A ridiculous religious diatribe has surfaced on the web, supposedly taking the form of a conversation between Albert Einstein and an atheist professor back in his university days. Before delving further, I feel this preface is necessary and you’ll notice that I attach to all of my religious debasement: I am not an anti-religious man. I simply feel that it has a bad name among intellectuals because it has become a sanctuary for fools who defend it with circular reasoning and Swiss cheese logic. The essence of it is meant to be liberating, but in practice, it is bastardized into a bio-political instrument.
For anyone who hasn’t seen this conversation, take a minute to un-enlighten yourself:
And now behold, the rarest of all virtues, Common Sense:
1. Einstein never had this conversation, nor was he ever a man of blind faith. I turn your attention to several of his writings:
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. [...] Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." (1)
"I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism, but admire even more his contribution to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, and not two separate things."
(2)
And finally, my personal favorite of his insights, the idea that science, religion, and logic can all exist in harmony:
"A person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings and aspirations to which he clings because of their superpersonal value. It seems to me that what is important is the force of this superpersonal content, regardless of whether any attempt is made to unite this content with a Divine Being, for otherwise it would not be possible to count Buddha and Spinoza as religious personalities. Accordingly a religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation. In this sense religion is the ageold endeavor of mankind to become clearly and completely conscious of these values and goals and constantly to strengthen and extend their effect. If one conceives of religion and science according to these definitions then a conflict between them appears impossible. For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be." (3)
Is it even plausible that a man of Einstein’s intellectual caliber would have used such pathetic rationale to prove anything, let alone a mindbogglingly enigmatic world paradigm? This is the man who, through a series of thought experiments, created the foundation for relativity, who viciously debated Bohr for years to dispute the validity of quantum theory because he thought it lacked logical tightness, and who considered his greatest life blunder to be a constant he invented to justify an ignorant perception of the universe.
I find it rather amusing that whoever wrote this attached the name Einstein in order to rile up a bunch of idiots who immediately placed it under the light of brilliance. But then again, that’s how religion works doesn’t it? You tell a bunch of people something was written or said by someone with divine or majestic authority and suddenly it’s perceived under a blaze of epiphany. Like Voltaire said, works are often worshipped because so few people have read or thought about them.
Why is religion so violently allergic to logic? I imagine it has something to do with the ostracizing of anyone who questions its supra-rational foundation. Think back to Dante’s Inferno; what was in the first circle of Hell? Not heretics, but Aristotle, Lucan, Virgil, Plato, Socrates and a few other notables.
2. It’s not just the student’s argument that’s flawed, so is the professors. If the concept of divinity were to exist, it would not be within the confines of a single metaphysical plane.
To call something evil or even good is to restrain it to a single perception, that which sees it as such. To air moral prejudices is simply to state your opinion on a matter. The essence of morality is meant to be a foundation for one to serve mankind in a positive manner; not to establish a system of reward and punishment for a list of actions you may or may not do.
Imagine hypothetically that god did exist, would a force of infinite transgression and transcendence see a person dying from cancer as evil? It would be like us saying a spider was evil for eating a bug instead of trying to be vegetarian; but an infinite times more trivial assuming God was indeed transcendent to an infinite degree. The world simply functions; to say God is Good is a rationalization people use to medicate their fear of the abyss.
3. The student’s argument is flawed on multiple levels. The cold, darkness, and thought arguments are almost respectable because of the their intent.
He was trying to prove that they do not exist per say, they are only abstract concepts used to describe the relative lack of energy or light. But unlike God, both darkness and cold are very much measurable, and they do exist in terms of what they stand for — the relative presence of something else. Cold = no heat, but it does not exist in absolute. But nor do we refer to it in absolute, we just don’t think about the subjectivity of the concept for ease of use. Let me quickly elaborate:
How would you precisely measure the end of a stick? Theoretically by measuring where the last atom of that stick ends, right? But where does the last atom end? The cloud of it’s outer most electron? According to wave function theory, an electron can theoretically be anywhere in the universe away from its atom. Hence even something like length is subjective. But do we actually debate this every time? If you went to measure the dimensions of your room, would you have to clarify to the guy at home depot: "Well technically length is subjective, this was just my imprecise measurement?" No, you must somewhat rely on faith to substitute for absolute objectivity, but that faith has a sense of reasonableness and logical congruence to it.
We see this again in the brain argument. The existence of God has never been put on a vivisection table like a brain has, nor has a CT scan ever displayed the implications of an all-powerful being. But even if you circumvented this and still argued over the subjectivity of that claim based on empirical reasoning, there’s a catch. Tell a scientist "Well, we have no proof of this." What does he do? He attempts to give you proof. Tell a religious person "there’s no proof of this." What does he do? He tells you "it’s a test" or "you just need to have faith." It’s a childish logos and for fuck’s sake, this is the 21st century, have we not made any progress in the last few thousand years?
Which leads me to my ultimate conclusion.
