An agnostic friend just sent me this quotation by Albert Einstein:
·
“I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call
myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We
are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are
covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows
that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It
does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a
definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does
not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude
of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a
universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws
only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the
constellations.”
Einstein correctly observed a “universe marvelously
arranged, obeying certain laws.” He also correctly noted that a child observes
that someone must have designed it all. However, Einstein claimed the this is the
“attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God.”
I suspect that, on some level, the greatest minds must realize this. However,
what is apparent is that many such minds deny this.
Why? I don’t think that it is because of their intelligence
or even their education. Nor do I think that any scientific findings have
surfaced that have undermined the many apparent appearances of design that
children gladly note. If anything, science has continued to reveal what had
first been noted in greater detail—" a universe marvelously arranged.”
How then do we explain the presence of atheists? I think
that it is simply a matter of will over ID, as NYU Emeritus Professor of
Philosophy and avowed atheist, Thomas Nagel had observed:
·
For a long time I have found the materialist
account [that the world consists of nothing more than molecules in motion] of
how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the
standard version of how evolutionary process works. The more details we learn
about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more
unbelievable the standard historical account becomes…The current orthodoxy
about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are
unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense. (Mind and
Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost
Certainly False, 5)
Why then does the theory of evolution still hold sway in the
halls of science? I think that it is merely a matter of will.
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