"Childish Superstition"

I guess it's predictable that I would have something to say about the Drudgebart.tv.com-linked story about Einstein dismissing religion as "childish superstition."

I don't think anyone should be surprised, assuming the story is true. Einstein was a leftist who had a childish superstition of his own: that the world could be a man-created utopia ruled by a single central government. And many of his fellow physicists, scientists, and mathematicians shared his superstition.

As I have noted many times before, mathematically inclined people tend to be a lot like idiot-savants. All the brains are packed into one side of their heads, leaving little grey matter to deal with things like humanity and human relationships. They typically have very childlike ideas about human nature. They often lack the capacity for empathy, which explains a lot of the misery inflicted on us by people who write code. They often have gigantic egos. They are among the last people we should turn to for advice regarding subjects like love, ethics, or religion.

Some people swing both ways, but they are rare. It's not uncommon at all to see people who score 800 on the math SAT and around 500 on the verbal side. In fact, unless things have changed since I was a kid, the vast majority of the really high scores are mathematical, period.

Aside from his basic nature, consider Einstein's qualifications. From a fairly early age, he was a pampered, prized, tenured academic. Why anyone would expect a person like that to know anything about life is beyond me. Think of the academics you've known. How would you like to live in a world where their kind ruled? It would be like Cambodia under Pol Pot. Academia attracts the petty, the cruel, and the naive. As professors and instructors, they're harmless and amusing. As rulers? Horrifying. The end result is piles of bloated bodies decaying in the sun.

I do not suggest that Einstein was cruel or petty. But naive? Absolutely. Before you give me someone like Albert Einstein to tell me how to live, give me a pastor or rabbi or priest chosen at random, any day. Someone who has married and raised children and lived with adversity, without giving up his or her faith. Someone familiar with other people's suffering. Not an academic who has never known anything but a big, warm, permanently attached university nipple. A nipple which tends to flow more freely--more liberally, if you will--when the beneficiary attacks God.

I have never understood why academics get tenure. Presidents don't. Engineers don't. What's so special about academics? We give them so much security, it warps their minds. They forget what life is like for the rest of us. No wonder they make up such a huge portion of Democrat delegates. Social engineering is all theory to them. They can't understand what it's like when people are forced to become their gamepieces and endure the consequences of their inept theorizing. It's only natural that socialism and purges and so on make sense to people like that.

The Apostle Paul (a reformed academic) supported himself as a tentmaker while traveling the ancient world on foot, to spread the Gospel. He was flogged repeatedly; the skin and flesh were ripped from his back. He was stoned. He was shipwrecked. Finally, he was murdered. Corrie ten Boom survived on offerings as she traveled the world telling the world that she loved God, in spite of the fact that the Germans killed most of her family for saving Jews. I respect their humbly expressed opinions more than the pompous, sterile, conformist musings of a professor speaking down from the invulnerability of an ivory tower.

To put it in terms Einstein would have understood, to enter the heart of a brilliant, feted, Nobel-prize-winning scientist, a particle of faith has to make it into a very high-walled potential well constructed of ego. The odds are on a par with those of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. To steal an analogy from a source I respect a great deal. To stretch the analogy even further, in quantum mechanics, the seemingly impossible becomes possible. And with God all things are possible. However it looks like Einstein did not benefit from that iota--that quantum--of hope.

To me, the odd thing about all this is that Einstein himself laid the groundwork for experiments that seem to demonstrate that observation and belief alter the material world. In other words, his work seems to support the notion that faith has power. I don't remember enough about it to write about it with any degree of competence, unfortunately.

When I see intellectual theories put forward to deny the existence of God, I always think of what Archie Bunker said to Michael "Meathead" Stivic, when Stivic said he had renounced his baptism. "Renounce your belly button! You still got it!" It's pointless to raise arguments in a cerebral vacuum, to convince people of the nonexistence of things they have personally witnessed. Give me a word processor and a week, and I could probably prove I have three arms. Would that make it true?

Render unto Einstein when it comes to science. When it comes to religion, listen to someone who has been there.