Religion, Science, and Einstein

     It was common in the twentieth century, following the trajectory of the Enlightenment, to think that religion has no place in scientific inquiry. Religion adds no explanatory value to science, and if anything muddies the water. The ghost in the machine!

    Yet the motivation for religion and science, the desire to know answers to the big questions (why we are here?) are the same. Both are inspired by a type of wonder, as noted by Aristotle in his Metaphysics.

     Einstein held firm to a scientific realist account of the world by which there is a reality that is independent of us and has causal laws about which we could come to know. He resisted quantum mechanics as it suggested subjectivity was part of the universe (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle), the idea that two events could be not causally connected but related (quantum entanglement), and other types of spookiness. In his famous phrase, God made the world a certain way, one that was simple and predictable, everything the quantum view was not.

     His scientific views, then, have a religious tenor. His religious views are more philosophical than the average Christian, what he called “Spinoza’s God,” which is very close to the Hindu view, that is, there is no personal deity, but a pervading or co-extension of the one and many. Scientists’ beliefs often bring with them a strong belief system, which in theory they are willing to discard with appropriate evidence. But as Einstein showed that it's not an easy go of it.

    On the one hand, religious views can be useful, providing a framework for our intellectual pursuits, even us helping make sense of them at their most difficult points, the outer edges. Yet they also bring with them some type of belief preservation where we can be resistant to upend our thinking about the world. Sometimes our religious views, as in the Hindu case, are general enough to absorb various debates: Is the universe accelerating? Is it rotating? What is its shape? Does it contain dark matter and dark energy? A lot of the details have to be worked out by scientists, but the more we get to know the more attractive religion seems, because what we have come to know through reason is just so out of this world.