Longer Title, Still no Origins.

I will begin with a summary statement, leaving the specific and direct rebuttals for the end, so that one need not read the entire post to understand my point.

We live in an age where the advancement of material knowledge via scientific discoveries has begun to encroach on the spiritual life of mankind. Where once religion offered essence and principle, today people only see outward forms and literal interpretations. Devoid of all higher meaning, scriptural text becomes nothing more than traditional assuagement by means of rote. Perhaps this is enough for the lay person of faith, or for a plurality of people contented by the fact that true knowledge is beyond their intellectual capability to grasp it, and so belief will overcome doubt and all is good. Similarly, and with equal certitude, those scientifically inclined among us will gravitate heavily toward the physics, math, biology, and empirical method they understand to try and explain the same fundamental questions. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Yet they have fallen into the same ignorant paradigm which transforms their task into that Sysiphus, forever destined to push that stone up the hill. Life's great mystery will not be found at the bottom of a test tube! Instead of concerning themselves with what is attainable by modern scientific means (and modern is the emphasis here since traditional science [although long since lost to us] offered much of the sacred knowledge we ascribe to religion) such as the drag coefficient or Planck's constant, scientific minds posit forth a theory that ultimately will redeem mankind through their hard labors. Finding no higher meaning in the lab, they disavow the "folk ignorance" of the layman and replace "God" with "Physics" and sleep well at night. Are the fundamental questions answered by such supplanting? I posit that they are not, but it is easier to accept what you do know as the only Reality, than to methodically search for outward answers to inner questions and watch the stone roll back down the hill.

This is perhaps why those of Judeo-Christian heritage have flocked in droves to "New Age" concepts as well as Eastern philosophies. The answers they seek stare them in the face, yet they have lost sight of this forest by focusing on the trees, and have thus moved on to another forest in a land unknown to them. Where Moses and Jesus lack answers, surely Lao Tse and Buddha will pick up the slack! If not them, perhaps Darwin, or Hubbard, or Hawking, or Sagan. The outward search continues to the detriment of the inward development.

To see a vast and complex universe before your eyes and try to search for our place in it, this is the human task. If we are but molecular accidents floating on a spec of galactic dust, or we are created in an image of a Divine source, the final answer lies within. How one gets there, that is the journey of life. How silly and ignorant it is to proclaim ownership of total truth to oneself and deny it to others. This is the infantile diametric which now surrounds our argument, that one side is correct and the other is wholly ignorant, and here are the "facts" to prove it! My original post suggested that this "versus" scenario is the most ignorant of all, and belies no understanding of higher principles. I leave the rest to the judgment of our dear readers.


And now on to the Specific Rebuttals to Harrow's diatribes:

"[W]hat he (unfairly) describes as a deficit in Darwin's theory - which is to describe the origin of life from nonlife in purely scientific/mathematical terms." - Jason

The only scientific/mathematical proof for the above which could possibly be inferred is the concept of zero. As in, absolutely zero evidence or corroborating theory as to "the origin of life from non-life." A deficit indeed. One would readily admonish the work of Copernicus if he were to title his works On the Origin of the Solar System, and then arrogantly proceed to provide absolutely no theories on the actual origin of the solar system. Sound familiar to you, dearly evolved by Natural Selection? So the defense offered here to Darwin is that I misquoted his title (which is a poor assault on reason, as I only shortened the title to the commonly known and referred to title, as evidenced by the very link Jason provided. Notice both image of the cover of the book, and the title of the actual article. I guess the authors of that site were just wrong...,) and also that if the title is indeed what I said it was, it's definitely not what Darwin must have meant. Speciation, you see. Truly grasping at air here.

My reference to the work of Kaufman was to underscore that there is vast subtlety to the field of scientific inquiry as the answer to fundamentally spiritual questions. His work is titled At Home in the Universe, which is an apt summary for his own personal search for spirituality among the science he has committed his life to. Here I will quote a few passages from his work which will underscore my point:

"How Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection devastated all of this [worldly hierarchy based on the scriptural 'God']! ...[W]e have trouble with the implications, man as a result of a chain of accidental mutations, sifted by a law no more noble than survival of the fittest...[R]andom variation, selection sifting...Here lies the brooding sense of accident, of historical contingency, of design by elimination...We are just one of the fruits of this ad-hocery. Were the tape played over, we like to say, the forms of organisms would surely differ dramatically. We humans...need never have occurred. So much, too, for Paradise." (Ibid. pg 7)

It is clear that he sees the deficiency in the above reasoning, and refuses to accept his own mortal insignificance. Atheist or not, he shall not go gently into that good night.

