Einstein Letter Goes on Sale 615
ErkDemon writes "For any Slashdotters who want a piece of frameable Einstein memorabilia, a letter from A.E. to Eric Gutkind goes on sale at Bloomsbury Auctions today (May 15th). The content of the letter mostly deals with Einstein's views on religion. (Einstein pronounces himself rather unimpressed by the whole idea and rejects it as "childish.") The Guardian has printed a translated excerpt from the letter."
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading it, you'd think this would stop the theists from repeatedly dragging the man unwillingly into their camp; but since this well-known remark...
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, that, and does anyone want to date these quotes? It seems very likely that his beliefs changed; after all, how many of us were born or raised atheist? It seems mostly something that you come to on your own -- having once believed, you start to have doubts, which eventually turn into disbelief.
Re:Views on Religion? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Views on Religion? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a good lesson here: Poetic/metaphoric language can get you in trouble when people take you too literally. The dice comment is regularly trotted out as "proof" of his religious convictions, but the later statements in which he unequivocally denies that he believes in God somehow get missed.
In any event, this is all a rather sad reverse ad hominem; whether or not Einstein believed in God has no bearing on whether or not God exists. But both theists and atheists try to "claim" Einstein, because having a genius on your side *seems* to add weight to your argument. It doesn't, but there you go.
Re:Views on Religion? (Score:5, Insightful)
When person A comes to visit his neighbour and sees him lying in a pool of blood and shrieks "Oh my God!", does that mean that person A is religious, too?
The word is pretty deeply rooted in the language, so even if you completely dismiss the concept of God, you may find yourself using the word more or less frequently.
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Re:Views on Religion? (Score:2, Insightful)
Metaphor, dude (Score:5, Insightful)
E.g., we may spew or quote stuff like "Mother Nature always sides with the hidden flaw" or "Mother Nature is a bitch", without actually believing that there is such a sentient entity. Or when Stalin said that "artillery is the god of war", chances are he didn't mean it literally.
E.g., you may have noticed quotes from Futurama's characters before on Slashdot. I'll take a wild guess that most of those people don't actually believe that Bender or Dr Zoidberg are real.
More importantly, look at the context in which he said that. There was _nothing_ theistic about it. Einstein's view of the world was based on the evidenced-based large-scale physics, where stuff is very deterministic. More importantly, there seemed to be no obvious way to reconcile relativity with quantum physics, so one or the other had to be false. Einstein obviously favoured his own relativity, and had plenty of experimental confirmation (at macro level) that it's correct.
If anything, it just shows that even really really smart people can be occasionally wrong, when talking about stuff outside their expertise domain.
But the crucial thing is that it was based on falsifiable evidence, not on some belief in a deity whose will is absolute and whose habits can be guessed. There was nothing inherently theistic about that belief.
Yes, he used the word "god". It was just a metaphor/anthropomorphisation of the universe. He could have just as well used "mother nature" or just personified the universe itself. It was just supposed to get the point across, not be some declaration of faith in a god.
Re:Views on Religion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can an atheist use the expression "The devil is in the details?"
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
The universe is self aware. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's as simple as this. The universe is completely in our collective minds. When I say our, I do not mean humans, I mean the collective self awareness of the universe.
That collective self awareness of the universe perceived the universe into existence. The big bang was the beginning of the universe(self awareness), becoming aware of itself.
Existence is self awareness. That which is self aware is all that is real in the universe. Everything else is just junk information, noise. If all self awareness in the universe dies, the universe itself will cease to exist.
Basically the universe only exists because there are self aware beings capable of perceiving it. The only thing real in the universe are the self aware beings. And God is the collective self awareness of the universe, the universal awareness, or universal soul, or universal mind, however you want to think about it.
Israel (Score:2, Insightful)
This probably goes a fair way to explaining why he turned down the offer to be the second president of Israel. To do that job I would suggest that a belief in a god who does concern himself with the fate and the doings of mankind is something of a prerequisite.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sorry, and I'm not buying it. You don't call the sane people "dis-paranoid", or "un-shizophrenic".
