Specious logic
The claim that cold "doesn't exist" because according to the laws of physics it's merely "the absence of heat" amounts to semantic game-playing. Heat is a noun, the name of a physical phenomenon, a form of energy. Cold is an adjective, a description. To say that something is cold, or that we feel cold, or even that we're going out in "the cold," is not to assert that cold "exists." It's simply a way of describing the relative temperature of things. (It's helpful to recognize that the proper antonym for cold isn't heat; it's hot.)
The same applies to light (in this context a noun denoting a form of energy), and dark (an adjective). It's true that when we say, "It's dark outside," the phenomenon we're actually describing is a relative absence of light, but that doesn't mean that by speaking of "the dark" we mistake it for a thing that "exists" in the same sense that light does. We're simply describing the degree of illumination we perceive.
So it's a philosophical parlor trick to posit heat and cold (or light and dark) as a pair of opposite entities only to "reveal" that the second term doesn't really refer to an entity at all, but merely the absence of the first.
The young Einstein would have known better, and so would his professor.
Di sini intinya, yang membuat hoax ini hanya bermain secara semantik.
'Heat' (panas) adalah sebuah kata benda sementara 'cold' (dingin) adalah kata sifat. Begitu juga "light" (cahaya) adalah kata benda dan "dark" (gelap) adalah kata sifat. Jadi ikan kribo. Kalau mau, terang vs gelap; panas vs dingin.
Jadi ini cuma trik murahan saja.
Defining evil
Even if we allow those false dichotomies to stand, the argument would still founder on the conclusion that evil "doesn't exist" because, we're told, evil is simply a term we use to describe "the absence of God's presence in our hearts." It doesn't follow.
The case, such as it is, has been built on the unpacking of purported opposites — heat vs. cold, light vs. dark. What's the opposite of evil? Good. To keep the argument consistent, the conclusion therefore ought to be: Evil doesn't exist because it's only a term we use to describe the absence of good.
You may wish to claim that good is the presence of God in men's hearts, but in that case you'll have launched a whole new debate, not finished one.
Ini kelanjutan dari sebelumnya. "Evil" (kejahatan) adalah lawan dari "good" (kebaikan). Keberadaan kejahatan dan kebaikan tidak ada hubungannya dengan eksistensi "God" (Tuhan). Dan kalau mau dibalikin dengan cara bodoh yang sama, maka Tuhan pun tidak ada, yang ada hanyalah 'ketiadaan kejahatan'. Ikan kribo lagi.
Augustine's theodicy
Albeit thoroughly butchered in the above instance, the argument as a whole is a classic example of what's known in Christian apologetics as a theodicy — a defense of the proposition that God can be understood to be all-good and all-powerful despite having created a world in which evil exists. This particular form of theodicy, based on the idea that evil is to good as darkness is to light (the former, in each case, supposedly being reducible to the absence of the latter), is usually credited to Augustine of Hippo, who first laid out the argument some 1600 years ago. God didn't create evil, Augustine concluded; evil enters the world — which is to say, good departs from it — via man's free will.
Augustine's theodicy opens up an even bigger can of philosophical worms — the problem of free will vs. determinism — but we needn't go there. Suffice it to say that even if one finds the free will loophole persuasive, it doesn't prove that God exists. It only proves that the existence of evil isn't inconsistent with the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity.
Augistine's theodicy adalah sebuah argumen klasik tentang pembenaran keberadaan Tuhan walaupun kejahatan ada di dunia, yaitu dengan alasan 'free will' atau kehendak bebas. Singkat kata, keberadaan kejahatan tidak konsisten dengan 'mahakuasa' dan 'mahabaik'.
Einstein and religion
From everything we know about Albert Einstein, all this scholastic navel gazing would have bored him to tears. As a theoretical physicist he found the order and complexity of the universe awe-inspiring enough to call the experience "religious." As a sensitive human being he took a profound interest in questions of morality. But none of this, to him, pointed in the direction of a supreme being.
"It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image," he explained when asked about the religious implications of relativity. "For this reason, people of our type see in morality a purely human matter, albeit the most important in the human sphere."
"Hal ini tidak membawa kita pada langkah membentuk makhluk seperti-tuhan dalam gambaran kita," ia menjelaskan ketika ditanya tentang impilikasi religius dari relativitas. "Untuk alasan ini, orang-orang dari jenis kita melihat dalam moralitas adalah persoalan manusia sepenuhnya, hal terpenting di ranah manusia sekalipun."
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