“To me, that’s an untenable view of the world that will lead to great evil because people will just stand by as evil takes place.”Įllis’ questions about Einstein’s theory are philosophical and ethical – looking at the question as to what it means to be human, something many scientists do not think to be mere speculation but not science. It would be meaningless to tell them they were doing something wrong, he adds. “If we are just machines living out a future that has already been set, then Adolf Hitler had no choice to do other than what he did Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, had no choice,” Ellis says. Ellis questions Einstein because of these philosophical implications. Ellis’ questions are the questions that any theist has to wrestle with. The article, titled Tomorrow Never Was, written by Zeeya Merali.Įllis is troubled by the implications of Einstein’s theory, for if the past and future are no different, but everything is already set, then humans have no free will and there is no reason to hold people accountable for their behavior since all things and all actions are fixed by what came before them. And though the ideas of Ellis have not garnered much support in the scientific world, still he is a scientist attempting to offer a scientific alternative to what is considered dogma for most physicists. So it was interesting to read in the June Issue of Discover an article about one cosmologist, George Ellis, who disagrees with Einstein. Avowed atheists hold solidly to a notion that there is no free will, no consciousness and thus believe everything is simply an effect of past cause unfolding in mindless predetermination. This thinking is very contrary to what theists understand about the universe which is unfolding as God wills, changed by God’s will and also by human choice. Einstein and many scientists think of time as being an illusion with the future being fully set with no difference between the past and the future. Albert Einstein changed the thinking on time and how time (or the experience of it) is understood as being relative to one’s position in the universe. Certainly at one point even scientists imagined time was a fixed value, and Western thinkers imagine time as marching on in a progression from past to present to future (if one pays attention in Orthodox liturgy and to certain writings of the Orthodox, one will note the Eastern Christians do not hold to a strictly linear understanding of time, especially once the eternal God enters into time through the incarnation!). One issue which I think is related to both theology and science is the issue of time. These are not peer reviewed scientific articles, so the scientist may only pay scant attention to these articles, even if they are written by scientists for the curious. But I’m not a scientist, and so I read science mostly at a popular level, things like the magazine, DISCOVER: SCIENCE FOR THE CURIOUS. I have a curiosity about certain scientific topics.
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