I guess the letter speaks for itself, but I doubt that Einstein got the last laugh.
Posted on 05/12/2008 6:22:59 PM PDT by Aristotelian
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." So said Albert Einstein, and his famous aphorism has been the source of endless debate between believers and non-believers wanting to claim the greatest scientist of the 20th century as their own.
A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument - or at least provoke further controversy about his views.
Due to be auctioned this week in London after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, the document leaves no doubt that the theoretical physicist was no supporter of religious beliefs, which he regarded as "childish superstitions".
Einstein penned the letter on January 3 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since.
In the letter, he states: "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."
Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel's second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God's favoured people.
"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
I guess the letter speaks for itself, but I doubt that Einstein got the last laugh.
“God does not play dice” was Einstein’s retort to quantum uncertainty. He believed his own beliefs, and just as many people of faith did, scorned the beliefs of others.
Doubt is fine, wait till some idiot shows up and claims to know it...
At least he tried to find some answers. Interesting article.
And this is the man who has replaced Moses in the popular imagination as the “ultimate Jew.”
He was also wrong about quantum physics.
Nobody’s perfect.
“Who are you to tell God what to do?” retorted Neils Bohr.
Einstein believed that quantum mechanical uncertainty was merely a result of limited observability, not fundamental physical laws. He devised clever experiments to test this view (”hypothesis” is the formal word.) Unfortunately for Einstein (and probably to the delight of a playful God) the experiments demonstrated that uncertainty is fundamental, not an artifact of limited observability.
Jury is still out on quantum physics.
Quantum physics is indisputably useful.
However it still might be a statistical shadow of physics that we cannot observe. You can’t prove a negative.
It hasn’t been that long (decades) since quantum uncertainty was even conceived. There may yet be underlying laws discovered.
Albert was a committed atheist. In fact he let that belief encroach on his science by clinging to a static universe absent a beginning for far too long while the evidence pointed in the other direction. Ergo, his cosmologial constant.
Why would Einstein be an authority about God?
The experiments seem to preclude any possibility of anything other than fundamental uncertainty. But you are correct, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio.
“Why would Einstein be an authority about God?”
The money post of this thread.
Declaring the search for quantum related anomalies over eh? Must be nice. They should just stop the experiments now that they know everything.
That is still to be seen. No experiment to this day, bragging by various experimenters notwithstanding, has violated Einstein's locality, thus Einstein was right on QM so far.
Since the serious experimental attempts to violate Bell's inequalities have been going on since 1960s, that pursuit is increasingly starting to look like the one for perpetuum mobile before the laws of thermodynamics were discovered.
Einstein did not seem to expend a lot of thought on philosophical musings. His greatest successes were achieved by considering what was physically observable. Einstein made statements that could be seen as mild supportive of intelligent design. Einstein never strayed far from what he knew best.
BTW, while not a religious Jew, he was a Zionist, before the Nazis came to power. He never visited the Soviet Union despite numerous invitations. He stated that he did not wish to appear to lend legitimacy the regime. He also only left the United States once after coming here in 1933. On that he occasion he and his wife took a cruise to Berumda, where they spent one day applying for an immigration visa and reentered on an immigration visa so they could become eligible for citizenship. He could have all the waivers and favors he wanted, but he wanted go through the process.(He originally entered on tourist visa, but on the advice of friends in Germany did not return to Germany.)
He also publicly and openly opposed a nuclear freeze in the 1950's, arguing that leaving the field open to the Soviets would result in certain disaster. He was nowhere near as naive as some of his would-be acolytes.
For the same reason Susan Sarandon is an authority about Iraq.
One thing I did think tho the show didn't say it was that he was sort of a scumbag in his personal life.
C.S. Lewis was walking in a cemetery with a friend. They came upon a maker that read: "all dressed up & no place to go." Lewis remarked:"he wishes now that was true."
Do you claim to know that all such claims are false?
Yet I have read Einstein’s statement against angry atheists and espousing a reverance for the “mystery” behind the universe. Einstein’s rejection of religions is not necessarily a rejection of God, or at least the possibility of God.
Man is neither the beginning nor the end of all that is or will be. Nor is man capable of deciphering the mysteries of existence. All questions lead to answers which are inconceivable. We cannot comprehend the incomprehensible.
For us, here and now, God is incomprehensible.
Why couldn’t Einstein balance his checkbook?
(He never claimed to be an authority on God.)
