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Einstein's Brain

SERIES: In Tables of Stone #2 of 11

2008-09-21

PRODUCTION #: 1121

SPEAKER: Shawn Boonstra

You know, on paper sometimes the theory of evolution makes pretty good sense. But don’t you find there’s this nagging doubt in your heart that tells you this place couldn’t have possibly come into existence all by accident?

How in the world does a cosmic accident develop to the point where we can generate nuclear power? What can we learn from a literal piece of Einstein’s brain?

Albert Einstein continues to hold an incredible fascination for the rest of us mere mortals. Each year, scholarly books are written about his theories. Professional conferences are held to discuss his achievements. And new technical works are presented that debate the unanswered questions Einstein raised about the nature of space and time.

Not only has Einstein enjoyed considerable popularity in scientific circles, but he has also been the subject of popular media, as well. In 2005, Jean-Claude Carriere wrote a novel called Einstein, S’il Vous Plait (or in English, Please, Mr. Einstein). Walter Matthau played Einstein in the film I.Q. Alan Lightman wrote a novel called Einstein’s Dreams. And comedian Steve Martin did a whole play about Einstein. Einstein was the subject of Philip Glass’ 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach. And an Australian filmmaker named Yahoo Serious (no kidding, that’s his real name) made a movie called Young Einstein.

You know, at last count, if you type in “Albert Einstein” on Amazon.com, more than 27,000 titles will come up, everything from Einstein’s Universe and Relativity Made Plain to a book called 365 days of Baby Einstein. And by the time you hear me say this and check the website for yourself, I guess there will be even more.

Every year TIME magazine has its annual “Man of the Year” award. But in 1999, it did something unusual. It named Albert Einstein “Man of the Century.” And of course, I didn’t even need to tell you that in order for you to know that Einstein is basically a household name.

But few people know much about him, except for the fact that he came up with E=mc2. If you dig into it, there are all sorts of fascinating stories around his life, especially his early years. For example, few people realize that Einstein was a very late talker. Even at nine years of age, he wasn’t fluent in his native German, and his parents feared that he might be mentally deficient.

He wasn’t a particularly good student, either. According to Einstein biographer, Ronald W. Clark, when his father asked Albert’s schoolmaster what profession his son should pursue, the schoolmaster replied, “Well, it doesn’t matter. He’ll never make a success of anything.” Imagine that—Albert Einstein destined to be a failure.

In 1895, at the age of 16, Albert Einstein took the entrance exam for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. And he passed with flying colors, right? Wrong. He was a miserable failure. He flunked. But then this not especially good schoolteacher, who was serving as a minor civil servant in a patent office in Berne, Switzerland, wrote four papers on physics that literally changed the way we look at the universe. And back then, I somehow doubt that anybody could have grasped just how profoundly Einstein was about to change the world.

In fact, in 1921, a young student approached Einstein, by then already world-renowned, and said that he believed that from Einstein’s formula, E=mc2, you could actually split the atom and create a nuclear weapon. Einstein just brushed him off—told the young man it was foolishness and he didn’t want to talk about it. But you and I know that about 24 years later, nuclear weapons were invented based on Einstein’s formula, and we entered the nuclear age for better or for worse.

Now, I’m not going to pretend to be able to explain all of Einstein’s theories in half an hour. But let’s take a stab at the basics. Let’s say we have a pair of twins, Hans and Louie. Now, Hans loves planes and rockets, and all his life he has wanted to be an astronaut. But Louie is different because he doesn’t even like heights. In fact, he doesn’t even like looking out of a second-story window.

These two brothers grow up. Hans becomes an astronaut and Louie becomes an accountant. When both boys turn 20, Hans takes off on a 30-year mission in a rocket that can travel near the speed of light, which as you might remember from high school, is a little more than 186,000 miles per second, which means that at that speed, you could go around the world seven times in one second.