"Since Darwin, we turn to a single, singular force, Natural Selection, which we might as well capitalize as though it were a new diety... I shall argue in this book that this idea is wrong [emphasis added]. [E]merging sciences of complexity begin to suggest that the order is not all accidental, that vast veins of spontaneous order lie at hand...Profound order is being discovered in large, complex, and apparently random systems. I believe that this emergent order underlies not only the origin of life itself, but much of the order seen in organisms today...If this is all true, what a revision of the Darwinian worldview will lie before us! Not we the accidental, but we the expected. [emphasis added]" (pg. 8)

Rage, dear Kaufman, rage against the dying of the light!

"Darwin's assumption, I will try to show, was almost certainly wrong...Selection cannot assemble complex systems." (pg. 152)

"Such limits begin to demand a shift in our thinking in the biological sciences and beyond...It is not only on random landscapes that selection fails. Even on smooth landscapes, in the heartland of gradualism, just where Darwin's assumptions hold, selection can again fail and fail utterly. Selection runs headlong into an "error catastrophe" where all accumulated useful traits melt away." (pg. 183)

But wait, there's more "Atheism" to come from this guy;

"[E]volution of co-evolution itself are the work of an invisible choreographer [emphasis added]. We seek the laws that constitute that choreographer. " (pg. 209)

"As if by an invisible hand, all the co-evolving species appear to alter the rugged structures of the landscapes over which they evolve such that, on average, all have the highest fitness and survive as long as possible. We are not sure how this invisible hand works." (pg. 234)

But wait, there's more!

"If science lost us our Western paradise, our place at the center of the world, children of God, with the sun cycling overhead and the birds of the air, beasts of the field, and fish of the waters placed there for our bounty, if we have been left adrift near the edge of just another humdrum galaxy, perhaps it is time to take heartened stock of our situation...If the theories of emergence we have discussed here have merit, perhaps we are at home in the universe in ways we have not known since we knew to little to know to doubt...I would rather life be expected in this unfolding since the Big Bang than that life be incredibly improbable in the timespan available. I am heartened by the posibility that organisms are not contraptions piled on contraptions all the way down, but expressions of a deeper order inherent in all life. [emphasis added, albeit superfluously] " (pg. 304)

As as if this weren't enough of a rebuttal to your absurd claims that his arguments are in your favor, he leaves me with a quote of both Einstein and the BIBLE! I love irony.

" 'The Lord is subtle, but not malicious,' said Einstein...we are unlocking some kind of secrets, to all of you making your ways by your own best efforts and best lights... In the beginning was the Word -- the Law. The rest follows, and we participate. [emphasis added again]" (pg. 304)

For being a secular humanist atheist scientist, this guy sounds an awful lot like he's searching for spiritual answers. In sum, I say again that he 'reconciles the dilemma with a degree of efficacy.' The dilemma of course not that of science vs religion (as you so foolishly assumed) but that of finding oneself outside of the "versus" paradigm and satisfying both your mind and your heart.

Of Frithjof Schuon, one of the greatest spiritual luminaries and thinkers of the 20th century, don't take my word for it. T.S. Elliot , having read Schuon's Transcendent Unity of Religions, opined that "I have met with no more impressive work in the comparative study of Oriental and Occidental religions." But perhaps T.S. hadn't yet gotten to chapter on Saurumon in Lord of the Rings, and thus lacked a basis for comparison.

If your only valuation of a person's argument depends on his credentials among 'academia', then I offer this from Huston Smith, the academic authority on the study of religions at the academic level:

"The man is a living wonder; intellectually à propos religion, equally in depth and breadth, the paragon of our time. I know of no living thinker who begins to rival him..."

