Blogotional

Christians are prone to over reach. Intelligent design is a good example. But the Christian over reach is often born of the over reach of science.

This article for yesterday's NYTimes is a good example. It's a "celebration" of the 100th anniversary of Einstein's famous equation E=mc². The article over reaches in a couple of ways. Consider

The standard illustrations of Einstein's equation - bombs and power stations - have perpetuated a belief that E = mc² has a special association with nuclear reactions and is thus removed from ordinary activity.

This isn't true. When you drive your car, E = mc² is at work. As the engine burns gasoline to produce energy in the form of motion, it does so by converting some of the gasoline's mass into energy, in accord with Einstein's formula. When you use your MP3 player, E = mc² is at work. As the player drains the battery to produce energy in the form of sound waves, it does so by converting some of the battery's mass into energy, as dictated by Einstein's formula. As you read this text, E = mc² is at work. The processes in the eye and brain, underlying perception and thought, rely on chemical reactions that interchange mass and energy, once again in accord with Einstein's formula.

Now, all of that is strictly true, but essentially pointless. The reason is simple. Take the example of your car engine -- the amount of energy generated is infinitesimally small in comparison to the energey potential in the equation -- meaning that the amount of mass converted into energy in the operation of your car is too small to be measured. Such chemical reactions -- all of the examples cited here -- are analyzed in accordance with something called "The Law of Conservation of Mass" - the mass of the reactants (the chemicals you start with) must equal the mass of the products (the chemicals you finish with). On the macroscopic scale discussed in this quote Einstein is irrelevant, true, but pointless, good old Newton works just fine.

But here is the big over-reach. The author starts the article with

DURING the summer of 1905, while fulfilling his duties in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein was fiddling with a tantalizing outcome of the special theory of relativity he'd published in June. His new insight, at once simple and startling, led him to wonder whether "the Lord might be laughing ... and leading me around by the nose."

And he finishes with

In the far, far future, essentially all matter will have returned to energy. But because of the enormous expansion of space, this energy will be spread so thinly that it will hardly ever convert back to even the lightest particles of matter. Instead, a faint mist of light will fall for eternity through an ever colder and quieter cosmos.

The guiding hand of Einstein's E = mc² will have finally come to rest.

Somehwere in the article we went from God revealing Himself to Einstein by revealing how He makes the universe function, that is God guiding Einstien -- to the product of Einstein's work taking the role of guide, the role of God. A bit grandiose, don't you think? Science went from exploring God's creation to being, at least functionally, God.

You see, lying at the heart of the so-called science/faith divide is a philosophical understanding, not a scientific one. The sciences seeks only to describe how things work -- not what makes them work. Nothing in Einstein's work says it makes things work, it just describes how they work, and as we have seen, in most ordinary cases even it is an impractical description.

There is one final place where science over reaches. The article contains a description of a joust and discusses how the joust will appear very differently to the jousters and the refreee (at least if the horses run close to the speed of light it will) -- in other words, according to Einstein, "reality" is relative, it will look to different to different observers. This is the essence of Einstein's theories and many people have used it to justify the notion that there are no moral absolutes, that there are no absolutes at all.

What a bunch of nonesense! Within the realm of physics, Einstein reigns as THE absolute. The theories of relativity are not self-referential, they do not change! They may have moved physical absolutes from the Newtonian to the Einsteinian realm, but they in no way abolish the idea of absolutes.

I have some sympathy with the efforts of Christians to "push back" when science over reaches into realms that Christianity should occupy alone, but the answers lie not in playing their game, which is what Intelligent Design seeks to do, but in pointing out the fallacy of science's over reach.