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| Albert Einstein was not on either side. Let's stop trying to make it seem like he was. |
“It was, of course,
a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being
systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never
denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be
called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the
world so far as our science can reveal it.”
- Albert Einstein, letter to an atheist (1954), quoted in ‘Albert Einstein: The Human Side’, edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffman
- Albert Einstein, letter to an atheist (1954), quoted in ‘Albert Einstein: The Human Side’, edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffman
“The biggest
problem with the internet is that anyone can attribute any quote to anybody.”
- Han Solo
You may
well have seen this copypasta cropping up on your various social media
sites over the last couple days or weeks. I would paste it in here but the
thing’s massive, so instead just hit the link if you want to see what I’m
referring to.
To give
you the short of it, it’s a copy/pasted dialogue between ‘THE NASTY ATHEIST
PROFESSOR’ and ‘THE HEROIC RELIGIOUS STUDENT’ in which the nasty professor type
attempts to ridicule and browbeat the student for his faith in god, only for
the student to retaliate with a can of supposed logical whoop-ass that turns
the table on the professor.
Oh, and
apparently this student is Einstein.
I saw
this flare up across in the US via r/atheism a few weeks ago,
with lots of irreligious redditors voicing their criticisms of this copypasta.
Now it’s crossed the pond to appear on social media feeds here, so I figured
now would be an excellent time for me to take a good hard look at it and point
out the flaws in the history of the copypasta itself, it’s content and the
fact that Einstein’s name has been attached to it.
Much of
what I’m about to say I would not be able to argue had those lovely chaps and
chapettes over at r/atheism on Reddit not pointed it out first, to
give credit where credit is certainly due. Cheers, Reddit.
Now
then, let’s get this deconstruction started.
We start
off with a vague butchering of the Problem of Evil Argument being bandied about
by the Professor against the Student as a way to discredit god and the belief
in him. It misses out a lot of the key points of the Problem but I’d prefer to
focus on the Student’s response, so we’ll move past that to the part where the
Student starts countering the Professor’s onslaught. His first point is about
heat and cold, arguing that cold is simply the absence of heat. Okay, I can
accept that too.
But here’s
where things start to get silly.
“Student: You’re wrong again,
sir. Darkness is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal
light, bright light, flashing light. But if you have no light constantly, you
have nothing and its called darkness, isn’t it? In reality, darkness isn’t. If
it is, well you would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn’t you?”
This
view has a few key flaws in its reasoning. Whilst it is acceptable to label
darkness as the absence of light, it should be noted that there are things in
cosmology that are dark by their very nature and that there are things we consider
to be dark because we cannot perceive the wavelengths of light that do actually
illuminate them. The view itself is solid enough but does imply that the
Student has a limited grasp of astrophysics. Considering who they attribute
authorship to, this does cast a bit of doubt on the whole thing.
Moving
on:
“Student: Since no one has
ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this
process is an on-going endeavour. Are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are
you not a scientist but a preacher?”
Here we
start to fall into the territory of the evolution denier. The usual ‘can’t see
evolution so that means it’s just like god lolololol’ trash spouted by
creationists and intelligent design proponents. They fail to realise that we
have actually observed evolution. We have observed HIV evolving to adapt to
living beings across the years. We have observed viruses and diseases reacting
to medicine by evolving to resist it better. By using things like bacteria and
insects as control species scientists can indeed “observe evolution”, as they
reproduce fast enough in laboratory conditions to see it happening.
And of
course the Student cannot help but drop the “I DIDN’T EVOLVE FROM A MONKEY”
faux-pas into this rant. He’s absolutely correct, of course. We didn’t evolve
from monkeys. We evolved from an ape-descendant that we also share with other
animals, such as monkeys. Please actually understand what you are criticising
before you criticise it.
“Student: Is there anyone here
who has ever heard the Professor’s brain, felt it, touched or smelt it? No one
appears to have done so. So, according to the established Rules of Empirical,
Stable, Demonstrable Protocol, Science says that you have no brain, sir. With
all due respect, sir, how do we then trust your lectures, sir?”
Absolute
nonsense. Through scientific methods such as MRI scans we have indeed observed
the brain. Scientists have mapped out causal links between brain activity and
all functions of the body; observation of a sort. Finally, if we really felt
the need to we could also cut open the Professor’s head and observe the brain.
Hell, isn’t that what brain surgeons do? The brain is a thing; through evidence
and reason we know it to be there. Have I seen one? Admittedly, no. Has the
Professor? Given his focus on Philosophy, probably not. However, belief in the
brain is not a matter of faith, as the Student seems to be implying; we have
evidence and reason to consider it a real thing. A philosophy student might claim
that all this evidence could be false and based on flawed evidence, but I think
that a swing from Ockham’s Razor puts this to bed. What is more believable,
after all? That through evidence we know the brain is there, or that because
this evidence could (very, very) potentially be false we can never truly know
it is there?
That is
the jist of this version of the copypasta. The Student drops the conclusion
that “the link between man & GOD is FAITH. That is all that keeps things
alive and moving”. And then the final bombshell drops in the last line:
“By the way, that
student was EINSTEIN.”
Here is
my main issue with this copypasta, the reason why I’m devoting a blog post to
criticising it. There are thousands of these things floating about the
internet. Hell, there are multiple versions of this one; you can see older
versions of the dialogue between the Student and the Professor that date back
to 2007, interestingly without Einstein’s name forcibly affixed to the bottom.[1]
It is the religious apologist equivalent of an urban myth popularised by the
internet; this exchange likely never happened.
This
fact ties nicely into my next point.
Which is
that Einstein never said this. The copypasta you have just read is a huge
misrepresentation of him aside from being logically flawed.
Albert
Einstein was undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century,
arguably one of the greatest minds our species has ever produced. His theory of
general relativity was a work of unparalleled genius that continues to define
the field of physics to this day, holding up and remaining solid in the face of
rigorous testing. Einstein himself is hailed as a genius, and rightly so; his
name has entered into popular language as a stand-in for genius in many places
(“what are you, some kind of Einstein?”).
Is it
any wonder that many factions and ideologies want to claim him as their own?
That is
what this copypasta seeks to do; tie Einstein firmly to the theist camp. Yet
this is a gross misrepresentation and an insult to what the man actually
believed. He was a man who decried the belief in the personal god theists so
ardently cling to.[2] This
he perceived as “child-like”. He was not even Christian; his mother and father
were non-practising Jews.[3]
It is important to note, however, that Einstein was not an atheist either. Indeed,
he was quite critical of atheists and atheism at times, calling out our “crusading
spirit” and stating that he preferred an attitude of humility.[4]
I guess you could call him an agnostic, or perhaps a pan-theist at a stretch.
This is
the point I am trying to make in all this. Would I have liked it if Einstein
identified himself as an atheist? Certainly I would; it’s always nice to know
that great minds of the past thought similarly to you. But that does not mean I
am going to deliberately misquote him, deliberately falsify his views in order
to try and deceive people into thinking that he is of a similar mindset to me. To
do so is to simultaneously insult the memory of a truly gifted scientist.
It also
implies that I secretly worry that my views lack validity and plausibility;
after all if I was confident in them why would I feel the need to lie in order
to make them superficially appear stronger?
So when
it comes to the debate on the validity of religion, ladies and gentlemen on
both sides of the court, let’s just leave Einstein out of it shall we? He was a
scientist first and foremost. He did not believe as either side does. Why is
that?
Simply
because he did not really have time for religion; he was too busy being one of
the greatest scientists who ever lived.
Let’s
stop insulting such a man’s memory, shall we?