Quite an endorsement, I would say.

Fin.

GUEST POST( by Harrow) From Dawin to J.R.R Tolkien

Reading the reply posted to this blog by my co-blogger was one of the more frustrating experiences I've ever had. While I appreciate the obvious time and effort he put into it, the post nonetheless didn't address any of the major points with which I responded to his initial post: am I to assume that he realizes he misfired in quoting Einstein? And what of the obvious conflicts I note in the Biblical passages I cited to?

Absent those answers from him, let me first point out a few inaccuracies and mischaracterizations, which litter the brief post as they did the initial one. Perhaps, at some point, my co-blogger will realize that it's okay to say "I made a mistake" when it comes to such things.

He said: "It seems quite odd that Darwin would title his work On the Origin of Species, yet offer absolutely no 'theory' on the actual origins of life."

It's actually not odd at all. After all, Ilya's just wrong: the book was not called On the Origin of Species, but instead was called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (see http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/Freeman_OntheOriginofSpecies.html). In other words, Darwin's book was precisely about the scientific concept of speciation - i.e. how a new species can evolve from a pre-existing one. Ilya's absurd proposition is rather like saying that it's odd that Copernicus's theory of heliocentricity offered no theory of the origin of the solar system - the theory of the motion of our planets move around relative to each other, though, is just not the same as how they got there in the first place. They're just different topics; Copernicus was able to answer one and not the other. Likewise, theories of speciation are just not about the origin of life. When he was meticulously studying specimens while traveling the globe on the Beagle, he was studying speciation. Period.

Thus, while it's true that the origin of life from non-life is an important question, the fact that Darwin himself did not address it in his masterpiece has nothing - zero, zilch, nada - to do with the debate. Still, I will return to the topic of the origin of life shortly.

Ilya ends with: "[T]here is a great scientific work which attempts to reconcile the aforementioned dilemma with a degree of efficacy. Highly recommended reading for those unconvinced by the nihilistic Darwinian perspective." The work in question? At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, by Stuart Kaufman.

Now, I almost fell off my chair when I saw that link. If Ilya's citing of Einstein to support his position previously was a slight misfire, this citation is rather like turning a bazooka on himself. For one, while Einstein is agnostic, Kaufman is an avowed atheist! See, for just one example, this video, where Kaufman says: "The secular humanists, I among them, who don't believe in God..." (http://reinventingthesacred.ning.com/video/video/show?id=1986926%3AVideo%3A33). Boy is it easy to "reconcile the dilemma" between science and God when one is an atheist!

Sadly, it gets much, much worse for Ilya's position. Kaufman himself has dedicated his life to scientific research into the origin of life, despite Ilya's claim that "Here [i.e. in wondering about the origin of life itself] all 'scientific' camps (including Darwinian and ID) are grasping at things far beyond their reach." But wait! Here's a quote from Kaufman himself from the VERY WORK THAT ILYA CITES (it's on page 47, for those interested): "I hope to persuade you that life is a natural property of complex systems, that when a number of different kinds of molecules in a chemical soup passes a certain threshold, a self-sustaining network of reactions...will appear."

So, what am I missing? Here Kaufman, a self-described atheist-scientist, tries to do precisely what Ilya admonishes scientists not to do - indeed, what he (unfairly) describes as a deficit in Darwin's theory - which is to describe the origin of life from nonlife in purely scientific/mathematical terms. If Ilya can't admit that page 47 of that book doesn't pose a direct, head-on conflict to the Jewish/Christian/Muslim theory that an omnipotent and benevolent Deity created life where none previously existed, I just don't know what does. I give up. Really. The two accounts - Genesis 1 and Kaufman 48 - are just exact opposites.