If he is honest, says Lewis, the materialist will have to admit that his own ideas are merely the “epiphe-nomenon which accompanies chemical or electrical events in a cortex which is itself the by-product of a blind evolutionary process.” If all thoughts are merely the products of non-rational causes, this includes the materialist’s own thoughts. In other words, there is no reason according to materialism for materialism itself to be regarded as true.
No less for the expansion of the universe.
ping
Incomprehensible. Perhaps. But it is possible to "know" God. That knowledge comes by way of an open mind and a willingness to believe. Things occur in our lives that inform us of God's existence.
Ability to concentrate or OCD? I read somewhere that Einstein had a form of obsessive compulsive disorder and that he actually wore the same outfit every day. He had several copies of the same shirt, pants, etc., in his closet because he could not stand the thought of wasting any time thinking about what he would wear on any given day.
God’s existence isn’t in question.
I do this with my socks. They are all the same style, fabric, and color. I can't stand looking through the drawer trying to match socks. When I find one with a hole, I toss it knowing the drawer is full of matches. I still can't figure how gravity works.
I do this with my socks. They are all the same style, fabric, and color. I can't stand looking through the drawer trying to match socks. When I find one with a hole, I toss it knowing the drawer is full of matches. I still can't figure how gravity works.
Einstein made numerous contradictory statements on the matter. There is no reason to privilege this one. Most aeteists I know vacillate on the matter.
I know a lot of people who do that with socks. I like to think of it as a little bit of the Einstein in all of us, and probably the closest I’ll ever get.:)
The fact that people question it, indicates that it is. I happen to believe in God, but what do I know?
Einstein may have been smarter, but Moses was much wiser, realizing that God used Moses to transmit the most important information for man to get along with each other. Otherwise, man would be living like animals-stealing from each other, killing each other, and having sex with everyone and anything and everything. Dennis Prager had the most coherent treatise on this. Without Moses, man would never have progressed much beyond the caveman stage. And people like Gore and Obama would return mankind to the primitive stage by striking down Mosaic Law and restraint and replacing it with just Man’s Law.
Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists
I strongly doubt that a man who could say this -- "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." -- is a "committed atheist." Atheists do not believe in "mysteries." Nor do they seem to be particularly interested in "comprehensibility" in the sense Einstein seems to be using that word in this context.
I think you may be trying to pigeonhole Einstein. Take a clue from Prof. Brooke:
"Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him ... It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions ... but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion."
Albert was also a committed socialist, and actively campaigned for socialists.
Sounds like he was a deist but agnostic on--or against--organized religions (including atheism). Pure genius.
But I'll happily admit that I could be wrong and Albert was some sort of Deist. I just don't think the evidence leads there.
“The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
This comprehensibility fits right in with the Judeo-Christian, Abrahamic view of God.
God is good, consistent, and FAITHFUL. He is not capricious, as most other religions define their deities.
If He were capricious, it would be an exercise in futility to try to empirically discover the laws of the universe.
This is why all Modern Science developed in Western (Judeo-Christian based) cultures. It’s also why Islam completely stopped advancing in the 12th century - they had killed off or converted all that didn’t believe in Allah (”who must not be ‘chained’”).
Yes, he was that as well.
As RaMBa"M said, "Moses is the father of all wise men, both those that came before, and those that came after."
“It is the height of arrogance for man, Einstein or whomever, to claim that he, or any man, could understand the cosmos and all that is contained therein, given the time and capacity to observe and theorize.”
...and how dare Einstein even try to understand the world around him!!
“We cannot comprehend the incomprehensible.”
And for some the incomprehensible is even moreso....
jwalsh07, you wrote: "I could be wrong and Albert was some sort of Deist. I just don't think the evidence leads there."
The evidence would have to include his statement, above.
It is a completely non-doctrinal statement, unaffiliated with any particular religious creed. On that basis, I wouldn't try to "classify" Einstein in terms of any particular religious confession at all, or even Deism.
We do know that he often referred to "The Old One," and strongly identified with "The Tribe." It seems to me the spiritual impulse goes very deep in Einstein, and that he did believe in a Creator (that he does not define, perhaps being aware that to do so would be an exercise in anthropocentrism). I believe he just had little use for "religion" as we usually think of it, as being, perhaps, too human and thus subject to foolishness.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me jwalsh!
I so agree. Thank you so much, Mr. B, for your excellent post!
as=ask (sorry)
For the same reason Susan Sarandon is an authority about Iraq.
Who exactly do you two consider to be an "authority about God"?
Is one person's opinion more valid than another?
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