Where science strives to prove itself, religion (the way it is practiced by most people) tries to circumvent the need to prove itself. Religion is meant to beg for enlightenment, but religious preachers beg for ignorance. Point out to a scientist that his work is flawed, and he goes back to the drawing board to perfect it. Point out to a theologian that his work is flawed, and he claims it cannot be because it presupposes perfection. A criticism of religion is considered flawed simply because it is a criticism of religion, it begs the question of true knowledge.
Both religion and science are only the pursuit of truth, but in terms of death and supernature, it is impossible for either to make any progress. It is a limit we can only embrace, not break. The void hungers for souls and neither reason nor religion will satiate it.
Sources:
(1) Albert Einstein, "Religion and Science," New York Times Magazine, 1930.
(2) Albert Einstein, "Interview with G.S. Viereck", 1930.
(3) Albert Einstein, "Symposium on Science, Philosophy and Religion", 1940.
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The whole issue (of the existence of God) is at the end of the day just a question of fact: does God exist, or doesn't he? It's very much like the question "do we have free will?"
But of course politics and other things enter into it later. How could it not, given that the Church claims to have authority from God, and then things like Betrayal happen. Or when feminists or the poor classes correctly read religion as partly a tool for subjugation. Or when anti-abortionists use theistic arguments to defend their theses. Or when we very clearly know that the higher one's level of educational attainment, the more irreligious one becomes, and the more religious one is the more likely he is to reject scientific facts, not fringe facts but universally accepted ones, like evolution.
And so the two communities separate quite distinctly when it should just be a question of fact.
But I've been into atheism and against religion my whole life, too much to encapsulate here!
If there is a "good" kind of religion, that aims at overcoming selfishness, that has values and goals and oughts, then these ought to be liberated from religion if we are to be able to back them up rationally. Otherwise their morality is built on shaky ground, much like saying that promiscuous sex is bad cos it gives you STDs, and then the condom is invented and your whole morality is circumvented.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts here.
I think a major problem with criticizing religion is that there is so much bad religion, and it can be easy to ignore the good.
I personally believe there is one true religion. It has millenia of philosophical AND scientific study and encourages both.
If you look more carefully at Dante's Inferno, the first circle of hell was not a painful one. (It is not church doctrine either) It was a place for the unbaptized but noble pagans...so Dante was giving a place of respect to those philosophers, not saying they were naughty people for not believing in God (how could they? They preceded Christ!).
Happy to continue the conversation. :)
And what religion would that be?
Good points about Dante's Inferno. I shouldn't have used the book to try and make the point that I was making.
I am Roman Catholic.
And yes, I am very aware of the Galileo affair, but I would like to also point out that while it is an embarrassing stain on the Church's long history of scientific support and leadership (going back to at least Albertus Magnus and continuing today with the Vatican observatory), there is more nuance in the story than is generally addressed in popular articles. Church figures were quite supportive of theories of heliocentricity before Galileo.
I'd also like to comment that I agree with many of your points above, the Einstein story is silly, it is cheap "red meat" that is probably forwarded by well meaning grandmothers to their friends and children. No theologian takes that argument seriously.
Most Americans have not been well educated-many don't understand basic economics, basic statistics, grammar, logic, etc. Is it any surprise that many can't argue their religion effectively? But their inability to debate effectively does not make it untrue (or true).
You mention "If the concept of divinity were to exist, it would not be within the confines of a single metaphysical plane".
I agree. The difficulty then is, are we able to measure such a being using the tools we have available? Can a cockroach assess and measure a man?
Since the answer is obviously no, we can come to one of two conclusions: one, be agnostic and accept it is impossible to know; two, to continue the search exhaustively.
That search begins for the non believer with philosophical truths that may not be able to be empirically proven, but can be understood nevertheless. Your mention of the ancient Greek philosophers leads me to believe you have a high view of philosophy.
It is with this starting point-not science-that you'll find more difficult to answer questions.
Faith and reason go hand in glove. With respect to my fundamentalist brothers and sisters, their approach to "Bible only" religion has resulted in the anti intellectualism too common in the US.
That "conversation" you linked is hilarious.
Ok. Case closed. He MUST be right now.
Anyway, some good points in this write-up.
Although I feel like a religious truth and a scientific truth aren't the same thing. "Proof" isn't really a religious concept and thus asking a religious person to "proof his faith" means applying an irrelevant concept to his religious truths.
(Btw, keep up these longer writings. I'll give you a resteem again.)
I don't agree. We can't have different meanings of the same concept "truth" depending on the context. Truth is, will and should be universal.
Yeah it's like Nietzsche said, religion dag its own grave when it started talking about objective truth. That was the beginning of the end. Basically everything the Catholic Church did (they approached the issue of the existence of God very rationally). There's some wisdom (or sneakiness?) in the (opposite) approach of the Eastern Orthodox Church, that preferred to make their theology apophatic ("we can't talk about God").
Oh I like that idea of a apophatic theology. Never heard of it. I feel like that is indeed the proper way of a religion to act.
On the other hand, the objective approach of the Catholic Church in some way opened up the door for the Enlightment to creep in.
And a quick fistbump for a fellow Nietzsche-n!
:P
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Some similarity seems to be present here:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
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