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Einstein’s letter is small comfort to Dawkins
Those who believe science has all the answers are as ‘childish’ as the religious, says Guy Dammann
Richard Dawkins must have chuckled on reading that Albert Einstein viewed religious belief as 'childish superstition'. Einstein pulled very few punches in a newly unearthed letter to be auctioned in London this week. "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of... primitive legends."
The fact is, though, that Einstein disliked those he thought lacked humility in their conception of scientific explanation, and thus would probably have disliked Dawkins. In truth, the debate over whether or not God exists is simply beyond the reach of any scientific theory.
"Human weakness", in Einstein's phrase, refers to our species' propensity to seek an explanation when our conception of the world fails to live up to our experience. We are weak, in other words, primarily in the sense that animals are strong: we fail, unlike fish, birds and mosquitoes, to take the world on trust.
In that sense, the practice of science - in which something is true if it's the best explanation on offer, and which is driven forward by the failure of existing explanations to match experience - is no less an expression of human weakness than belief in God.
So we need to ask ourselves why we keep asking science to answer our most urgent questions. Before long, philosophy, art, even free will and consciousness - none of which play a role in causal explanations of the universe - will be deemed irrelevant by a culture that increasingly credits science with the exclusive power to account for its institutions. Ironically, it will be precisely at such a moment that we shall have most need of Einstein's "childish superstitions" to remind us that our being here has any value at all.
Science should be left to explain the natural world. No one has asked it to explain away the human one. ·
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Actually, this article nails the issue rather well, and it's certainly far from being religious propaganda, just a gentle warning that science can't answer all our questions. And when Bill Knott cites Popper, does he not realise that Dammann is making the same point. Where Popper differs is in saying that scientific claims are necessarily falsifiable in a way that, say, religious and certain other kinds of claim are not.
Even by the usual standards of religious propaganda, this is a stunningly vacuous and fatuous article. To claim that science maintains that "something is true if it's the best explanation on offer" is just wilfully ignorant: at least acknowledge the ideas of Karl Popper or a thousand others, even if you don't agree with them. Science, apparently, should be left to explain the natural world... of which humans are clearly not a part. What arrant nonsense.
The writer also seems to believe that there is some sort of inexorably pro-science movement which is shaping the way we think about the world, at the expense of good ol' superstition.
If only.
No one thinks science 'has all the answers', science is about looking for explanations and settling on the most likely until a better one comes along. Religion is superstitious belief that all the answers were revealed thousands of years ago to simple uneducated people by a supreme being who created the universe. Likely? The reason Dawkins is attacked by the credulous is because he disects their spurious claims remorselessly and they have no answers to his argument. So, as with this lightweight article, he is attacked in a variety of ways unconnected to his precise reasoning. If Guy Damann needs to be reassured that his 'being here has any value' he should go speak to a religionista, whose logic is always less rigorous.
Einstein's letter? Fascinating. This article, on the other hand, lacks all merit. I don't need superstition and institutionalised fairy tales to recognise the value in art, love and all the other things that make life so fascinating and rich. Science enriches our understanding of ourselves and our universe, whereas dull sentiments like those in the article benefit nobody.