| What Einstein REALLY thought about religion....
Posted: 5/17/2008 4:34:48 PM |
Could any scientist worth his salt really take the idea of a 'god' off the table?
Actually, yes. The largest percentage of atheists in the States is among scientists. I doubt that their credibility as scholars is related to their beliefs.
But look at the question of whether a supreme being created the universe. If your answer is yes, you believe that He did, then you are faced with exactly the same question. Then who created God? If your answer to that is that he's always existed, then to a scientist isn't it just as likely that the universe in some form always existed?
So that's how anyone, not necessarily a scientist, can in their opinion take God off the table.
Besides, scientists require proof, of which there is none by the metrics they would use to prove that He does exist.
Quoting Einstein:
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses
These particular words to me do not refer to simply religious verse....However, it should not matter what Einstein thought; everyone has their own beliefs and, genius or not, he was as much in the dark about these matters as the rest of us. | |
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| What Einstein REALLY thought about religion....
Posted: 5/17/2008 4:54:57 PM | I read that Einstein was classified as an INTP personality making him an intuitive thinker. These beliefs seem actually quite in-line with a lot of intuitive thinkers. Basically, he'd have this need to learn and was adept and thinking at things in a conceptualized big picture way then applying rational logic to those thoughts without letting his feelings, fears, etc. get overly involved in interpretation.
I would trust his interpertations because they would not be based on superstitious beliefs. It goes against the nature of that personality.
The purpose of the stories in the bible is not to idolize those in the stories but for people to learn morals from them. Morals, which in many cases there are very rational and psychologically sound reasoning why its good to instill in people if you want to co-exist in a society. We take for granted now many of these rules. At the time when people were starting to live in larger societies though, it would have been necessary to establish these rules.
If you spend anytime at all looking at different religions, you see a lot of similarities that are hard to dismiss which in many ways, make those that follow one religion no different than those who follow another if you are looking at in terms of how things work in the big picture of the way a society functions.
If Einstein changed his perspective about religion, I'd say it probably had to do with his own (not any religious doctrine) beliefs by seeing the elegance he saw in the Universe. It was a universe not everyone could see so he'd have to basically come up with his own rule book as to how he thought a greater authority applied to all that.
From Einstein's perspective, the intelligence level of many probably seemed childish. When measured to his own, it probably was. Not everyone had his gift of vision and could make his rationalizations. They need rule books/guides/...bibles...to explain it to them in a way they can understand and digest.
P.S. I also think that Einstein would have been drawn to Buddhism. I think the connections between balance and systems would have been very fascinating to him.
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| What Einstein REALLY thought about religion....
Posted: 5/18/2008 2:59:50 AM |
he was as much in the dark about these matters as the rest of us.
Which is exactly my point.
No matter how deep you go, from a human perspective there's always another level.
What's beyond space? what are quarks made of? If god exists, who created him? etc etc
scientists require proof, of which there is none by the metrics they would use to prove that he does exist.
There is also none to prove that he doesn't so like I say, if you discount the possibility all together then you're just being intellectually dishonest and science becomes about egos, trying to prove things to self rather than find the truth. | |
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| What Einstein REALLY thought about religion....
Posted: 5/18/2008 4:44:25 AM | I don't know what Einstein's true beliefs on religion were because I'm not him, and frankly it doesn't matter to me, but it looks by his writings that he did not believe, that he felt that God was created by superstitious humans.
But why should it matter what he thought to a religious person?
Also, the idea that no intelligent person can discount the idea that there is a God is absurd. You're setting up a situation where you can never be wrong. If proof one day surfaces proving that there is a God, then, great, you're right, but let's pretend there is no God, which is why there has been no proof of him. You're saying that your hypothesis of his existence can never been proven wrong because there will always exist the possibility of proof surfacing one day. You could use that argument for the existence of anything for which there is no proof.
About your unanswered questions, that's all they are are unanswered questions. Maybe there is nothing beyond space because it is infinite, or maybe it's not and there is something else, but not having answers to questions does not necessitate the need for there to be a God. It could be that we just do not yet know the answers. | |
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| What Einstein REALLY thought about religion....
