By Edidiong Esara

Albert Einstein was so good a physicist that after his death, a pathologist took out his brain, hoping that an examination of it would reveal where the dead man’s ingenuity lay. Sigmund Freud was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century – so prominent that though dead since 1939, his ideas are still venerated today.

More recently, Stephen Hawking has been described as Britain’s most eminent scientist; not even a life-threatening motor neurone disease has dimmed his intellectual lights as he won the 2013 Fundamental Physics Prize for outstanding achievement. Scientists have done marvelously in changing the world. They have solved many puzzles of mankind, paving the way for inventions that make life easier. But scientists often fail to acknowledge that they too are human and so cannot know everything.

The fault is not completely theirs, for there are too many hero-worshippers who take every word and sentiment of renowned authorities as infallible truth.  Einstein, who was of German birth and Jewish ancestry, made ground-breaking discoveries such as the theory of relativity, wrote more than 300 scientific papers and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. He lived from 1879 to 1955 and brought such glory to the nation of Israel that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion offered him the Presidency of that country, which he declined. As an authority in science, many accepted his views on other matters, such as religion.

The idea of a personal God who was concerned about fates and actions of men to him was naïve and an afterlife did not exist as far as he was concerned. Einstein described himself as an agnostic or a “deeply religious nonbeliever”.  Albert Einstein’s conviction coloured his treatises. Because he did not believe in the God of the Bible, his works found alternative explanations that spurned deference to God. Scientific discoveries are accepted if affirmed by a large number of scientists, not necessarily because they are truthful. Since the greater percentage of this world’s scientists are evidently opposed to God, any research finding that recognizes the hand of God would most likely be rejected within their ranks. Committees that give major laurels of achievement, such as the Nobel Prize, are dominated by people who do not believe in God or reject the deity of Jesus, so they will only recognize works that leave God out of the equation.

Of course, scientists cannot prove that Jesus is not who He said He is. Some of Einstein’s theories were disputed by his contemporary physicists. Even the general theory of relativity he was famous for became controversial. He had contributed to, but later disproved quantum theory and quantum mechanics, despite its acceptance by other physicists. A great scientist could be mistaken.

According to Kelly Dickerson, “a major part of quantum theory, called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, says it’s impossible to know both the speed and position of a single particle at the same time. So in quantum mechanics nothing can be certain, and we can only describe things in terms of probabilities.

Einstein did not like this. He believed there must be some underlying laws of nature that could define particles and make it possible to calculate both their speed and position. There’s no evidence of the law Einstein hoped for, and all experimental evidence suggests that quantum mechanics is real”. In other words, science cannot know it all because the scientist is not God, but Einstein wanted science to play God.

Dickerson concludes that “Quantum mechanics may be correct, but it’s a total mystery as to how it fits in with the rest of Physics”. Uncertainty is the very nature of everything created by man. Einstein himself acknowledged to a group of students that science was often inclined to do more harm than good. Albert Einstein was human and thus prone to failure.  While still married to a pregnant Mileva Maric, Einstein wrote love letters to Marie Winteller, another woman he had known before his marriage: “I think of you in heartfelt love every spare minute and am so unhappy as only a man can be”, he wrote. Albert Einstein married Elsa Lowenthal, his cousin, after Maric divorced him for being romantically attracted to Elsa, while still married to her. The great scientist could not solve complications in his own life.

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Sigmund Freud was a medical doctor who specialized in neurology. He was of Jewish ancestry and worked in a Psychiatric clinic for five months after medical studies at the University of Vienna and clinical medicine at Vienna General Hospital. One aspect of Freud’s personality theory emphasizes a young boy’s sexual attraction for his mother.

As a Psychologist, John Santrock suggests, it is possible that this aspect of the theory was derived from Freud’s romantic attachment to his mother, who was beautiful and some 20 years younger than her husband. Science cannot be completely purged from personal sentiments of its scientists. Freud attributed outburst of creative energy to sexual repression. In 1908, he examined Leonardo da Vinci’s life and art, concluding that da Vinci’s creative energy derived from extreme sexual inhibition brought about by castration anxiety.

For most scientists, there are biases that colour their theories and conclusions. It is not enough to accept their statements hook, line and sinker. Because the prejudice of a man often influences the ideas he comes up with, even the ones that are scientific, we cannot accept that anything is good or bad just because a researcher says so. Dr. Santrock determined that Freud’s Oedipus Complex theory was influenced by the latter’s cultural setting, and English anthropologist, Brownislaw Malinowski found that the Oedipus Complex is not universal as Freud assumed.  In trying to fulfill his calling as a scientist whose duty it is to find answers, Stephen Hawking explained the origin of life thus: “tiny quantum fluctuations in the very early universe became the seeds from which galaxies, stars and ultimately human life emerged”. And “science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance we are in”. Hawking wants us to believe that the earth is not God’s creation, but a chance happening. If nature is a creation of chance, then scientists cannot be trusted, because the natural phenomena they study are probabilities rather than realities.

So, why do scientists take themselves so seriously? Because Hawking has predetermined that the universe is governed by science, not God, and because he believes that biblical ideas such as heaven and the afterlife are “a fairy story for people afraid of the dark”, he concludes that there is no need for a creator to explain the existence of this universe. Says Hawking, “because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing”.

Whether science can prove the hand of God or not is immaterial. How can a human activity prove a phenomenon that is beyond the human mind? Yet, evidence of a living and all-powerful God abounds in all of creation. Albert Einstein in his lifetime searched for but never found the unified theory of Physics that will be the successful conclusion to the search for reality.

Man will never find that reality for as long as he continues to deny God. Science would be an endless, ever-inconclusive search though it brings jobs and fame and glory to its practitioners.

Renowned men of science will be famous and rich but aching in soul and body; respected by men of the world, but never finding inner peace. When their eyelids close in death, they will awake to the ultimate reality their microscopes and test tubes could never find: that this universe belongs to God and each human must give account of his life to the Almighty someday.

Esara writes from Ritman University, Ikot Ekpene, Akwa Ibom State