On The Bookshelf CONEY ISLAND Greek and American Cuisine OPEN 7 DAYS A VAIEEK 154 S. Woodward, Birmingham (248) 540-8780 Livia Halsted Village (37580 W. 12 Mile Rd.) Farmington Hills (248) 553-2360 6527 Telegraph Rd. Corner of Maple (15 Mile) Bloomfield Township (248) 646-8568 4763 Haggerty Rd. at Pontiac Trail West Wind Village Shopping Center West Bloomfield (248) 669-2295 Author describes tag team between science and religion. 841 East Big Beaver, Troy (248) 680-0094 SANDEE BRAWARSKY Special to the Jewish News SOUTHFIELD SOUVLAKI CONEY ISLAND Nine Mile & Greenfield 15647 West Nine Mile, Southfield (248) 569-5229 R FARMINGTON SOUVLAKI CONEY ISLAND Between 13 & 14 on Orchard Lake Road 30985 Orchard Lake Rd. Farmington Hills (248) 626-9732 Robert Pollack: "As soon as the notion of the unknowable as distinct from the unknown placed itself before me, the shock changed both my career and the way I see the world." NEW LOCATION: 525 N. Main Milford (248) 684-1772 UPTOWN PARTHENON 4301 Orchard Lake Rd. West Bloomfield (248) 538-6000 HERCULES FAMILY RESTAURANT 33292 West 12 Mile Farmington Hills (248) 489-9777 Serving whitefish, lamb shank, pastitsio and moussaka I not to go with any other offer withcoupon i Expires I/31/2001 lam mum. am ow ow INN Nu um Now obert Pollack likens the working habits of a rabbi to that of a scientist trying to prevent dis- ease. The two, he explains, see the natural world in similar ways and agree that the world can be best understood through the study of texts. For the rabbi, it's the Torah, and for the scientist, the text is the human genome. They also would agree that their understanding of these texts is incomplete. A distinguished ge: molecular biologist with a serious interest in Judaism, Pollack is a scholar engaged at the junction of science and religion. He sug- gests how the two fields can inform and enhance each other's visions of the world. His new book, The Faith of Biology & The Biology of Faith (Columbia University Press; $19.95), is based on a series of three lectures he gave last fall at Columbia University, where he is a professor of biological sciences, lecturer in psychiatry at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and director of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion. Pollack writes gracefully and is able to make science, molecular biology in particular, accessible to the layman. His approach is original and provocative as he brings emo- tions and religious experience to scientific discourse. He comes to this perspective primarily from a path of science, which he has followed since his days as a physics major at Columbia, where he graduated in 1961. He received his Ph.D. in biology from Brandeis. Since the mid-1990s, he has become more involved in Judaism and increasingly observant. "I am not a representative of religion as such, nor of sci- ence as such," Pollack writes in the book's introduction. This is a slim book of big ideas. He ponders the challenge of finding meaning and purpose in life, when scientific data show that our species is neither unique nor permanent. Pollack accepts both the data of the science he has embraced for a lifetime and his emotional belief in God, or the unknowable, which he prizes as a gift of his free will. It is this free will that Pollack sees as affirmation that life has meaning. Pollack uses the word "unknowable" at times in place of the word God. "This book is about the boundary of the knowable and the unknowable," he writes. "Science works at the bound- ary of the known and the unknown, a different place entirely. The unknowable as a notion does not come easily to the scientifically minded. Dealing with it is a project full of paradox, requiring that one talk about the unutter- able and anatomize the unmeasurable. "I chose to work at this new boundary; nevertheless, because I have the habits of thought of a scientist. As soon I as the notion of the unknowable as distinct from the unknown placed itself before me, the shock changed both my career and the way I see the world." In an interesting analogy, he draws connections between the sudden insight in science "through which we see clear- ly to a corner of what had been unknown" and revelation in religion. He also writes about the consequence of the loss of free will in sickness, about the ethical ramifications of genetic medicine and the findings of Jewish law. Throughout, he writes candidly about his own thoughts and practice. Interviewed in his Manhattan apartment near the Columbia campus, the professor speaks with intensity, clarity and a down-to-earth quality. When asked what's most radical about his book, he points to his refutation of a long-held misunderstanding — the Greek notion that mental states are ineffable, existing independently of the physical body. "We know now that memory and the unconscious are parts of the body," he says. "Religious experience is a body