We don't "doubt". I "doubt" the christian god about as much as I "doubt" the flying spagetti monster, invisible pink elephants and moon-cheese. It's not a matter of "doubt", which is a negatively-loaded word and implies that there is some truth that could be believed. But in fact there's only a load of made-up bullshit. Not believing every shit someone came up with while on drugs isn't properly expressed with the word "doubt", and using that word indicates a tendency already.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
So to be clear here, what you are saying is that you have to be trained in religion to have an opinion on it? Surely this rules out 99% of theists out there today, pretty odd that they can't have a view.
The flip side of this is that no-one (theist or atheist) should have an opinion on science unless correctly trained. That no-one can have an opinion on the Law unless fully trained in the law and become a politician unless trained in politics.
Its a bit childish to refer to Einstein and saying "yeah see, proves it" but using his arguments (that religion is not rational for instance) certainly shouldn't be ruled out just because he was only a Nobel Prize winning physicist who revolutionised mankind's view of the universe. Philosophy of religion is the study of only a limited domain and it is a domain that has been reduced over the centuries by science, the best way to understand why religion is bunk is to read science books because they explain the universe much more effectively than "man with beard did it".
Enlightenment is the antidote to religion, and you don't get much more enlightened than Einstein.
Re:Do people still write letters? (Score:4, Insightful)
We already have a few historical emails about the creation of internet, spam, linux, and so on...
The mind of God (Score:3, Insightful)
And yet 50+ yrs after his death, religious philosophers, fellow scientists, and popular writers are all trying to understand what he meant by the phrase "The mind of God". So I hardly think "http://www.einstein-website.de/z_biography/credo.html">the personal philosophy of one of the great thinkers of the 20th century can be dismissed as inappropriate.
However I do agree with the rest of your post it's more entertaining to watch all sides trying to prove "Einstien is on their side".
Re:Absolutely not. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Absolutely not. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, is that what they teach you at school ? To start with bland empty made up statements ?
(not impressed)
Re:He just does not believe in the Christian God. (Score:2, Insightful)
He never said self-aware, nor did he suggest anything about how it was created. That's more Hawking's department, anyway.
So while there might not be a personal God, we do know that time is relative. If you travel at a faster speed time slows down, because distance shrinks. Now we have discovered non-locality and we see that distance itself is the illusion and that when an object is on the quantum level, distance ceases to exist.
You can't say the Big bang was random if nothing in the universe was an accident. If all events are caused, then even the big bang had to have a cause.
If the universe is nature, and nature is just self awareness, then the universe is self aware. Nature is not "nothing" or "space".
Re:Absolutely not. (Score:4, Insightful)
1. God is self awareness.
What is the basis for your core assumption ?
This means, life is real if it's aware of itself. Humans and most mammals are real.
Most mammals ? Which ones are unlucky enough not to make the cut ? Who decides ?
Where do reptiles and fish fit into your scheme ? Or, aren't they cute enough to have feelings ? Do the poor old insects get a raw deal as well ?
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Are people born under a white moon more likely to be X or Y ? That's not something astronomy confronts itself with. At best it answers the question when a white moon occurs. Astrology uses astronomy as a tool, to make their calendars and doesn't dispute the validity of it. The science they dispute the validity of is (mostly) biology and economics.
You will find most idiotic groupings disputing biology and economics, and little else. Socialism, islam, other cults
The problem with that is that every scientist has already decided on a camp. A real scientist (in the exact, positive sciences) has accepted 2 assumptions as the absolute truth :
1) miracles may or may not occur. However since neither presence nor absence of miracles has any shred of hope to ever be proved, we ASSUME in all scientific theories that they don't. Per definition a miracle is a non-repeateable event, and theories only discuss repeateable (and therefore hopefully one day predictable) events.
Science only studies "what happens when God's asleep" for lack of a better expression (I don't mean to imply that God ever sleeps for example).
2) Because of 1) Science will never either verify or cuonterproof a christian-style religion that's based on historical reports of miracles. It can't be done. Think about this : the evidence that Jesus walked over water is exactly as strong as the evidence Julius Caesar conquered Gaul. How then, to judge the relative truth of both events : simple. Don't. Just report them both, without prejudice and, like all historical events, preceded by : X believes Y. (note that in the case of Caesar's contest of Gaul, it's in the end also a case of believing).