But then, as if Kaufman himself wanted to personally settle this very debate in my favor, he says (at 2:48 of the aforementioned video): "Is it more extraordinary to imagine that God created it all...or is it more awesome to say that everything around us from the solar system to the galaxies to life to the intricacies of the cell... - that all of this has come into existence without a Creator, but as the natural evolution of this universe? I think the latter is more astonishing, and I find myself wanting so say 'that's God enough for me.'" In other words, you know how Ilya was just mocking those who would say "All Hail Lord Darwin!?" Um, so, this is awkward, but: Kaufman himself just literally did that. Literally. Kaufman just claimed, on video, in explicit terms, that Darwin's theory underlies Kaufman's own form of "religion." That the remarkable fact of evolution IS his religion. All Hail Lord Darwin indeed - and this guy was supposed to support Ilya's position! Maybe if Elie Wiesel went ahead and cited to Joseph Goebbels for some sort of moral authority about tolerance would there have been a more inapt citation than Ilya's presenting Kaufman as someone who transcends the science vs. religion debate. Maybe. It'd be close, though.

In closing - because Kaufman went ahead and made all of my points for me, so I don't have much left - I do want to clarify why Ilya may have gone so horribly wrong; it's a confusion of what one might call the "necessary" claim with the "actuality" claim. The necessary claim is a weak one, and a rather uninteresting one in my view: namely, does modern science - and specifically the neo-Darwinian claim that evolution is essentially undirected - necessarily conflict with every single thing that anyone might give the name "religion"? That answer is an easy and emphatic no: the quasi-religious beliefs of Einstein, Kaufman, Daniel Dennett, and many others - where they essentially see a kind of spirituality or Kantian "sublime" beauty in the very fact that life and consciousness arose, undirected, from nothingness fit that bill. But we need to recognize this for what it is: it's not a melding of science with Christianity or Judaism in some new way; rather, it means abandoning belief in any semblance of a creator or personal God and letting science dictate one's deep understanding of the universe. And that's fine, if you're into that thing. But, as Ilya noted, about 99.99999% of religious people want to keep their Biblical/Koranic God and not start Hailing Lord Darwin with Mr. Kaufman.

But let's not confuse this weak claim (as Ilya so clearly has) with the "actuality" claim: namely, given the specific claims made by the major religious and the actual beliefs held by the vast, vast majority of religious believers, does Darwin's dangerous idea pose a direct conflict to the truth of these beliefs? The answer, as I've tried to show - and as Kaufman and Einstein recognize - is quite simply yes. They collide head-on. That's why from the very day of publication, religious leaders have been railing against evolution by natural selection, and coming up with stopgaps like creation science and ID theory to try and shore up their views. They knew the trains are running into a head-on collision. I know the deal. I'm not sure why Ilya doesn't.

N.B. In addition to Kaufman and Einstein, Ilya cites ones additional authority for his view that there really is no dilemma between religion and science, a "philosopher" (who, incidentally, "never formally entered into the field of academia," so his views were never required to be scrutinized or clarified) named Frithjof Schuon. I would respond to his use of him and his work, except that it's not clear what Mr. Schuon actually believed or what anything he said actually meant. His metaphysical beliefs are summarized as follows on Wikipedia; anyone who can unpack them is smarter than I am:

"Said differently, being the Absolute, Beyond-Being is also the Sovereign Good (Agathon), that by its nature desires to communicate itself through the projection of Maya. The whole manifestation from the first Being (Ishvara) to matter (Prakriti), the lower degree of reality, is indeed the projection of the Supreme Principle (Brahman). The personal God, considered as the creative cause of the world, is only relatively Absolute, a first determination of Beyond-Being, at the summit of Maya. The Supreme Principle is not only Beyond-Being. It is also the Supreme Self (Atman) and in its innermost essence, the Intellect (buddhi) that is the ray of Consciousness shining down, the axial refraction of Atma within Maya."

Let's agree to ignore old Frithjof, shall we? His beliefs sound more like those of Sarumon from "Lord of the Rings" than a philosopher's to me.