Posted: 5/29/2008 10:09:05 PM | he did however find god before his death.
Did he??? That's good, cause the old codgers been lost for quite some time now.
He's interesting and all but I'll take what he says with a grain of salt since he couldn't be bothered to comb his hair
That was always the issue about Al with me as well.
um ... hate to say it but even einstein made mistakes sometimes... the possibility of time travel
And yet, even to this day, it is still being researched - So maybe he was on to
something.
By the way, don't they travel back in time in Star Trek? Something 'bout slingshotting around the sun wasn't it? Spock must be Einstein reincarnated. | |
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| What Einstein REALLY thought about religion....
Posted: 5/30/2008 9:29:23 PM | I like this letter as well Caffeine7. I've been reading the responces and many seem to give way to their own way of thinking about this.
1. He did not convert before his death.
2. Scientists don't have a need for taking god off the table because god was never there to begin with.
3. Go to the Nobel prize website, http://nobelprize.org/ and listen to the winners. Many are jewish ancestry and most have no belief in a god. By most I think it is something like 87%
Examples:
Steven Weinberg says science doesn't prove the nonexistence of god it just makes it possible to have no belief in one. Abe Frommen when asked about god, stuttered because the question took him off guard, says that if the interviewer hadn't asked he himself would not have brought up the question because god is irrelevant and did in fact dismiss the question offhand.
I find it fascinating h0w people make up stories that are more about their own hope than about reality. Science marches on and many scientists, and by many I mean Most as in 90% , are actively working to bring real science to the people. Not some new age nonsense. Many people while being well meaning also lack the real discipline to pursue any real endevour that requires reading and math. Below is the Beyond Belief series held at The Salk Institute in San Diego. Give it a look. Most of the downloads are one hour. I especially liked Carolyn Porco director of the Cassini project and Harold Kroto and Neils de Grazzi Tyson as well as most others. The first is from 2006 the second 2007
http://thesciencenetwork.org/BeyondBelief/
http://thesciencenetwork.org/BeyondBelief2/speakers/ | |
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| What Einstein REALLY thought about religion....
Posted: 5/30/2008 10:23:22 PM | "Science oriented people" worship Einstein in much the same way Muslims worship Mohammad- they give the guy way too much credit for putting the last brick into place on a house that others had been building for a while.
And is it turns out his brick was not as final as people might have thought it would be.
I wouldn't listen to Einstein's ideas on religion any more than I would that baboon Richard Dawkins  | |
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| What Einstein REALLY thought about religion....
Posted: 5/31/2008 9:12:14 AM | | For what I read Enstein was more of a humanist and he believed that if there was a God it was a god that didn't involve himself in the affairs of mankind. I wonder if his religious beliefs, like many people change within a limited set of parameters depending on how his life was evolving? | |
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| What Einstein REALLY thought about religion....
Posted: 5/31/2008 12:38:21 PM | Of all the quotes I've read of his, I never saw phrases like 'animistic', 'subtilised', 'highly manifold', 'monotheism', 'animistic', 'monopolisation'. I think his letter needed one more interpretation.
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| What Einstein REALLY thought about religion....
Posted: 6/2/2008 3:32:35 PM |
Could any scientist worth his salt really take the idea of a 'god' off the table?
They can't take the concept of a supernatural force of any sort ultimately off the table, but much like the idea of Zeus controlling lightning from the 5th dimension or a teapot floating in orbit around Mars, these ideas seem to have no way to falsify them and the way the universe as we know it works is devoid of their presence. Everything we can find functions according to some set of physical rules and any time someone claims to have experienced a supernatural event they have yet to bring forward evidence that can be shown as functioning outside the realm of physics. When your god's power and might is shown through feats like flooding the world or ascending someone into the sky without physical help but there's been no such thing happening since we've been able to measure and video how such things would happen then that lends a lot of credence to the idea that such things were made up and possibly hoaxed. Hell, even bringing someone back from the dead isn't the end-all be-all it used to be. Doctors who practice physical and empirically studied medicine bring people back from the dead, heal the blind, cure the lame, and all manner of other things that were seen as miraculous in the biblical sense 150 years ago. | |
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