So the brothers say goodbye and Louie watches his brother Hans blast off in the rocket. The years go by, Louie gets married, he has kids, he gets gray hair and wrinkles and a little arthritis in his knee, and a little bit of a belly. And after 30 years, Hans returns from space. Louie runs outside to meet him, but he can’t believe what he sees. Louie is 50-years-old, but Hans doesn’t look any older than the day he left. In fact, according to Hans’s calendar, he’s only been gone two years. Now how can that be?

Well, I can’t exactly explain how, except that Einstein taught that when you get close to the speed of light, time slows down. And so, what was 30 years for Louie only felt like two years for Hans. Now I know that’s hard to wrap our minds around, but that’s the way a lot of people interpret the theory of relativity. And that theory gave us explanations for the universe that filled in some of the gaps in Newton’s discovery of the laws of gravity.

Now try to picture this scene. Here’s young Einstein in the midst of looking at other people’s patents for things like mousetraps or dog collars. And while he’s working, he figures out that the faster you move, the slower time goes. And, according to the math, Einstein appears to be right. So no wonder people are obsessed with his brain. What a brain it was!

A few years later, Einstein’s brain came up with another theory even more complicated than the one we just looked at. The only problem was that this new theory needed experimental verification. And because of World War I, it was going to be a few years before it could be done. In the meantime, someone asked Einstein, “Suppose the experiment proves your theory wrong?” And Einstein said, “So much worse for the experiment. The theory is right.” You know something? It was right, and our understanding of the world has never been the same ever since.

Now, of course, Einstein’s story has its flipside, too. One woman tells the story of Einstein at a fancy black-tie party given in his honor. All these people were there, tuxedos and gowns, a very formal thing. And, at one point, the woman saw Einstein sitting there in his tuxedo. When he crossed his legs she noticed something strange. Einstein, the genius, wasn’t wearing any socks.

On another occasion, a person who lived in the same town as Einstein said that someone wearing a hat and sunglasses approached him on the street and asked for directions to a house. Now, that wouldn’t be strange except for the fact that the house was Einstein’s, and the person asking was also Einstein. In spite of his genius, he couldn’t find his own house.

No wonder the fascination with Einstein and Einstein’s brain—such genius and eccentricities all rolled up into one. And the fascination with Einstein’s brain took a ghoulish twist soon after he died. The doctor who did the autopsy actually stole Einstein’s brain. That’s right. He stole it and supposedly kept it for medical research. And rumor also has it that an ophthalmologist got Einstein’s eyes, and would occasionally bring them out at parties to amuse his guests. I know it’s hard to imagine, but sometimes people do some pretty strange things.

Anyway, the doctor who stole the brain never did any real research on it. Supposedly, over the next 30 years, he gave out pieces to his friends and other researchers. But toward the end of his life, the doctor—now probably feeling just a little bit guilty—got in touch with Einstein’s closest relative, a granddaughter living in California, and decided to return what was left of the brain.

A journalist named Michael Paterniti heard about it and offered to drive the doctor, living on the East Coast, all the way to California. The doctor accepted the offer and Paterniti wrote a book called Driving Mr. Albert, all about this cross-country trip with the remains of Albert Einstein’s brains sloshing around in a Tupperware container filled with formaldehyde in the trunk of a Buick Skylark.

But the most interesting part of this story is when Paterniti sat in the car with Einstein’s granddaughter in front of her apartment building. They opened the Tupperware container and she picked up a few of the pieces of the brain. And, with her grandfather’s brain in her hand, she commented how they could perhaps make some nice jewelry out of it. And then she said something very interesting. With the greatest brain of the modern era right there in her hand, she said, “So this is what all the fuss is about?”

Here they were holding in their hands the literal place where some of the most profound and world-changing ideas in history were formed. And you just have to ask, “Could Einstein, with all of his genius, all of his ideas, and his passions, really be limited to this simple brain matter? Those rills and crevices of neurons and fibers that were sitting in their hands; is that really what all the fuss was about?”

