Re: An Open Letter to [Hammond]

From: Paul Draper (pdraper_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 10/01/04 

Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2004 16:40:55 +0000 (UTC)

Earle Jones <earle.jones@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<earle.jones-4FB920.16424530092004@netnews.comcast.net>...
<snip>
>
> "From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have
> always been an atheist.... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion
> the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an
> agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the
> professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of
> liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in
> youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the
> weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our
> being."
> --Albert Einstein, quoted in
> Dukas and Hoffman"The Human Side"
>
> "I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I
> consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no
> superhuman authority behind it."
>
> --Albert Einstein
> July, 1953; Einstein Archive 36-553
>
> "I don't try to imagine a God; it suffices to stand in awe
> of the structure of the world insofar as it allows our
> inadequate senses to appreciate it."
>
> --Albert Einstein (Letter to S. Flesch, April 16, 1954
> Einstein Archive 30-1154)
>
> "To assume the existence of an unperceivable being ... does
> not facilitate understanding the orderliness we find in the
> perceivable world."
>
> --Albert Einstein (in a letter to an Iowa
> student who asked, What is God?)
> July, 1953 Einstein Archive 59-085
>
> If you think Einstein believed in some supernatural God, you are
> mistaken.

This is a truly unfortunate characterization. The statements above by
Einstein do NOT mean that he felt there was no Creator -- quite the
contrary. What they DO point out is his reluctance to reduce God to
something mundane and comprehensible by mankind. He also did not feel
that human affairs could be divided among those "with God" and those
"against God".

>
> [...]
>
> > Fact is, I can't think of a single "great" scientist who professed
> > not to believe in God.
>
> *
> What if we surveyed the members of the National Academy of Sciences
> -- that represents some of the 'great' scientists. What would they
> say?
>
> Well, it's been done -- first in 1916, again in 1933 and most
> recently in 1998. Here are the results, as reported in NATURE:
>
> Leading Scientists Still Reject God
>
> Nature, Vol. 394, No. 6691, p. 313 (1998)
> Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
>
> Table 1 Comparison of survey answers among "greater" scientists
>
> Belief in personal God 1914 1933 1998
> Personal belief 27.7 15.0 7.0
> Personal disbelief 52.7 68.0 72.2
> Doubt or agnosticism 20.9 17.0 20.8
>
>
> Belief in human immortality 1914 1933 1998
> Personal belief 35.2 18.0 7.9
> Personal disbelief 25.4 53.0 76.7
> Doubt or agnosticism 43.7 29.0 23.3
>
> Figures are percentages.
>
> Details:
>
> "NATURE" SURVEY -- LESS AND LESS BELIEF
>
> The follow-up study reported in "Nature" reveals that the
> rate
> of belief is lower than eight decades ago. The latest survey
> involved 517 members of the National Academy of Sciences; half
> replied. When queried about belief in "personal god," only 7%
> responded in the affirmative, while 72.2% expressed "personal
> disbelief," and 20.8% expressed "doubt or agnosticism."
> Belief in
> the concept of human immortality, i.e. life after death declined
> from the 35.2% measured in 1914 to just 7.9%. 76.7% reject the
> "human immortality" tenet, compared with 25.4% in 1914, and
> 23.2%
> claimed "doubt or agnosticism" on the question, compared with
> 43.7% in Leuba's original measurement [Dr. James Leuba,
> Psychology Professor at Bryn Mawr University conducted the
> original study]. Again, though, the highest rate of belief in
> a god was found among mathematicians (14.3%, while the lowest
> was found among those in the life sciences fields -- only 5.5%.
>
> From "NATURE" 394, 313 (23 Jul 1998) Correspondence
>

While this is sociologically amusing, it also says nothing other than
science in the last 75 years has done little to persuade people about
the existence of God. It CERTAINLY doesn't mean that the majority
opinion is correct. It CERTAINLY doesn't even mean that there is, or
should be, any correlation between scientific advancement and
theological conviction. Are the scientists in 1998 *better scientists*
than the ones in 1914? If the quality of the scientists are presumed
to be more or less constant over the interval of this study, does the
trend indicate anything about the truth of their belief?

PD

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