07.11.09
What do They have Against Religion?
I’ve been struck by reactions in segments of the American press to President Obama’s recent nomination of Dr. Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health. After what comes across as a perfunctory acknowledgement of Dr. Collins’ qualifications for the job, the reporter/commentator invariably spends the bulk of the article talking about Collins’ evangelical Christian identity. There’s the subtle implication that notwithstanding Collins’ widely-acknowledged accomplishments as a genetic scientist, his association with evangelical Christianity negates the qualifications and renders Collins suspect as a respectable scientist. That someone is able to hold a religious outlook as well as a scientific worldview is seen to be a logical impossibility.
Against this atheistic fundamentalism is the position taken by perhaps the most eminent scientist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein. To be sure, Einstein did not believe in a personal God; I suppose, like several of America’s Founding Fathers, he could be accurately described as a deist. He was not an atheist–indeed, according to Walter Isaacson, he “tended to denigrate atheists”. In one episode cited in Walter Isaacson’s biography, Einstein: His Life & Universe, Einstein and his wife were at a dinner party in Berlin when a guest disparaged religion. Einstein is said to have replied, “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”
Einstein coined the famous saying about science and religion, “The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” [Karl]
