Einstein’s idea: Science and religion aren’t at odds

The bone of contention between Richard Dawkins and Simon Conway Morris at a seminar organised by the Templeton Foundation in Cambridge, UK, (as George Johnson reports on Page 3 of this issue) needs a little more elaboration, now that the inhabitants of this part of the country are celebrating their biggest religious festival. Pandal-hoppers, who will bring Calcutta’s vehicular traffic to a standstill this week, will probably be too busy beholding the beauty of the idols to ruminate on that pertinent question: Is God a necessary hypothesis to explain the existence of the Universe?

So long as religion used to be the sole medium to make sense of the bewildering complexity of the cosmos, things went on smoothly. Problems arose as science started showing its superiority in the task. If religion now confines itself to resolving ethical and moral questions of humans ? an area where science is an almost useless guide to look forward to ? it will retain its old glory.

Religion and science ought to remain apart for mutual benefit, but that’s hardly the case. The Templeton Foundation’s attempt to remove the chasm between the two domains is but one example of the illogical urge to explore the mythical common ground that some believe exists between them. It’s hardly surprising that such an urge often leads to conflicts.

It’s easy to blame religionists ? or, for that matter, theologically inclined scientists ? for fomenting trouble by arguing that scriptures still have a role to explain nature. But that’s not to say that scientists not known for such biases are beyond reproach. Quite often they too perpetuate confusion, inadvertently though, by their utterances.

Take the case of Albert Einstein, who is especially remembered this year for some miraculous discoveries one hundred years ago. Alan H. Batten, formerly with the Dominican Astrophysical Observatory, British Columbia, Canada, has written an article in the last month’s issue of Physics World discussing that the most famous of all scientists used to say things that, taken together, would mean almost nothing.

The word ‘God’ featured many a time in Einstein’s comments whenever he wanted to talk of nature, or, better still, the subtlety of its design. Batten refers to his famous remark that in his view there could be no “legitimate conflict between science and religion” and that the main source of conflict between the two lay in the concept of God being someone with whom humans could communicate.

The second part of his assertion is understandable, but why should a conflict between science and religion be an illegitimate one? Pointing out that Banesh Hoffmann, Einstein’s colleague and biographer, had concluded that we do not know precisely what he meant by God, Batten writes that the great scientist’s usage of the word was “idiosyncratic”.