Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Einstein's Conception of Science and Religion
The religious community has always seemed to regard science with a certain degree of suspicion. The ideas of Copernicus and Galileo aroused a great deal of concern among the leaders of the Catholic Church, since they directly challenged the Church's interpretation of the physical world. Even today, science is often accused of "killing God" or at least denying his guiding role in the functioning of the universe. I find it interesting, then, that the great physicist Albert Einstein ultimately views science as necessitating the existence of God. He concludes that because man's intelligence is incapable of grasping all the mysteries of the universe, there must be some divine intelligence that not only understands these mysteries, but that also imposes its guiding will over everything in nature. For our last class, perhaps it would be appropriate to discuss how we all view science in this day and age and whether we agree with Einstein that it is not opposed to religion but is actually linked inextricably to it.
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