At his Substack account, Bill Dembski asks, “Does Einstein’s advice about thinking for yourself hold for both science and faith?”

He owes the anecdote about the advice of Albert Einstein (1879–1955) to a friend, plasma physicist Robert W. “Bob” Bass (1930–2013), who got to meet him as one of a group of Rhodes scholars, setting off on a tour in 1950:

Bob had gotten to meet Albert Einstein. As he shared with me, Frank Ayedelotte, the head of the [Princeton] Institute for Advanced Study, was able to gather the then current batch of thirty-two Rhodes Scholars (one of them Bob), with Einstein as the guest of honor. Ayedelotte asked this question: “Now Einstein, can you give these young men any parting advice?”

Einstein replied: “If I could give the young men any advice it would be this: don’t believe anything is necessarily true just because you see it in the newspapers or hear it on the radio or everybody else believes it! ALWAYS THINK FOR YOURSELF!!!”

“Science, Faith, and Einstein,” Bill Dembski, June 17, 2024

Dembski reflects on the power — and risks — of taking Einstein’s advice:

Einstein was here giving crucial advice that he himself followed in making his revolutionary discoveries in physics. Yet, this advice clashes with what faith seems to demand. Faith is often seen as requiring obedience, even blind obedience. You are told to accept certain doctrines without question. Any deviation makes you a heretic, cast out from the true believers. Faith seems to replace “think for yourself” with “trust and obey.”

Given my own faith journey, I don’t see faith and science at odds in this way. True faith needs to be a faith you own, one you’ve thought through carefully. It must support you through life’s hardships and struggles. It must not be just going through the motions, pretending to believe to please those in authority.

If you’re forced to pretend to believe something you don’t think is true, you’re asking for trouble. This applies as much to faith as to science. Science today has its sacred cows. Challenge them and face excommunication. The same goes for faith. Pretending to be a believer when you’re not makes you hate yourself. It leads to hypocrisy. You say one thing but do another because you don’t really believe.

Dembski, “Science, Faith, and Einstein”

The herd grows

Dembski should know, of course, about sacred cows. His own career has been shaped by doubts about Darwinism, the sacred cow of biology, according to which the entire, nearly unfathomably complex history of life can be explained by natural selection acting on random mutation.

That has never been demonstrated and isn’t at all likely. But it’s very helpful for atheism, as Richard Dawkins famously pointed out. That’s a problem for theists like Dembski, of course.

But those very facts mean that the biologist who accepts Darwinian evolution, if only to avoid getting Cancelled, has an incentive to continue to enforce its dominance. Practically any nonsense can now be talked in Darwin’s name and any evidence against his thesis is treated with hostility.

In recent years, the herd of sacred cows kept by science seems to have grown. As Wesley J. Smith pointed out earlier this month, a demand for political stances is swelling it. For example,

The Lancet‘s editor in chief, Richard Horton, is furious at people who don’t believe in the international community… He blows a gasket while casting deep aspersions on skeptics of international institutions, particularly on those who participate in the Geneva Project…

I wasn’t aware of the Geneva Project’s work, but good for them. Reasonable people who believe in national sovereignty and individual liberty should oppose the pending pandemic agreement. The agreement would elevate the untrustworthy World Health Organization from an advisory institution to one with the power to declare an international health emergency, impose public-health policies on nations, and censor those who do not toe the party line. In other words, the agreement would enable the imposition of a technocracy.

Wesley J. Smith, “Don’t believe in “international community”? You’re hardly human!,” Mind Matters News, June 10, 2024

Horton believes that racism, populism, and nationalism, rather than reasonable skepticism about unchecked international powers, underlie public doubts about technocracy.

The thing to see here is that a medical science journal whose editor speaks with such vehemence — as well as assurance — on political topics may be inclined to force ideological conformity on the physicians writing up research in its pages. How welcome, for example, would a series of papers on shortcomings of the World Health Organization be just now, however well sourced?

In a similar vein, Smith noted at National Review last Saturday that “Our most venerable medical journal have gone political, continually espousing the redefinition of our most contentious political controversies — race, climate change, guns, etc. — into public-health emergencies to permit the authority of medicine and people’s trust in doctors to sway outcomes.”

One example he cites is a Perspectives editorial in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. advocating lawfare against oil companies, which the authors hold responsible for climate change. And, of course, the authors “want to enlist doctors as shock troops in the great lawfare campaign!”

Lawfare against Big Oil might benefit governments but the end result would be higher energy costs for everyone, including low income users. So the cow’s relationship to ideology is much clearer than its relationship to public health.

Come to think of it, that may be a characteristic of sacred cows as a breed: They do not have a straightforward relationship with the discipline or pattern of thinking in which they find pasture.

And thinking for yourself is your best protection against having them proliferate in your own life.