao Tzu, The Way of life : A New Translatzon of the Tao Te Ching, by R. B. Blakney (New York: New American Library, l955), p. 47.
  25. . Sisyphus pushing his stone up the hill of Hades parallels Christ carrying his cross up the hill of Calvary at least to the extent that neither complains. One who is finally convinced that there is no divinity that shapes his ends, no world soul, no just purpose within the universe, cannot logically complain: there is no one to receive the complaint. Starting from very different premises—namely, from Jesus' command that his disciples bear the cross as he would‐the Christian also loses the right to complain. Joseph Campbell, understanding religion as the celebration of heroism, defines the hero as “the man of self‐achieved submission.” Though narrower than Geertz's definition, Campbell's self‐achieved submission seems to cover not only Sisyphe heurewc and Jesus the Lamb of God but also Monod and Buddha. It is least adequate, however, for Judaism; for Judaism has made complaint—whether in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the impatience of Job, or the irony of Tevye‐a central religious category. It is this category which most massively resists incorporation into a scientific restatement of religion, not only because for science no one exists to receive such complaints but also because the ideal which stimulates a protest or a project can never be objectively known. The knowledge, for example, that the human brain is an evolutionary exag‐geration of the sort which in documented parallel cases has proven fatal to the species does not, scientifically, generate anything more than an estimate as to how long the human species is likely to last. To go beyond that to a program of eugenics or genetic engineering requires a value judgment that the death of man should not take place. Such a refusal to live with the facts as they are, such an ambition to change them, though not necessarily antiscientific, is surely unscientific. If it is not tampering with the evidence, it is at least longing for different evidence. Since a similar refusal and a similar ambition within a religion of submission would be judged morally wrong, one suspects that Western civilization has developed its prodigious technology not because Western religion was more worldly or world accepting than Eastern religion but precisely for the opposite reason. Technology then would be the marriage of the objective knowledge of the Enlightenment to the complaining attitude of Judaism as it survived in Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
  26. . Stent (n. 23 above).
  27. . The Song of God: The Bhugavad‐Gitu, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Chris‐ topher Isherwood (New York: New American Library, 1951), pp. 47–48.
  28. . Monod, p. 185: “On comprend alors pourquoi il fallut tant de millenaires pour que paraisse dans le royaume des idees celles de la connaissance objective comme seule source de vkriti. authentique.”
  29. . Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 54.
  30. . Monod, pp. 187–88: “S'il accepte ce message dans son entiere signification, il faut bien que I'homme enfin se reveille de son reve millenaire pour dkcouvrir sa totale solitude, son etrangetk radicale. I1 sait maintenant que, comme un Tzigane, it est en marge de I'univers ou il doit vivre. Univers sourd B sa musique, indifferent i ses espoirs comme B ses souffrances ou B ses crimes.”
  31. . Ibid., p. 183.