In the end, was Albert Einstein nothing but a bit of physical matter, a body of flesh and bones, a lump of gray brain matter and nothing more? For that matter, is that what we are? Purely physical beings existing only because of purely physical laws that give off emotions, ideas, art and creativity—kind of the way a stomach gives off peptic acid? Are we just a physical phenomenon, the motion of atoms, the synthesis of proteins, and the flow of blood and hormones? Is that all Albert Einstein’s genius was—the flow of chemicals and atoms? Could you find the secret of Einstein’s genius just in the physical structure of his brain?

Well, if you want the answer to that question, you have to answer the question of human origins. If we’re just the chance products of physical forces alone, as many scientists and philosophers are telling us, then I guess that’s all we could be, just physical beings living in a physical world with nothing transcendent above or beyond us. And if modern science is right, I’m afraid that’s the conclusion we have to come to.

Just think about what your high school textbooks told you about the origins of human life. Billions of years ago, they say, there was this massive explosion. Hot globules of matter formed all over the universe. Some of those globules, including the stuff that made our Earth, cooled down and condensed.

Over time, warm pools of water formed, and in them simple proteins and amino acids mysteriously emerged. And over time, somehow, they turned into primitive life. Over millions and millions of years, this primitive life evolved in a vicious battle of survival of the fittest, and eventually, among other things, they turned into Einstein’s brain.

Now, of course, that kind of thinking leaves you feeling just a little bit empty. I like how socialist Peter Burger phrased it. There’s really nothing very funny about finding oneself stranded, alone, in a remote corner of a universe bereft of human meaning. There’s also nothing funny about the idea that this fate is the outcome of the mindless massacre that Darwin, rather euphemistically, called “natural selection.”

You know, I have to agree. It’s not very funny, not at all. French biologist and atheist Jacques Minot wrote:

“The ancient covenant is in pieces. Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkest below, it is for him to choose.”

I’m not quite sure just where Mr. Minot thinks he’s going to find a kingdom above in a godless universe where we all emerge by chance. But all that aside, if I accept his idea that if we are, indeed, alone in the universe, I think I’d start to feel a little pessimistic myself.

But I don’t accept that view, not at all. I have a totally different and totally incompatible view of human origins. I believe we’re here because of a loving Creator—the God revealed in the pages of the Bible.

He created us and breathed into us what the Bible calls, in Genesis 2, “The breath of life.” I believe we’re here not because, “In the beginning, cold, mindless, uncaring forces created the heavens and the earth…” I’m here because, as the Bible says (Genesis 1:1):

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

I believe that we’re here not because of evolution or natural selection or genetic mutation, but because God said in Genesis, chapter one (Genesis 1:26-28):

“‘… Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”

It’s the only thing that really makes sense. It gives us that meaning in life that we all crave so badly. There is a reason for our existence. Somebody wanted us here. And because that someone is our Creator, I worship Him.

Now, directly tied in with this idea of a God who created us is the question of morality. If we accept the atheist view of our origins, then we have to admit that ideas like good and evil or right and wrong are nothing but human concoctions; the products of our culture. And if you accept that morality as something invented by human beings, you run into a pretty big problem.

If one culture says it’s okay to throw young virgins into an active volcano in order to appease the gods of the underworld, then who is allowed to say that it’s wrong? By what authority can they possibly critique that behavior? What gives one culture the right to judge the moral codes and traditions of another culture, especially if we all came into existence by random chance? What basis do you really have for morality? The answer, it seems, is “none at all.”

But again, I don’t buy it. Not only do I believe in a Creator God, but I also believe in a moral God, a great lawgiver who gave us a perfect moral code—and it’s far from being an outdated set of dos and don’ts from some ancient outmoded religion. The Ten Commandments still remain God’s standard for right and wrong today. There are laws that make sense.

I mean, think about the first commandment, because it fits right in with what we’ve been talking about. It says very simply, “You shall have no other gods before me.” And why would that be the first commandment? It’s really simple. It’s because there are no other gods. The Creator God is the one who made us, and so, logically, He’s the one we should worship.

Right from the start, with the first commandment, God sets the foundation for everything that follows. He has to come first in our lives because everything we have comes from Him.