When The Origin of Species offers no Origins

*Warning – Those not particularly interested in the current debate of ‘science-v-religion’ should cease reading under punishment of severe boredom. Ye Be Warned, arrh! =)

In no way was my criticism of Ben Stein’s approach a defense of one scientific theory over another. Neither was it an attempt to make peace among disparate warring factions by proclaiming that science and religions are somehow incongruent and should peaceably stay among their own flock. I simply observed that science has started to reach beyond the measure of its ability into realms best suited for the study of esoteric and metaphysical doctrines. I’ll try to clarify this point further:

Science has become the new Catholic Church as epitomized during the Dark Ages. It has merely supplanted a faith in a Divine with a faith in Darwinian Natural Selection, deifying the latter to the point of absolute orthodoxy. Where there were formerly Cardinals, Bishops and Priests who announced that their truth was the only way to salvation, today we are met with Biologists, Geneticists, Scientists et., al., claiming not only the rights of knowledge of their respective fields, but arrogantly laying claim that theirs is the ONLY knowledge accessible to humanity. Where there was once a faith is Mystery, there is now a faith in Future Science which will explain everything. If empiricism cannot prove all absolutes, it is only due to the relative infancy of the scientific fields, not the nature of the limits of scientific knowledge. All Hail Lord Darwin! Perhaps evolutionary theories can explain how species actually originated? From whence did life spring forth out of nothing? Unfortunately, proponents of intelligent design fall under the same orthodoxy as their Darwinian brethren. They do not know the limitations of their own field. Perhaps they should retreat from the confines of their lab and read some Frithjof Schoun once in a while:

“Modern science... plunges dizzily downwards, its speed increasing in geometrical progression towards an abyss to which it hurtles like a vehicle without breaks. This criticism of modern science is made not on the grounds that is studies some fragmentary field within the limits of its competence, but on the grounds that it claims to be in a position to attain to total knowledge, and that it ventures conclusions in fields accessible only to a supra-sensible and truly intellective wisdom, the existence of which it refuses on principle to admit.

By refusing to admit any possibility of serious knowledge outside its own domain, modern science...claims exclusive and total knowledge, while making itself out to be empirical and non-dogmatic, and this, it must be insisted, involves a flagrant contradiction.”

Your invocation of Obama is quite telling, as you resort to similar character analysis of all religious people, claiming that they “cling” to their stubborn beliefs despite all empirical evidence to the contrary. It is one thing to rail against Intelligent Design as a plausible scientific pursuit (as you laboriously do in your thesis), but it is in no way a refutation of the fundamental criticism of Darwinian or neo-Darwinian thought. It seems quite odd that Darwin would title his work On the Origin of Species, yet offer absolutely no ‘theory’ on the actual origins of life. Dealing with biological/genetic transitions among already living organisms is wholly different than offering scientific explanations on the origins of life. Here all ‘scientific’ camps (including Darwinian and ID) are grasping at things far beyond their reach.

The failure also lies at the feet of those religious leaders who have lost all deeper understanding of their religious tenants (unfortunately they are currently a majority,) and now must square their beliefs against the mounting scientific evidence which on the surface seems contradictory. Here again, Schuon illuminates the problem :

One of the effects of modern science has been to give religion a mortal wound, by posing in concrete terms problems which only esoterism can resolve; but these problems remain unresolved because esoterism is not listened to, and is listened to less now than ever. Faced by these new problems, [ i.e. literal interpretations of Biblical texts vs. scientific empirical evidence] religion is disarmed, and it borrows clumsily and gropingly from the arguments of its enemy [i.e. the emergence of Creationism as a pseudo-science]; it is thus compelled to falsify by imperceptible degrees its own perspective, and more and more to disavow itself.

This was the core of my admonition to scientists and fundamentalists to go study metaphysics when searching for answers to supra-scientific questions. This is not a call to “kumbaya,” but the separation of intellectual wheat from the chaff.

I’ll leave you with a final nugget:

To exist is no small matter; the proof is that no man can extract from nothingness a single speck of dust; similarly, consciousness is not nothing; we cannot bestow the least spark of it on an inanimate object. The hiatus between nothingness and the least of objects is absolute, and in the last analysis this absoluteness is that of God.”

P.S.

If any readers are interested, there is a great scientific work which attempts to reconcile the aforementioned dilemma with a degree of efficacy. Highly recommended reading for those unconvinced by the nihilistic Darwinian perspective. Check it out here.

Guest Post (by Harrow):The Top 4 Things Wrong With (Ilya's) Blog Post Number 1

While I applaud the launch of this blog, it’s a shame that it had to begin with a post so laden with inaccuracies and bits of “conventional” wisdom that’s just plain bunk. It may take a book length treatise to disabuse you, dear reader, of all of the inaccuracies in that brief blog post (coincidentally, if it really does take something that long, feel free to check out my senior thesis.)