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Er... all of us were born atheist. Many of us were later taught theism, and then some of us still later rejected that. Nobody is born believing in God, any more than they are born believing in Father Christmas.
Re:Do people still write letters? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
In case (a) we have some guy telling a story of how Jesus walked on water. In case (b) we have some guy telling a story of how Caesar conquered Gaul, plus coins found throughout France showing Caesar's image, plus Roman and Gaulish weapons of the period found throughout France, plus centuries of evidence in writing and in artefacts of continuous Roman occupation of Gaul which coincidentally begin at the time of Caesar.
And that's before we discuss the relative plausibility of the two written accounts we began with. One describes a man doing something exotically impossible, while the other describes a man doing something we know perfectly well that men do from time to time. Does that not make one far more likely to be a fiction than the other?
Re:Absolutely not. (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, you believe in magic. But we can easily experimentally verify this state of affairs.
I put you inside a dark room, completely and utterly dark, so that most of your perception is disabled. What you don't know is that there is a hole in the floor of the room : but no worries, nobody is aware of the hole, and it isn't aware of itself : so you won't fall through it.
Obviously if you do fall through : your "philosophy" is worthless and untrue : it failed a prediction.
Your philosophy is different in nothing from any ancient belief that you would call utterly stupid. They believed something that could be trivially disproven and "the world is only what you think about it".
Obviously it's not. The world exists independantly of you.
Re:Absolutely not. (Score:5, Insightful)
In your response please do keep in mind that unicorns are pretty and they can do anything they want.
Re:He just does not believe in the Christian God. (Score:3, Insightful)
The natural condition of all humans at birth and prior to indoctrination in or self-invention of Theism.
Honestly, it seems there's a silent majority of agnostics out there who would rather be left alone regarding religious matters. I also suspect a lot of people who claim to be atheist are agnostic, because it's only natural to play with ideas over time and not be quite as resolute as most attempt to appear when posting on internet forums.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
To imply that Einstein didn't think about his position and wasn't well read on the subject certainly appears to go against both his education and background as well as the writings and arguments he made on the topic.
If I want to know what is wrong with me, I ask a doctor not someone who studies the philosophy of illness, if I want to know what governs the universe then I'll ask a scientist over people who study the philosophy of religion. Einstein is an authority on what makes the universe tick, much more so than people who study religion.
So maybe the question is what authority do philosophers of religion have when talking about what created and governs the universe?
Re:Absolutely not. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:amused (Score:4, Insightful)
No? Einstein discovered some of the most important principles upon which the Universe is built; he revealed the strange nature of space and time and how the two are related, the equivalence of solid material things and abstract energy, the connection between the propagation of light and the principle of causality itself.
If there exists a creator, then Einstein's study of the creation has told us more about that creator than any prophet ever has.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Putting aside the fact that other notable Nobel Prize winners have managed to demonstrate brilliance in multiple fields (Currie for instance) this really is a crock. It is a classic insular mind argument that only the "blessed" are smart enough to understand all the complexities of religion, that it takes a huge amount of study to truly "understand the mind of god" and to understand the arguments of religion.
The reality is, as has been proven by science for thousands of years, philosophy of religion is a subject which is continually being undermined by science. Whether it be the concepts around how different religions consider the creation of man or on the position of the earth in the universe, philosophy of religion can argue all it likes that Abramic religions say "God did it directly" and "at the centre" but it is science who can say "Evolved from a common ancestor of today's apes" and "Just in some back-water solar system in a back-water galaxy".
It is science that questions religion, always has and always will, and it will be the "philosophers of religion" who condemn science for the presumption of argument whether than be condemning Socrates to death, Galileo to torture or Darwin to infamy.
Philosophy is an arts subject, its a purely academic subject, its certainly not "a full time job"
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
What science cannot disprove is a story that is redefined every time it is questioned, and fobs most stuff of to 'the mystery'. But anyone who can conduct some honest self questioning does not need science to prove/disprove it.
