Hand of God and Adam. Image taken from printsondemand.com
I cannot help but have to blog about this. I initially scoffed the video and just pushed it aside, but I have seen too many people use this as some sort of evidence for god as though the words of one of the greatest scientists from our time is going to make much difference to what stands now.
The main argument goes – God did not create evil; evil exists when there is absence of God’s love.
Evidence for this argument – (1) The sensation of coldness is in fact the absence of heat. (2) The perception of darkness is the absence of light.
So like these two phenomenon, Einstein concludes that God’s love must be like this.
How wrong.
First, I shall argue in terms of biblical evidence, and next, scientific evidence. I spent some time writing these, and I even consulted people to rehash some arguments. While all possible grammatical and logical flaw is entirely mine, please do not dimiss me as Gentile and pretend in your own little Judeo-Christian world that what follows is crap.
Biblical evidence
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” [Genesis 1:1-2]
IF there was nothingness but He before the creation, then he must have created darkness. Just as it is stated He created heavens and earth and THEN there was darkness over the surface, then it follows that darkness came about only after the creation, and hence God created darkness. This darkness was not the absence of light – light was only created after the creation of earth and heaven (with that came darkness, remember?). So, if darkness did not exist, did or did not God create it? Can He create something that does not exist?
If we accept the argument he created heaven and earth and hence darkness, we must accept that darkness is something that can be created, and that entails that darkness cannot NOT EXIST.
Tree of Knowledge. Image taken from academic.evergreen.edu
“9 And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” [Genesis 2:9]
So God made trees, including the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If evil does not exist as Einstein had claimed as a child, how can God make a tree that give knowledge of something that does not exist? Can here meaning ability – is He able to dichotomize Good and Evil if Evil did not exist? Sure, you can argue that He’s referencing to Good and Ungood – then it follows that the concept of things that are ungood is falsifiable – something that is not good is ungood. However, something that is ungood need not be Evil. For example, if we assert doing charity work is good. So not being charitable is ungood. What about stealing from a charitable organization? that is Evil.
Besides, he is omniscient. He can only know things that exists; or you could argue all that He knows must surely exist. In either case, He knows Evil exists, and hence Evil exists. Since He is the creator of one and all, He created Evil. If he didn’t create Evil, then he did not create EVERYTHING.
Scientific Evidence
Verbatim from the video — “Darkness is only the absence of light”. I assume this was a time where the concept of electromagnetic field has not been properly addressed. What the human eye can perceive is only a narrow spectrum out of the entire electromagnetic field on earth which ranges from infra-red to ultraviolet. Using special equiment, such as an infra-red sensor, we can attribute visible colours to difference in amount of heat energy in an object. This exhibits the limitation of human perception. So darkness is what we cannot see, but not what does not exist.
To complicate matters, there other kinds of “darkness” in the universe, such as Dark Energy and Dark Matter. I shall not attempt to explain these concepts except provide some basics. In a nutshell, Dark Matter does not interact with the electromagnetic spectrum and hence it is invisible under all circumstances. However, it exists even though we cannot see it because it exerts gravitational forces. So, Dark Matter is too darkness in the broadest sense, it is the case of absence of light, but it exists. (Ironically Einstein’s theory of a warped space is paramount to proving the existence of Dark Matter.) For more information, I suggest you watch this 17-minute video on TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/patricia_burchat_leads_a_search_for_dark_energy.html
What about the argument that “cold is absence of heat”? If we consider heat as energy, we are talking about a particular substance having more or less heat energy. True, a cold substance has less heat energy than a warm substance, however, this has nothing to do with the perceptual kind of heat the video was talking about. The boy in the video clearly asked – “Do we feel cold?” That refers to perception, which can be easily tricked. Consider this experiment where I have 3 buckets of water — one ice-cold, one at room temperature, and one at seventy degrees celcius. You immerse one hand in the ice-cold bucket, and the other in the warm bucket. After 1 minute, I ask you to withdraw your hands and put both in the room-temperature bucket. Do you feel cold or warm? My point is, while it is true that a cold substance has less heat energy, it has nothing to do with what we perceive.
Hence all in all, I still dismiss that infernal video which should not be used as evidence for God’s existence. Apart from the compelling (or not) reasons above, don’t you think that this is just this huge gap between proving the absence of evil and the existence of God? Whether evil exists does not prove if God exist. This is the crippling logical flaw in the message and evidence of this video, and this is also why I hate it this much. If you care to be a reasonable (i.e. ability to reason) person, you will cease to trust video of those nature until you prove to yourself that it is worth believing.