In the interest of time, let me just mention the top 4 most egregious errors/bits of baloney:

1. “Science purports to explore the nature of the physical universe, with all of its encompassing laws and processes. Religion claims to explore the metaphysical universe, by definition a section of human knowledge unknowable by scientific means.”

This sounds good, and frankly most people – who don’t give this statement more than a moment’s thought – do hold this view, which states that, as the biologist Stephen Jay Gould said, religion and science occupy “nonoverlapping magisteria.” But this is just an empirically false claim. Among the scientific (i.e. non-“metaphysical”) claims made in the Christian Bible are:

The relationship between man and the animal kingdom. Compare Genesis Chaps. 1 and 2 with Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The age of Earth. Compare the approx. 6,000 years of the Bible with the 4.6 billion years based on multiple scientific techniques.

The occurrence of a world-wide flood. Compare the story of Noah’s Ark to the geological record indicating such an event didn’t happen.

The relationship between the Earth and the Sun. Compare Joshua 10:12 (where Joshua asks the sun to stop revolving around the Earth) with the modern knowledge that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

The list goes on. The point is that there are scientific claims in the Bible, the most important being the creation of the Earth and the existence of animals and humans, which is directly in conflict with modern evolutionary theory. What the author must mean – indeed, the only thing that it can make sense for him to mean – is something like “the lessons drawn from an allegorical reading of the Bible are about morality and the nature of existence, and religious teachings are the best resources to use to help us answer those questions.” But this is a vastly different claim than the original. For one, he should admit that most religious people around the world do believe in the literal truth of their religious texts and that, when one does this, man claims directly contradict scientific knowledge. That’s just a fact. And second, some find the morality in the Bible deeply loathsome, and disagree with it vehemently. I won’t get into that here, though.

In fact, both sides of this debate need to recognize the truth of this collision course. Darwin’s powerful and elegant theory is so disconcerting to religious people – and gives rise to movements like creationism and Intelligent Design – precisely because it forces those people to realize that sometimes science and religious do clash head on. It really is either/or. Perhaps the author should vote for Obama if he would rather live in a fantasy world where differences just evaporate when people get in a room and think about how they’ve really been discussing two different things, and can’t we all just get along? Indeed, that would be nice. But it’s not our world. If the Bible and Darwin didn’t truly clash – if we could wish away the dilemma, by saying religious is about X and science is about Y – there wouldn’t really be much of a controversy, now would there?

I simply can’t stress this enough: the claim that Darwin’s theory and Genesis 1 (and the “other” Creation account in Genesis 2) “speak of different things in different languages without the aid of an obvious Rosetta stone” is just 180 degrees from the truth. They both speak of precisely how humans got here, and the relationship betweens humans and animals. And they offer vastly different answers and accounts. In the end, one of them is the right relationship, and here’s a hint: it’s not the one that Pat Robertson espouses.

2. “Dogmatic religious fundamentalists should not burden themselves with a scientific defense of supra-scientific matters of ‘God.’”

This is a normative statement about theology disguised as an innocent-sounding plea to just get along. Here’s the situation: the Bible says something; let’s take the claims that there was a world-wide flood, wiping out all of humanity and much of the animal kingdom save a select few. The author would like to tell those religious believers not to worry about whether there’s any evidence for such a flood, he thinks they should just listen to the Book or ignore it. But there are two options: either the flood happened or it didn’t. Some people are actually interested in looking at the Earth and seeing if we can answer the question, but Ilya doesn’t want to be bothered with that. But why not? Why is that claim – a massive flood wiped out much of the planet – outside the “domain” of either science or religion? Scientists look for evidence of long-ago climate changes all the time. They’re not allowed to look for whether such a flood actually happened?

3. “Dawkins…incredibly allows for the possibility of intelligent design as the source of life as we know it.”