*I saw a study of it somewhere previously, but can't find the link, so don't take my word for it, check it out if you want to repeat it
Re:Absolutely not. (Score:2, Insightful)
Which means that if you don't accept the heuristic that "gee, I can seem to find rules governing my perceptions (e.g., apples seem to fall when unsupported), and I perceive things (e.g., people) that seem to discover rules as good as I do, even better sometimes--why, this means there's some sort of universe that follows rules and that I and others like me actually perceive", then you don't have any justification to believe "only my perceptions exist, and I am God".
(If you don't understand why, try to prove that the two statements mean _different_ things. In your proof, don't forget to state _when_ two statements about the world are different.)
Re:Well... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
So the point of this story is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, considering the off-kilter nature of genius as we know it, I wouldn't want to lay too much value on having some of the same ideals of other geniuses, or many other people for that matter.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
If this is true, why does he make a distinction between natural and spiritual? "Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity." It is clear here, that he sees that "the spiritual" is something other than "the natural." However, he believes that both can be experienced. If you mean by "super-natural" something that can not be experienced, then very few people believe in a supernatural.
From the article: "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.'"
This letter simply shows that Einstein disagreed with nearly everyone, Athiests, Christians and Jews. He had a simple and rather humble belief system and didn't really like his ideas to be misrepresented by people trying to prove a point.
I'm a Christian and I would have loved for Einstein to say, "Jesus did it all," but he didn't. He also didn't say, "God doesn't exist," or even that religion is childish as the article summary suggests. He simply said that he thought the legends in the bible were childish.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh wait, a civilization that hasn't invaded France. Nevermind.
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Re:Einstein was also wrong about many things. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why am I bothering to reply to something so obviously foolish....?
Physics is the study of the physical universe. God, as an entity, doesn't exist in it. Either
Personally I'm quite happy to accept that God is a real emergent property of human politics, and that, in that sense, God exists. By creating a God and persuading other people to believe in it you can extend hegemony over them, increasing your own political power; and people have done that for millenia. But if you want to argue that God created man, and not the other way around, then sorry, but you're out of your tree. It is not merely not rational; it is not possible.
Re:Views on Religion? (Score:1, Insightful)
On the other hand, it's a standard strategy of religion to remove all evidence of cultural heritage that contradicts or challenges their dogma - a modern example being the Taliban's use of artillery to decimate statues of Buddha throughout Afghanistan.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
The trouble is that the english language doesn't have any word that is widely used/recognised to describe someone who believes in a purely natural rather than supernatural world, so the ambiguous word "atheist" is normally used, which seems better to describe someone who has actively rejected god rather than the default position of someone non-indoctrinated who has no reason to label themself in such a negative/redundant manner.
I'd argue that "scientist" (i.e. ascribing to the scientific method of "theorize & verify") is a reasonable label for the naturalistic worldview, notwithstanding that some self-decribed scientists may also ascribe to religious views (which is really more a matter of holding multiple conflicting beliefs). Strictly speaking we don't really need a word to describe people who don't believe in or do things (consider how odd it would be to have a word to label someone as a disbeliever in father christmas, non-practitioner of kung-fu, etc) since that's the default condition, but in a religous society or in religous discussion it is useful to have a word to identity yourself as non-religious.
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:amused (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Repeat after me: Correlation != causation.
It is equally likely, if not more likely, that the people for whom more prayers were said were more seriously ill or injured to begin with. You don't generally get hundreds of people praying for someone who had an appendectomy, but when somebody is in a car wreck or has pancreatic cancer, a lot of people are praying for that person. Unless the study focuses on a single cause of hospitalization within a single age group, etc., there are too many other variables that would have more of an impact.
Further, there were studies done that have shown pretty conclusively that religious patients under the care of doctors who were dismissive of religion or ignored it entirely tended to fare worse than patients whose doctors and other care providers were willing to pray with them. Whether this is the power of prayer or the power of self suggestion is, of course, more a matter of philosophical debate rather than scientific debate.
Before you buy (Score:1, Insightful)