The value of Einstein’s mistakes

I enjoyed Steven Weinberg’s article except for the not-so-subtle knock on religion at the beginning, where he refers to “other supposed paths to truth,” and the subhead, “Science sets itself apart from other paths to truth by recognizing that even its greatest practitioners sometimes err.” If the point of the article is to show the superiority of science over other “supposed paths,” Weinberg confuses the issue by ending with the claim that Einstein “made no mistakes” in his decisions about “great public issues,” including his opposition to militarism, his refusal to support the Stalinist Soviet Union, and his enthusiastic Zionism. Since none of those public issues are ones in which science alone can provide answers, how did Einstein achieve such infallible knowledge about them without relying on paths to truth other than science? With all due respect for his undoubted genius in science, I think Weinberg’s hostility to religion is blinding him to errors in elementary logic.