Einstein’s letter is small comfort to Dawkins

Richard Dawkins must have chuckled on reading that Albert Einstein viewed religious belief as 'childish superstition'. Einstein pulled very few punches in a newly unearthed letter to be auctioned in London this week. "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of... primitive legends."

The fact is, though, that Einstein disliked those he thought lacked humility in their conception of scientific explanation, and thus would probably have disliked Dawkins. In truth, the debate over whether or not God exists is simply beyond the reach of any scientific theory.

"Human weakness", in Einstein's phrase, refers to our species' propensity to seek an explanation when our conception of the world fails to live up to our experience. We are

weak, in other words, primarily in the sense that animals are strong: we fail, unlike fish, birds and mosquitoes, to take the world on trust.

In that sense, the practice of science - in which something is true if it's the best explanation on offer, and which is driven forward by the failure of existing explanations to match experience - is no less an expression of human weakness than belief in God.

So we need to ask ourselves why we keep asking science to answer our most urgent questions. Before long, philosophy, art, even free will and consciousness - none of which play a role in causal explanations of the universe - will be deemed irrelevant by a culture that increasingly credits science with the exclusive power to account for its institutions. Ironically, it will be precisely at such a moment that we shall have most need of Einstein's "childish superstitions" to remind us that our being here has any value at all.

Science should be left to explain the natural world. No one has asked it to explain away the human one.