I stumbled upon this quote from an essay on religion and science at: http://www.quodlibet.net/johnson-science.shtml
According to Einstein, there is no absolute time and space. Einstein expressed sorrow that his relativistic principles were applied to ethics, and that such indirectly changed absolute morals into relative morality. His relativity belonged to a scientific culture committed to objective truth, truth that was what it was even outside mankind’s epistemology. For that reason, Einstein was the enemy of relativism and merely partial descriptions from particular perspectives about reality.
My question:
Scientific breaktroughs from one discipline (here, physics) often result in wholesale changes in another disipline’s world veiw (here, philosophy).
Is this the case here?
I’m not a logician or a physicist but does the above quote hold any water from a theoretician’s point of view?
Einstein may have “expressed regret” but he was well aware that he was making an analogy, not implying that absolute frames of reference in spacetime should have anything to do with moral values.
Scientific discoveries often have serious impact on other areas, because it applies a more rigorous (and harder to refute) standard of proof than the common sense or “obvious” assertion that were commonly made in other fields (and, for that matter, were often made in what passed for science).
One could argue that the progression from geocentric to heliocentric to acentric universe has had an impact on many theological and philosophical traditions around the world, but generally a robust tradition will find workarounds. Evolution is still unacceptable to many people who believe “Man was made in God’s image” in some literal sense, and frankly, even liberal and educated laymen today still have incredible misconceptions about it. I know that I personally often find myself switching between an almost existential social relativism (“Man and his values aren’t the pinnacle of evolution, just one more primitive link in a chain extending into the indefinite future – who takes himself too seriously, laughably so”) to being very concerned about issues and quandaries that may seem foolish, arbitrary or insignificant when viewed “objectively” from a larger perspective.
We don’t have “the ultimate truth”, not even in science. In the interim, each thing we learn, observe or conclude, rightly or wrongly will tend to affect our views of other things, in seeemingly unrealted fields. One might not think that xenobiology is very related to theology, but public contact with an alien race would have profound and diverse effects on different religions and sects. It would be a “new truth” that must be accomodated, and its exact details will likely be inconvenient.
It is true that since Einstein, thousands of papers, books, talks, speeches, articles, and every other type of possible communication have been produced by philosophers trying to deal with their perceived understanding of relativity and whether and what it changes. The same is true for quantum mechanics, string theory, the discovery of planets around other stars, and every other bit of physics.
So it’s certainly true that it’s had an effect. What that effect is, whether any of these philosophers understand enough of the science involved to comment meaningfully on it, and whether even the meaningful comments have had any effect outside the field is a whole different set of questions.
Which will be answered differently by everyone involved.
Sorry, I was wondering if moral relativism was a concept born of Einstein’s time. There has been so much demonizing of that concept lately that I wondered if this was it’s inception.
Moral Relativism has been around since before Socrates. Sorry, I can’t remember the name of whichever of those old greek guys first espoused it on record in Greece. Maybe it was Epicurus? Maybe another doper knows…