Einstein vs Professor

My father (who is a lawyer by trade, as will later become relevant) recently got a facebook, and he posted this video to it.



I didn't know whether this was true or false, but I had suspicions about it. It sounds like one of those crappy e-mail urban legends, like the Declaration of Revocation of Independence, which occasionally purports to have been written by John Cleese. Luckily I was able to get to the bottom of this, and I went ahead and posted a comment:

ME

Interesting and insightful, but fictional.
http://www.snopes.com/religion/einstein.asp

But that was not the end of it. Oh, far from it.What follows is the discussion we had.

DAD

Interesting comment from Snopes. The author asserts that the story is "false," which is a positive statement of fact.

The evidence for the verdict, however, is that there is no record of the event ever having occurred in any Einstein biography or literature.

Is that proof that the story is false?

Or, does the Snopes author base her conclusion on her belief that if she cannot find any historical record of something, it must not have happened?

ME

Oh, come on.

Does it prove conclusively that the story is false? No. Negatives can't be proven, as you well know. Does it sufficiently demonstrate the improbability of the story to such an extent that they can comfortably assert its falsehood? Sure. And a convincing, evidence-supported narrative for how the story came about has been provided. This isn't a criminal trial. We don't need "beyond reasonable doubt" as our standard for evidence because we're not confronting the ethical concern of potentially punishing an innocent. Here, the gradation of probability matters.

It's fiction. It's also a misrepresentation of Einstein who, by more reliable historical accounts, was so woefully inarticulate as a child that he was thought retarded and who, by the way, went to a Catholic elementary school, rendering the premise of the atheist teacher situation even more improbable.

It's really annoying how in so many discussions concerning religious issues, all sides attempt to claim Einstein as their own (sort of like how a lot of political discussions eventually devolve into Hitler comparisons, a phenomenon known as Godwin's Law). During his adult life, he usually described himself as a Spinozist, and was highly annoyed when others would miscategorize his religious beliefs in an attempt to prove some kind of point (as though it would!). Doubtless he would be even further annoyed by this ad.

DAD

First, your point about "an appeal to Einstein" is well taken; it is a classic argumentum ad verecundiam (or appeal to authority) which is a well-recognized logical fallacy.

Having said that, it does not dispose of the child's response to the professor. Assuming arguendo that the account is entirely apocryphal with regard to Einstein, you don't really need the child to be Einstein for the child to get the better of the professor.

Third, I disagree with the breadth of the Snopes author's definition of faith. She says that faith involves only those propositions that cannot be proved. In fact, many people have faith in things that could very well be proved, although the "believer" is completely ignorant of the basis or process of the proof.

Consider flight, for example. Most airline passengers have no idea how or why an airplane takes off, flies, or lands. Yet they have faith in the technology of the aircraft and the skill of its crew. That's faith-- not because these processes are incapable of proof, but because the "believer" is almost entirely ignorant of the physical principles involved.

Using the author's definition of faith, by the way, wouldn't evolution be an article of faith?

Certainly there can be no absolute scientific proof of evolution. There may be evidence to support it, but there was plenty of evidence to support geocentrism before Copernicus and Galileo, no?

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. "By faith he received power to generate, even though he was past the normal age--and Sarah herself was sterile--for he thought that the one who had made the promise was trustworthy." (Heb. 11:1)

ME

The conversation between the child and the professor is a rather unsophisticated discussion of the problem of evil on both sides. It's no Karamazov, but it doesn't need to be. It's a commercial. So I don't really care so much about the content of the argument as I do the way it's being presented. Appealing to an urban myth as though it were a fact is an appallingly stupid way of making a point about what should and should not be taught in schools.

I also care nothing about the Snopes author's pontification on the nature of faith. Frankly I skimmed the article to get the gist of the Einstein debunking. But I suppose if you take that definition literally then perhaps you have to classify all inductive reasoning as faith. And you do have to classify trust in airlines, evolution, gravity, and frankly, the existence of, say, Kelly, as faith, because none of these things can be proven conclusively and we can always come up with a crazy, unfalsifiable science-fiction. Go ahead, Hume does.

But as you rightly point out, the Snopes author has a poor definition of faith. Even though Airline passengers can't explain how the plane works, they at least have a concept that air accidents are relatively unusual, which is grounded in objective statistical reality. We still have serious questions about how evolution works, but it is observable at the microscopic scale and follows from sound logic that is strongly supported at the macroscopic scale by the fossil record. Gravity is an observable phenomenon that has never served us wrong, although we still haven't managed to integrate it unto a general unified theory of reality. We've all known Kelly for years and she behaves like a real person with consciousness. Although we cannot conclusively demonstrate that she is not an extremely sophisticated automaton, it is highly improbable.

Probability. Remember?

This has gone way off topic. But I'm fine with you making evolution potshots as long as they're better potshots.

(I mean, not that I've ever heard any decent evolution potshots, and believe me I've tried. But maybe you've got something.)

DAD

Kelly exists.

Not sayin' her existence explains the presence of evil in the world or anything...

But I was there at 2:59 pm on Feb. 6, 1991, so I don't need to rely on Descartes, St. Paul, or Einstein on this one.

ME

Q.E.D.

The fact that he resorted to an irrelevant joke means I won, doesn't it? I think I'm going to count it as a win.