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Tuesday May 13, 2008
James Randerson, science correspondent
The Guardian article :

"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. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

The letter will go on sale at Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair on Thursday and is expected to fetch up to £8,000. The handwritten piece, in German, is not listed in the source material of the most authoritative academic text on the subject, Max Jammer's book Einstein and Religion.

One of the country's leading experts on the scientist, John Brooke of Oxford University, admitted he had not heard of it.

Einstein is best known for his theories of relativity and for the famous E=mc2 equation that describes the equivalence of mass and energy, but his thoughts on religion have long attracted conjecture.

His parents were not religious but he attended a Catholic primary school and at the same time received private tuition in Judaism. This prompted what he later called, his "religious paradise of youth", during which he observed religious rules such as not eating pork. This did not last long though and by 12 he was questioning the truth of many biblical stories.

"The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression," he later wrote.

In his later years he referred to a "cosmic religious feeling" that permeated and sustained his scientific work. In 1954, a year before his death, he spoke of wishing to "experience the universe as a single cosmic whole". He was also fond of using religious flourishes, in 1926 declaring that "He [God] does not throw dice" when referring to randomness thrown up by quantum theory.

His position on God has been widely misrepresented by people on both sides of the atheism/religion divide but he always resisted easy stereotyping on the subject.

"Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him," said Brooke. "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."

Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Brooke said that Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

When all can function as one, then the one can function to the betterment of all.
Any assertion that one is better than another is the assertion that all cannot function as one and the eventual denial of the progression towards totality.

Man, I'm just curious... Are those words from you or did you quote someone?

The physical behaviour of the universe may simply be a system that eventually defines itself as an absolute through all the possible relationships of it's sum parts and dilating it's entirety into a single variable capable of upholding all possible relationships.

And that variable will ultimately be compared to itself on some level which inevitably leads to a new dimension and new possible dimensional relationships.

Although I am no expert on anything.

I believe that the universe is some how interwoven with mathmatics

Posted by AncientMuse
Well folks.... I believe this ridiculous debate over whether or not Einstein believed in a creator has finally come to an end once and for all !

It's about bloody time....

I believe this ridiculous debate over whether or not Einstein believed in a creator has finally come to an end once and for all

Einstein hated, he absolutely hated that science was being used to find bigger and better ways to kill people we couldn't see eye to eye with.

Ironically, both psychoanalysis and relativity are discussed in the Jewish religion.

The calculations of Jacob's journeys doesn't appear to add up, and appear to show that one journey took Jacob far too short a time to be possible, and is explained by a "Kfitzat HaDerech", a "compression of the road", as if the road itself compressed into a shorter space, that allowed Jacob to make the journey faster, relative to us. There are other examples of extensions of objects, as if the objects became longer. This sounds suspiciously like Einstein's relativity.

After I spent a few years in Yeshiva, I read the introduction to one of Freud's books. I think it was The Interpretation of Dreams. At the bottom, Freud wrote that he couldn't understand why the Rabbis never taught anything about psychology. I creased up at that point, because there was so much of Talmudic Law that was based on psychology, that it would be really difficult in avoiding it.

What Freud and Einstein also both had in common was that they came from Germany. It was well-known that German Jews were mostly in the German Reform movement, that re-explained Jewish tradition in terms of German philosophy, and ignored much of traditional Jewish sources of philosophy. Einstein even went to a Catholic school. Neither appeared to have much contact with Jewish religious intellectual philosophy as part of their education.

So I really can only wonder what they would have made of religion if they had actually learned about their own religion in even a tenth as much depth as they devoted to Physics and Medicine.

I believe this ridiculous debate over whether or not Einstein believed in a creator has finally come to an end once and for all

You would think so, wouldn't you? But people will continue quote mining and claiming their out of context quotes are proof of Einstein's belief in a Christian god, or even "intelligent design". Dogma is a tough nut to crack.

What I find most interesting about this debate is how much importance is placed on what Einstein believed. It's a rather fallacious appeal to authority IMHO.

'.....It isn't "quote mining" (implies a deceitful process by which the quoted person is presented as believing something they actually didn't)....

what does IMHO mean?

Personally, I could care less what Einstein (or anyone else for that matter) thought about whether there was a deity or not. That might be why it annoys me so to have people continually making this irrelevant appeal to authority in various ways.

to appeal to Einstein to support a point in religion would be to make an irrelevant appeal to authority. Einstein was an expert in physics, not religion. However, even if he had been a rabbi, to appeal to Rabbi Einstein as evidence that God exists would still be an irrelevant appeal to authority because religion is by its very nature a controversial field. Not only do religious experts disagree about fundamental matters of religion, many people believe that religion itself is false. Appealing to non-experts as if they were experts, or appealing to experts in controversial fields, as evidence for a belief, are equally irrelevant to establishing the correctness of the belief.

most of us it is obvious that humans come from humans, dogs from dogs, flies from flies, etc.