Why is this incredible? Any intellectually honest scientist knows that we have never been able to create living structures from mere “stews” of organic molecules in our labs (at least, we haven’t done so yet). Perhaps the initial seed of life on Earth did come from a comet, or some alien civilization. The point of science is simply to look for evidence either way, and test and prod and improve and revise. If the evidence for that is there, great! Now we’ve increased the store of human knowledge. But that doesn’t mean that he believes at all in anything resembling the God in the Judeo-Christian Bible. Not for one second. The statement that Dawkins’ hypothetical, testable alien seed-of-life is “another man’s diety,” is downright insulting. Dawkins’ “designer” would be essentially the exact opposite of anything at all described in major religious literature.

4. “Einstein wanted to ‘know God’s thoughts, the rest are details.’ I wonder if Princeton would still grant him Tenure under today’s scientific orthodoxy.”

This is a nice little quote to drop. But a second’s research about what Einstein meant by “God’s thoughts” reveals that he was diametrically against anything resembling organized religion, and in fact fully endorsed the view of the world that science provides. The only sense in which he can be labeled religious is that he saw a kind of inherent beauty in things like symmetry and simplicity, and he simply unified those characteristics under the moniker “God.” Here are a few snippets that indicate what he really meant by “God’s thoughts” in that quote:

1929: “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

1950: “My position concerning God is that of an agnostic.”

And the doozy, from 1954: “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.” (emphasis added)

So, in fact, we can stop wondering, since that little non-sequiter at the end is inaccurate on two counts, one small, one large: for one, Princeton never granted him tenure (while in the U.S., he was a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is in Princeton, NJ but unaffiliated with Princeton U.). But second, and far more important, Einstein, does, in fact, share the views of most Ivy League science faculty today; that is, if one self-identifies as religious at all (and, clearly, Einstein self-identified as an agnostic), it is a sense of “religious” so far removed from any semblance of organized religion as to be unrecognizable.

In sum: “kumbaya, let’s all just get along, you take your Darwin, I take my Jesus” sounds nice. But there really is a clash between the two, and a choice to be made: it’s not at all “as if one were comparing the physical density of metal to the compassion one may have for stray animals.” Rather, it’s much more as if one were comparing two Presidential candidates: they both want the same job, and only one can win. I hope the author realizes someday that he will need to get in the voting booth and make a choice.

Ben Stein's "Expelled'' Documentary

Almost everyone willing to go see Ben Stein’s new documentary Expelled is going to drink from a poisoned well. After all, the nature of the debate is not a singular discussion of evolutionary theory versus intelligent design theory (the film itself presents little evidence in the support or contradiction of either,) it is framed under the broader umbrella of “Science versus Religion.” It is the “versus” which is wrong.

Science purports to explore the nature of the physical universe, with all of its encompassing laws and processes. Religion claims to explore the metaphysical universe, by definition a section of human knowledge unknowable by scientific means. The closest area of academic discourse where the two intersect is perhaps the study of Philosophy, which can never be confused with the physical sciences. Ben Stein falls into a familiar intellectual conundrum of setting up a discourse in which the two distinctly separate areas of human knowledge are part of a balanced equation which must cancel each other out. It is as if one were comparing the physical density of metal to the compassion one may have for stray animals. They are not mutually exclusive nor should they be. They speak of different things in different languages without the aid of an obvious Rosetta stone.

Dogmatic scientists should channel their venomous intellectual disdain into the study of metaphysics, while dogmatic religious fundamentalists should not burden themselves with a scientific defense of supra-scientific matters of ‘God.’ Otherwise we shall all endure nothing more than petty, infantile mud slinging by those most ignorant of a ‘bigger picture.’

There is one extraordinary occurrence in the film which needs further exploration. Richard Dawkins, leading author and intellectual vanguard of the atheist / evolutionary movement, incredibly allows for the possibility of intelligent design as the source of life as we know it. Except that for him, if there is such a possibility, it is by Aliens from outer space. Just goes to show that one person’s Deity is another person’s Xenu.

Albert Einstein quite readily reconciled himself to the notion of a God quite integrated into physical science, and after a lifetime of the highest intellectual and scientific inquiry, concluded that he simply wanted to “know God’s thoughts, the rest are details.” I wonder if Princeton would still grant him Tenure under today’s scientific orthodoxy.