sounds as if Einstein was a deist. Believed in a Higher Power or Creative Intelligence, but didn’t think it participated in worldly affairs.
I’ve found that astronomers and physicists are more open towards a deity than biologists. I have read that, in Einstein’s case, creative intelligence was the only possible way to explain how such cosmic marvels could exist.
I’ve always wondered why it seems so important for people to have labels attached to their beliefs.
Very interesting and worthy of future study. Thanks!!
FYI!!!
If we didn’t ask Einstein what he believed in life, why try to squeeze it out of his dead bones now? Does it even matter? He can not know anymore than the garbage man. He too merely had his opinion.
He was a great physicist though. RIP.
Home run.
Even if in the end we don’t agree with everything Spinoza writes, or even any of it, its fascinating to watch someone try to get his arms around some of the same issues we may be trying to understand ourselves. If in the end I see him heading off in a direction I’m not going, its still gain for me.
As for Einstein, its hard not to love the guy.
Sometimes people make the mistake of trying to understand just so much of someone’s philosophy so as to be able to dismiss it, and him. Rather, it should be approached like a conversation over late night tea. That always seems to be your approach.
Really good job.
Placemark...
snip: We also know that Einstein was a “classical” causal determinist and scientific realist. He was prepared to defend Newton’s strict causality to the dying breath.
As the emminent historian of science Stanley Jaki wryly noted, though Newton was a Christian, he was not Christian enough to avoid falling into a worshipful view of the laws he had discovered. Hence Newton unwittingly set the stage for mechanism, a sort of deterministic ‘quiet pantheism.’
Determinism is modernity’s word for the ‘Fates.” In the time of Aristotle, men believed that long before one’s birth, the Fates had already ‘determined’ whether one would be freeman or slave, king or baseborn. In short, the lives, actions-—and even the thoughts-—of all men were fully caused and determined by the gods, fates, planets.
Essentially, man was born ‘good’ but ‘caused’ by unseen forces of nature to do ‘bad things.’ In this view, free will is absent and man’s conscience a sadistic trick played by the gods.
In ‘Confessions,’ St. Augustine observes that when men were ‘caused’ to sin they sought absolution from the astrologers—the scientists of their day—who would tell them, “it was Venus here, or Saturn there.” Evil-doing was thus transferred onto the planets, gods, etc.
In this view of things, the vast majority of people were fated to be subhumans while a small number of ‘lucky’ ones were fated to be kings, philosophers, and so on.
Determinism is always elitist. It panders to pride. No less does Einstein’s determinism pander to his pride. How ‘lucky’ for Einstein to be ‘fated’ with freedom and brilliant thinking. Oh but how ‘unlucky’ for murderers, and the ‘not’ brilliant.
An accusation of malice is not being leveled against Einstein. Rather it is most likely that Einstein is guilty of not thinking through to the logical consequences of the ideas he adhered to.