God and science (What should be taught in schools?)

by dhw, Sunday, March 14, 2010, 19:10 (5367 days ago) @ David Turell

A SEQUEL	-When the professor and Albert Einstein sat down, another student stood up.-"Professor and Mr Einstein," he said, "as someone far less knowledgeable than yourselves, I must confess to finding both your arguments extremely confusing. For instance, Professor, you call yourself an atheist, but you began by trying to prove that God is not good and God created evil. These arguments concern God's nature, not his existence, which implies that you think God exists. You then, however, cast doubt on the existence of Jesus and God because they are not perceivable by any of our senses. If these were the rules of "empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol" we would have to say that nothing exists or existed if it is not within the range of our senses. Mr Einstein has pointed out the folly of this argument, but Mr Einstein's arguments are equally flawed. Cold, darkness and death are terms for phenomena that are perceivable by our senses; the argument that they all denote the absence of something does not make them any the less real, and the fact that our knowledge requires a degree of faith in our own or other people's perceptions and experiences does not provide one jot of evidence for the existence of God. To call evil the absence of God is to presuppose God's existence. It is not like the cold that comes when there is no heat, or the darkness that comes when there is no light, because we have a consensus of human perception and experience to support the existence of what we call cold and darkness, but we have no such thing to support the existence of God. To deny the evidence provided by a perceptional and experiential consensus would render all discussion meaningless, and to assert the existence of something on the grounds that other well-known phenomena are not accessible to our senses would be not only unscientific but also contrary to common sense. Neither of you has made out any case at all either for or against the existence of God."-The student left the room, followed by all the remaining students, and leaving the Professor and Albert Einstein to contemplate the common sense of agnosticism. Indeed, we have it on good authority that Albert Einstein eventually became an agnostic. It is to be hoped that the Professor followed suit.