Posted on 12/04/2018 1:51:13 PM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
A letter written in German by Albert Einstein in 1954 is going under the gavel on Tuesday. Experts at Christie's auction house in New York estimate the so-called "God letter" could sell for up to $1.5 million (€1.3 million).
"This remarkably candid, private letter was written a year before Einstein's death and remains the most fully articulated expression of his religious and philosophical views," said Christie's in a statement.
The missive is referred to as the "God letter" because it addresses how Einstein felt about the characterization of God and Judaism in a then-recently published book on the subject by Eric Gutkind. Gutkind, like Einstein, was a German-born Jew who had fled the Nazis to the United States.
"The Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and in whose mentality I feel profoundly anchored, still for me does not have any different kind of dignity from all other peoples," writes Einstein.
"The word God is for me nothing but the expression of and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends,” Einstein tells Gutkind. "No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change anything about this."
Specifically, Einstein did not believe that if there was a God, he answered individual prayers and intervened directly in human affairs.
The "God letter" passed into the hands of Gutkind's heirs, who kept the letter until it was sold at auction in 2008 for $404,000.
Notes from Einstein routinely fetch high prices, the most expensive of which was a 1939 letter to then-US President Franklin Roosevelt. In that letter, Einstein described "the construction of extremely powerful bombs," thought to denote the beginning of the Manhattan Project. It sold in 2002 for $2.1 million.
(Excerpt) Read more at m.dw.com ...
This is far from a comprehensive description of Einstein’s views on God and the transcendent.
A much more accurate and richer understanding can be gained from the two chapters, written by Einstein, in Ken Wilber’s
“Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists.”
From the description:
“Quantum Questions collects the mystical writings of each of the major physicists involved in the discovery of quantum physics and relativity, including Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Planck. The selections are written in nontechnical language and will be of interest to scientists and nonscientists alike.”
On Amazon:
“As a child I received instruction in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene. 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.”
Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post, Oct 26, 1929
Don’t take what Mark? Why would your beliefs have any effect on me? Do Chinese laws effect your actions? Unless of course you live in China. I don’t live in your worldview. Your laws and theology don’t apply to me. Now, when our worldviews intersect, I hope your religion has informed you enough to ensure that you don’t kill or harm me or my family.
100%
I think you’re sorta right, but wrong in general. It would be more accurate to say he thought God incomprehensible by the scientific mind. Here’s a longer article by Einstein on the subject:
https://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
That essay is mainly about Einstein’s disbelief in a personal God, which is well known. To me he’s also proclaiming a sense of divinity, which I find find similar to Calvin’s sensus divinitatis.
Einstein doesn’t mention anything in this essay about his well known belief in determinism.
The essay was written in 1930. By the time of his death Einstein said he was an atheist.
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