 Reflecting an ambivalence that runs through statements in the Jewish tradition regarding such worship, Leibowitz vacillates between recognizing worship “Not-lishmah” as a genuine if flawed form of worship and as not seeing it as worship at all – indeed, seeing it as idolatrous in its reduction of worship of God to worship of man, thus implying that man is  holy.[14]  Philosophically speaking, his negative attitude can again be traced back to his strictly scientific approach to the world and his views concerning God’s transcendence. Regarding the former, Leibowitz dismisses the idea that human beings exist at some supra-natural level. As creatures of flesh and blood, we are governed by the same natural laws as the rest of nature. Human beings have no special endowment that transcends their physical nature. Given that this is the case, human needs cannot be sacred, and thus the service of human need cannot be the purpose of the mitzvoth. Coming from the opposite direction, given that God is transcendent and cannot be related to any form of concrete reality, including human reality, how could the service of our own needs, which are a function of our humanity, constitute worship of God? God must be the exclusive locus of religious value, to the exclusion of human values. Man, in comparison, is but human, and a part of nature. Thus, while Medieval Jewish philosophers usually take the statement at Genesis 1:27 that man was created “in the image of God” as placing man on a pedestal by somehow comparing him to God, for Leibowitz, the verse should be taken to indicate that man is a mere “image” in its more prosaic, if not pejorative Platonic sense (Judaism, 90).