Einstein's Description of Theologians?

Been reading Walter Isaacson’s Einstein bio. It’s awesome. This morning read this thought-provoking quote from Einstein and couldn’t help but think that this idea holds the key to solve the disconnect between science and religion in popular thought.

"Some scientific theories depend primarily on induction: analyzing a lot of experimental findings and then finding theories that explain the empirical patterns. Others depend more on deduction: starting with elegant principles and postulates that are embraced as holy and then deducting the consequences from them. All scientists blend both approaches to differing degrees. Einstein had a good feel for experimental findings, and he used this knowledge to find certain fixed points with which he could construct a theory. But his emphasis was primarily on the deductive approach... ‘The simplest picture one can form about the creation of an empirical science is along the lines of an inductive method. Individual facts are selected and grouped together so that the laws that connect them become apparent. However, the big advances in scientific knowledge originated in this way only to a small degree. The truly great advances in our understanding of nature originated in a way almost diametrically opposed to induction. The intuitive grasp of the essentials of a large complex of facts leads the scientist to the postulation of hypothetical basic laws. From these laws, he derives his conclusions.’” (Isaacson, Einstein, p.117/118)

"’The deeper we penetrate and the more extensive our theories become,’ [Einstein] would declare toward the end of his life, ‘the less empirical knowledge is needed to determine these theories.’" (p. 118)

Most often people dismiss religion as being relative and therefore not authoritative because it is unverifiable, not testable. But theologians are attempting to do the same thing Einstein sought with his deductive thought experiments: move humanity great leaps forward in their understanding of creation. Theologians shouldn't ignore the evidence of life any more than Einstein was ignoring the experiments of scientists of his day (he wasn't). But experimentation is not the key to getting human beings to understand the universe, as Einstein said, deductive reasoning is. Einstein seems to stand as the preeminent example of a critical thinker who models how rational deductive reasoning should proceed.

C.S. Lewis used thought experiments too. The difference between someone like Lewis and someone like Einstein is not really in terms of process, but rather in terms of semantics. Theologians don't say they discover things about God's way, and the scientist doesn't say that they discover things about God's way. But in reality, they're both describing the exact same things. Both theologians and scientists who rely on Einstein's model are both using deductive reasoning to determine the reality of creation. If they're good at their job, neither is doing so to with disregard to the facts of the universe, but they are attempting to move human understanding ahead of where inductive science and everyday experience currently take us.

How commercials work

Thought this was a very interesting quote. It was written by Neil Postman in the early 80s.

"There is nothing in the form of TV commercials that requires that a distinction be made between adults and children. TV commercials do not use propositions to persuade; they use visual images, as for every other purpose. Such language as is employed is highly emotive and only rarely risks verifiable assertions. Therefore, commercials are not susceptible to logical analysis, are not refutable, and, of course, do not require sophisticated adult judgment to assess. Ever since the graphic revolution, Commercial Man has been taken to be essentially irrational, not to be approached with argument or reasoned discourse. But on television this supposition is carried to such extremes that we may charge the television commercial with having rejected capitalist ideology altogether. That is to say, the television commercial has abandoned one of the key assumptions of mercantilism, which is that both buyer and seller are capable of making a trade based on a rational consideration of self-interests. This assumption is so deeply ingrained in capitalism that our laws severely restrict the commercial transactions children are allowed to make. In capitalist ideology, itself heavily influenced by the rise of literacy, it is held that children do not have the analytical skills to evaluate the buyer's product, that children are not yet fully capable of rational transactions. But the TV commercial does not present products in a form that calls upon analytic skills or what we customarily think of as rational and mature judgment. It is not facts that are offered to the consumer but idols, to which both adults and children can attach themselves with equal devotion and without the burden of logic or verification. It is, therefore, misleading even to call this form of communication "commercials," since they distain the rhetoric of business and do their work largely with the symbols and rhetoric of religion. Indeed, I believe it is entirely fair to conclude that television commercials are a form of religious literature.

"I do not claim that every television commercial has religious content. Just as in church the pastor will sometimes call the congregation's attention to nonecclesiastical matters, so there are TV commercials that are entirely secular in nature. Someone has something to sell; you are told what it is, where it can be obtained, and what it costs. Though these may be shrill and offensive, no doctrine is advanced and no theology invoked.

"But the majority of important TV commercials take the form of religious parables organized around a coherent theology. Like all religious parables they put forward a concept of sin, intimations of the way to redemption, and a vision of Heaven. They also suggest what are the roots of evil and what are the obligations of the holy."

Why pro-lifers and pro-choices have a communication problem

I thought this essay was excellent, one of the best I've seen at identifying and analyzing the current lack of dialog between the two sides of the abortion debate. Clearly, the author is pro-life, but regardless of your position, I think you'll find his article worth reading.

FIRST THINGS: On the Square: "I submit that pro-life arguments seem absurd to any listener who has in the back of the mind a sense that the embryo or fetus is being constructed in the womb. Here’s an analogy: At what point in the automobile assembly-line process can a “car” be said to exist? I suppose most of us would point to some measure of minimum functionality (viability), like having wheels and/or a motor, but some might insist on the need for windshield wipers or say it’s not fully a car until it rolls out onto the street (is born). We would all understand, however, that there’s no clearly “right” answer as to when a car is there. And we would also agree that someone who claimed the car to be present from the insertion of the first screw at the very beginning of the assembly line would be taking an utterly absurd position. To someone who conceives of gestation as intrauterine construction, pro-life people sound just this ridiculous. For a thing being constructed is truly not there until it is nearly complete. (Moving from ordinary language to metaphysics, we would say that a constructed thing does not have its essential form until it is complete or nearly complete. And it can’t be that thing without having the form of that thing.)" ...

The difference between making and developing is not just an accident of language. Suppose we’re back in the pre-digital days and you’ve just taken a fabulous photo, one you know you will prize, with your Polaroid camera. (Say it’s a picture of a jaguar that has now darted back into the jungle, so that the photo is unrepeatable.) You are just starting to let the photo hang out to develop when I grab it and rip its cover off, thus destroying it. What would you think if I responded to your dismay with the assertion: “Hey man, it was still in the brown-smudge stage. Why should you care about brown smudges?” You would find my defense utterly absurd. Just so for pro-lifers, who find dignity in every human individual: To say that killing such a prized being doesn’t count if he or she is still developing in the womb strikes them as outrageously absurd.

By contrast, if I had simply destroyed a blank, unexposed piece of your film, you would have been much less upset. You really would have lost little more than a smudge. Passive potential does not count for much. Only developing potential already contains its own form (essence, identity), is already the what that it is in the process of manifesting.

I conclude that pro-choice folks think pro-life claims regarding embryos to be not only wrong but also absurd whenever they think (even unconsciously) that embryos are under construction in the womb. And pro-life folks find pro-choice denials of prized human dignity in embryos to be equally absurd whenever they think that the unborn child develops (indeed, develops itself, unlike the Polaroid photo) from the moment of fertilization.

The two sides are not quite parallel in this, however: Human beings do develop. To think they are constructed is flatly erroneous.