Posted on 05/13/2008 9:08:59 AM PDT by liberallarry
"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."
"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power (my emphasis). Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, ... Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Many threads
Sorry. Should have searched before posting.
With all due respect, Einstein is no different from others have reject their family religion. He dismisses what he half understands.
Science has a problem with the concept of time. So they postulate a new universe for each moment, a whole new universe, universes unnumbered, innumerable. These many threads are a model of the multiverse model.
Which he, as a liberated Jew, uncritically appropriated.
Had he studied scripture in depth the way he studied physics, I dare say he would have had a different viewpoint.
You could use a little more humility. No. A whole lot more.
Which he, as a liberated Jew, uncritically appropriated.
I'm not sure that "uncritically" is correct. Einstein was a very thoughtful person, and not only about physics. Admittedly, he wasn't the best judge of political things, but he had read quite a bit of philosophy...
It goes to show that intelligence has no bearing on faith. Some of the smartest and dumbest people have faith, or don’t.
So smart yet so dumb...
Stupid is as stupid does...
He has more understanding now, sadly for him.
I heard that he was a mediocre violin player at best, but he enjoyed playing for the relaxation of it.
You assume that such choices are made after long study. They seldom are. Bertram Russell became an atheist as much because he wanted to be like his dead father as because of what he read as a precocious boy in his grandfather’s library. He tells us as much.
Einstein was every bit as good a philosopher as he was a scientist. He understood traditional religion and dismissed it as primitive, ignorant superstition. He found reason and experiment to be much better ways of describing reality.
But unlike athiests he didn't turn science into a new religion. He was amazed by its power and never deluded himself into believing that he was anywhere close to fully comprehending the world we live in.
Are we sure this letter is not a forgery?
One of the more memorable Einstein quotes is
“God does not roll dice with the universe”.
Heh. You can’t recognize calling Einstein stupid as facetious, and you’re telling me I don’t understand!
Not many Jews are up on politics from what I’ve been reading for years. Benjamin Netanyahu is one of them that gets it.
I bet Einstein is the smartest guy in hell.
He did cheat on his wife...tsk tsk.
I chose your post as a vehicle to say what I said, as a general response to many other posts. My apologies if I misunderstood you.
oh well if einstein said it it must be true. Yawnnnnn
I’d be willing to bet he has a different opinion now.
IIRC Einstein wrote that as a child of 11 or 12 he composed songs to God. It appears that as an adult he was essentially an atheist.
I don't see it that way. He rejected traditional religion but didn't replace it with another, all-encompassing view. He pursued science because - as he said - he had no choice. It's what came naturally to him, what he thought about day and night, what fascinated him. He really was amazed at what could be learned about the world we inhabit by pursuing thought and experiment.
I don't think he ever claimed that he understood anything beyond what could be demonstrated by experiment and always thought that the power of mathematics bordered on the miraculous.
He was too pre-occupied understanding that the phenomenon of gravitation is a manifestation of the bending of the space-time continuum around a mass.
“B>Atheism: The belief that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs.”
So the universe, by its very existence, proves the existence of God? Heavy. Okay, but then, is this the best He could do? I tend to agree with Woody Allen’s famous remark, that if there is a God, the worst thing you can say about Him is that basically He is an underachiever.
Einstein and the Mind of God (excerpt)
Do you believe in God? “I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages.
The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is.
That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2007/04/einstein_and_the_mind_of_god.html
But yet that elusive Unified Field theory still eluded Mr. Einstein. Perhaps if he had just looked a little bit closer...
I’m a geologist, or was in former life before becoming a lawyer, and I can at least see why some people can look at a rock and think that maybe if a bunch of chemicals together got mixed together by coincidence, and applied some heat and pressure, you could produce a rock, by coincidence.
But the evolution theory is the same for humans, a bunch of chemicals, that had their origin the big bang, got mixed together, to produce a human, with all of its complexities. We are just a bunch of very sophisticated rocks.
But for a coincidence, I could have been a basalt.
And I have no soul, because under their theory, there is no soul.
Neither of which made him the least bit qualified to talk on matters of theology and the sciences like archaeology which have gone a long way towards providing a material, tangible, empirical support for the claims of the Bible.
Perhaps I'm just a cranky old coot, but I look on philosophy from the Enlightenment on as little more that a systematic means by which to self-justify complete nonsense through excessive verbiage. In short, modern philosophy is not a path to knowledge, and the fact that Einstein was well-versed in it means little. Being a premiere physicist doesn't make him qualified on these subjects either.
Einstein was a good physicist, and a smart guy, but that doesn't mean I'd take his word about what the weather will be like over the word of the blow-dried, bonded-teeth pretty boy on the TV.
In a pristine state, without Man, the universe is a well-balanced thing of beauty, as anyone who has looked at a night sky will tell you. Man was devinely given freewill, to choose good or evil. This does not lessen the beauty or perfection of the Creation, but introduces a random factor capable of bringing about great joy or great pain to humankind.
If I rent a house to someone and they trash the place, I don't blame the person who designed and built the house. Likewise, I cannot blame God because His creations, given the free choice to do so, so often make selfish choices that make the world appear imperfect.
In the end, if I make bad choices for myself and blame God, it is no more intellectually honest than Adam saying, "the woman made me it it, Lord!"
The soul is a metaphysical construct, not a hard physical construct that can be shown to another human being.
I disagree w/ that. I've read several of his philosophic papers and they are very pedestrian, w/ notthing really to recommend them other than the author's reputation.
Which is why his viewpoints on God are not particuarly insightful or even interesting.
He called to his wife: "Dear, come here quickly! I've figured it out!"
Mrs. Einstein entered, and asked what the fuss was about.
"I've got it!" Einstein exclaimed. "E equals mc cubed!"
"Albert, mc cubed?" Mrs. E responded. "Haven't I told you not to drink and derive?"
You clearly didn't take any biology classes. Or if you did, you didn't learn anything from them. Evolutionary theory does not just say, "but for a coincidence [you] could have been a basalt."
The heart of evolution is natural selection, and there are no "coincidences" in natural selection.
No, no, no, you’re missing the point. You are looking at the theory of evolution from the point after the initial blue green algae that is the grandfather of us all (under Darwinian theory), while I am looking several steps prior to that point. At some point, some carbon elements went to the formation of rocks, while some carbon elements made their way to organic formation, all by coincidence. After the big bang, and matter is collecting at different sites throughout the universe, somehow by coincidence some elemental matter was separated out to form rocks, and others to form the elemental composition of living organisms. All by happenstance.
So, as I was saying, with no sovereign intervention, the formation of rocks and humans (in the big picture) are the same, matter from the big bang collected to form more complex structures, and the lucky ones got to be more like us, and the unlucky ones more like basalts. It has nothing to do with natural selection.
Oh, yeah, I remember the dude with the “on the backs of crystals” argument for the initial formation of life from non-life.
Very plausible argument!
Just like all the rules of the universe being set to within a gnat’s hair in order for the earth to be exactly where it is at the exact necessary distance from the sun with its exact moon necessary for life, with a sun of just the right class and intensity and sitting exactly the right distance from the galactic core between spiral arms of the right kind of galaxy so that we can live and observe the rest of the universe.
On the backs of crystals.
Just as Babe Ruth concentrated on hitting a speeding baseball.
Newton looked at things differently, largely because he wasn’t surrounded by people who rejected religion. Our peers shape the opinions of even the best of us.
thanks for the link, I’ll take a look at it later.
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