The famous political activist, Bertrand Russell, spent time in jail back in 1918 for his opposition to World War I. During a regular prison routine, his jailer, just wanting to strike up idle conversation, asked Russell what his religion was. He replied that he was an agnostic. So the jailer, who wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, looked a little bit puzzled and then brightened up saying, “Well, I guess it’s all right. We all worship the same god, don’t we?”

Well, to be honest, we don’t. Now, I know that flies in the face of popular thinking, and maybe it’s not cool to say that kind of stuff in a global village. But there really is only one God, the God who created the world. And because He’s the Creator, He has the right to be first in our lives. That’s why, when asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus said (Matthew 22:37-38):

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment.”

And, of course, that’s something you just can’t do if you have other gods that come ahead of Him. You’ll notice, too, that Jesus said this was the first commandment. But doesn’t the first commandment say, “you shall have no other gods before me”? Well, yes, and that’s exactly the point. Jesus is basically interpreting the first commandment, saying that it means you will love the Lord your God with everything you have.

I know this man…no need to name him. I know this man who has been married for a number of years. On the surface, it all seemed fine—a nice family man with a wife and children. Well, it turns out, much to our shock, that over the years the man had a series of lovers on the side. And, of course, when his wife found out, she was angry and devastated.

So you can imagine how she felt when he tried to explain that in spite of all those other women, he still loved her with all his heart, soul and mind. And, of course, she rejected that kind of thinking, because when you love someone with everything you have, there’s no room for someone else.

And that’s kind of the way it is with God. It’s an exclusive relationship. And it’s a relationship that makes really good sense. Just listen to this passage found in Daniel, chapter five (Daniel 5:23):

“…The God who holds your breath in His hand and owns all your ways…”

I hope you caught that, the God who holds your breath. That means God didn’t just make you, He actually keeps you alive. He is the God described in the New Testament like this (Acts 17:28-29):

“For in Him we live, and move, and have our being.”

In this God we live, we move, we have our being—our very existence—and that’s why He has to come first. He has to be loved with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And that’s the first great commandment in God’s moral law.

So, of course, if you’re a natural human being, you’re going to ask the question: What’s in it for me? It might seem like a selfish question, even an inappropriate one, but I know we’re still going to ask it. And the good news is that God’s law, from beginning to end, was actually written for your good. Just think about the logic in that first commandment. If there are no other gods, and the Creator God holds your life together, don’t you think it makes pretty good sense to walk in step with Him?

Everything you have, absolutely everything, comes from Him. And even after you threw it all away, He paid the ultimate price to give it back. And He wants to give you more. He wants to give you better things. In fact, He has a remarkable plan for better living.

Go into any bookstore and check out the self-help section. You’ll find hundreds, maybe thousands of books, and some of them are pretty good. But not one of them comes anywhere close to the kind of living you’ll enjoy when you mold your life to fit God’s moral guidelines. They were, after all, developed by the One who made you in the first place.

The Ten Commandments paint a picture of a remarkably loving God. And to live by those principles, you don’t need a brain like Einstein’s. Your brain will do just fine.

You want to know the really neat thing about your brain? You can use it to talk to God. So why don’t we do that right now?

PRAYER:
Father in heaven, as we look at the way you formed us, and at the world you gave us, it’s evident that you’re a God of love. And today we want to give you our allegiance, our love. We want to worship the Creator God. Take our sinful lives, reshape them in the image of Christ, forgive our sins, we pray, and lead us into the kingdom of God. For we ask it in Jesus’ name, Amen.

To download a PDF of Pastor Boonstra's In Tables of Stone book, click here.

Scriptures Used in “Einstein's Brain”

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
—Genesis 1:1

“‘… Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”
—Genesis 1:26-28

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment.”
—Matthew 22:37-38

“…The God who holds your breath in His hand and owns all your ways…”
—Daniel 5:23

“For in Him we live, and move, and have our being.”
—Acts 17:28-29