Posted on 04/09/2007 9:19:00 AM PDT by bamahead
He was slow in learning how to talk. "My parents were so worried," he later recalled, "that they consulted a doctor."
.........
It may seem logical, in retrospect, that a combination of awe and rebellion made Einstein exceptional as a scientist. But what is less well known is that those two traits also combined to shape his spiritual journey and determine the nature of his faith....he rejected at first his parents' secularism and later the concepts of religious ritual and of a personal God who intercedes in the daily workings of the world. But the awe part comes in his 50s when he settled into a deism based on what he called the "spirit manifest in the laws of the universe" and a sincere belief in a "God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists."
.........
You accept the historical existence of Jesus? "Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life."
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."
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
I don't do many religious posts, but I thought this was worth sharing. I definitely not what you'd call a true believer in theories like Intelligent Design, but this was definitely an interesting viewpoint.
As did his friend Neils Bohr..
Toynbee said Hindus were Spinozists before Spinoza.
Maybe Einstein was Hinjew.
Thank you for this great post...
Sure! It was one of those reads that really got my wheels turning on a Monday morning.
Coffee doesn’t seem to be working very well today ;)
“well, they cant possibly be ‘real’ scientists then, right?”
Nor can Gregor Johann Mendel, Austrian botanist and Roman Catholic priest, who established Mendel’s law, the basis of the modern scientific theory of heredity.
The “know-nothings” who believe in evolution will never admit that a large percentage of the giants of science were Christians. For them, history begins with their prophet, Darwin, and they are as zealous and close-minded as those who follow Mohammed.
I am going to pass this on to my minister. He often talks about faith and science.
A Christian astrophysicist friend of mine (Dr. Hugh Ross) knows Hawking personally and described to me several years ago Hawking's spiritual journey. Hugh said Hawking's wife (Jane?) is a Christian who prayed unceasingly for Steven's salvation but was ever thwarted. Sadly, they have since divorced. I don't have anything more recent.
I’ve corresponded with him indirectly, through the library staff in faxes years ago, but the topic of his religious beliefs was never a topic. I guess I’m getting old, to be interested more in his faith than his physics. But then, isn’t it all cosmology in the end? I think I’ll add him to my prayer list.
BTTT
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.
-Albert Einstein (The World as I See It, 1949
How about giving your minister this quaote also
The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the rampant growth of the so-called Theosophy and Spiritualism, is for me no more than a symptom of weakness and confusion. Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.
The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. The religion which based on experience, which refuses dogmatic. If there’s any religion that would cope the scientific needs it will be Buddhism....
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
Immortality? There are two kinds. The first lives in the imagination of the people, and is thus an illusion. There is a relative immortality which may conserve the memory of an individual for some generations. But there is only one true immortality, on a cosmic scale, and that is the immortality of the cosmos itself. There is no other.
— Albert Einstein, quoted in Madalyn Murray O’Hair, All the Questions You Ever Wanted to Ask American Atheists (1982) vol. ii., p. 29
Had to add this in also. Seem like Albert liked Buddhism the best.
“Seem(s) like Albert liked Buddhism the best.”
This is the impression I got also! Maybe he was a Buddhist in a previous life!
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