Atheist Professor vs. Student - A (not so) Brilliant Conversation

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:

A Brilliant Conversation

Source

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.