Nardy Grün | A Partial Critique on Sherwin Wine's book: "Judaism beyond God"

"Judaism beyond God"¹ is a brave attempt to revive the secular humanistic tradition in through Jewish identity. It is admirable, written poetically with an unequivocal charm that has a lot of appeal to the contemporary Jew today, like me.
Wine starts by speaking of Jewish identity as a given: "membership precedes conviction" (p. 2). Jewish identity is a matter of destiny, not of choice. He adds that non-religious Jews nowadays feel uncomfortable with Jewish traditions and beliefs, especially facing the modern era, after the holocaust. The controversy around Jewish identity spawns all kinds of active and passive reactions, mainly acceptance, avoidance and indifference. The purpose of the book is to deal with the new challenges the modern Jew faces. The book is meant for those "who are not traditional" but "want to integrate their Jewish identity with their personal convictions" (p. 5). From there on, Wine tries to deal with the challenges.
The main argument in this section is that the secular revolution prompted a new era of reason against the faith that ruled until then. Also, that reason is superior to faith especially in the constitution of a new Jewish Identity.
I intend to deal with only some of the notions on modern science. My contention is that the myth of modern science as portrayed in this section of the book is not as robust as it seems. I will try to offer a critique.
It is no wonder that science is referred to in the book as "a new 'religion'", and a "a new belief system". Also, "In the age of science, the secular revolution features a 'rational faith'" (p. 29). This reminds us of Comte's crude Positivism. In the 19th century, Comte wrote²:
"Thus Positivism becomes, in the true sense of the word, a Religion; the only religion which is real and complete; destined therefore to replace all imperfect and provisional systems resting on the primitive basis of theology". Later in his life Comte called for the creation of a "positivist church", in which, imitating the rituals of the Catholic Church, the "cult of humanity" could be practiced. Toward the end of the 19th century, "positivist societies" began to spread in Brazil, and a real church building was erected in Rio de Janeiro as the place where the adoration of the ideal of humanity could be practiced like a religion. But Wine's attitude is rooted in the logical positivism and in Popper's notion of falsifiability of the first half of the 20th century, that has already been criticized by Popper's students³ as naive.
Wine sates that "reason is universal. Facts do not belong to any nation… the facts are Chinese as they are American." (p. 25). But science today is Western, the language of science is English, science is practiced in the "industrialized nations" of the west were the main universities, scholars and laboratories are, where the money is. Science is also a product of the economic system of global capitalism. Any scientist in the world knows that in order to earn a name he has to get accustomed to western ways and manners. For example, a Pakistani physicist doing his postdoctoral thesis at M.I.T in Boston must, to some degree, "westernize" himself.
 Moreover, facts are not universal. Facts are the product of scientists, men and women, who have views and speak a language in a specific cultural environment. Facts are manufactured, engineered, fabricated by hypotheses; facts are "true" to their manufacturers. Facts are constructs of the culture of science today. This understanding led to new ways of research methods that changed the role of the researcher these methods are the Qualitative methods that arose side by side with the positivist traditional Quantitative way of research. In quantitative research, the researcher is ideally an objective observer that neither participates in nor influences what is being studied. In qualitative research, however, it is thought that the researcher can learn the most about a situation by participating and/or being immersed in it. These basic underlying assumptions of both methodologies guide and sequence the types of data collection methods employed⁴. In Qualitative methods "Data", and "facts" are put in parentheses because they are no longer the same rigid concepts they represented in the past. Niels Bohr⁵ said : "When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images". "Data", and "facts" are no longer only objective. They are also the product of the research tool – the researcher himself. Values influence the production of facts.
Qualitative research is more common, of course, in Humanities, Social Sciences, Educational research, etc. But even in the fields of Exact Sciences and Life Sciences we can
find that the language of science is a product of culture.
Let's look at Geometry. We can all agree that it is based on logical reason, and is precise and "true" in the way it represents reality.
Feldhay⁶, for example, tries to show that any scientific text, even a mathematical text, like Euclid's "Elements", has not only mathematical content but also the rules of discourse within which the text exists, that is to say, representation is an action in reality, a part of the social and political discourse in society.

Niels Bohr also said⁷: "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature".
New aspects of Quantum Mechanics⁸ have a big impact on epistemology, the way we grasp the world. There is no real or objective reality like modern science tried to show. There are descriptions that stem from the eyes of the beholder, each is subjective and they complement each other. All "truths" are seen in their different contexts.
Nardy Grün, July 2004.