Einstein Letter Goes on Sale

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."

Views on Religion?

[LaskoVortex]

This is the same man who said "God does not play dice with the universe".

Re:Views on Religion?

[SanityInAnarchy]

He also said:

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.

And also:

I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

So in this case, he did not believe that the "lawful harmony of the world" could allow for randomness, or could itself be an emergent pattern from randomness.

Here's a question: Has he ever said anything about faith? Or about how God loves... anything? Or how God will do anything? That would be a clear mark of a man with religious convictions: "God will protect me," or even "In God we trust."

Instead, we get the equivalent of, really, "God bless you" when someone sneezes.

He just does not believe in the Christian God.

[elucido]

And honestly, I don't believe in the Christian God either. This does not mean the man did not believe in a God concept.

Einstein did not believe the universe was randomly generated, this means he believed in intelligent design whether or not it's a Christian God or just some self aware universe, he believed in a God.

Athiests believe the universe is a complete accident and that everything in the universe is random. Nothing Einstein has ever said in any of his writings support that he believes that the universe is random. All we see here is that he's not a Christian and perhaps he was drifting away from being a traditional Jew.

Do people still write letters?

[symes]

Einstein's letter raises another issue - do scientists, the great, good and so forth still write letters? My feelings are that people nowadays just type out emails or long journal articles. The letter writing industry seems to have disappeared - which would be a terrible shame. Letters written by big historical figures like Einstein provide important insights into their thinking that other forms of communication seem to lack.

Re:Well...

[Adhemar]

Spinoza didn't believe in a personal God either. In Ethica, his philosophical masterpiece, Spinoza says that God is "immanent" in nature, not some supernatural entity beyond the world, interfering or having feelings.

Spinoza's concept of Deus sive natura (the God from nature) does not fit in the concept that most people mean when they speak of God. Schopenhauer wrote that because Spinoza called the substance God, he created his own problem of people misunderstanding him. Schopenhauer thinks Spinoza used the term God to make his ideas less objectionable. If only Spinoza choose to call his God-concept by any other name, his ideas would be understood more frequently for what they are: atheism in awe for the Beauty of Nature and the Universe; not theism, or pantheism, etc.

Einstein has the same problem: he stated many times not to believe in a personal God; the quote from this letter is just one quote among many others, many times equally clear as in this letter. But because Einstein, like Spinoza, did use the term God (for instance in the dice comment), even if it meant something that falls outside of most people's definition of God, theists like to talk about him as if he were one of their own.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins explains why Einstein's God-quotes do not contradict his unbelief.

This is a quote from Albert Einstein, which summarises his position best (in my opinion):

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.

A present to Richard Dawkins

[AceJohnny]

For some reasons, I think it would be very appropriate for this letter to end in the ownership of Richard Dawkins [wikipedia.org].

Can you think of anybody else who you'd like to end up with this letter?

(I won't go as far as to propose a fund to buy the letter for these people)

Re:He just does not believe in the Christian God.

[turing_m]

Mass is simply energy like everything else,

No. Matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.

Re:Well...

[holloway]

Except that Buddhists hate homosexuals and they frown upon people have sex during daylight hours [youtube.com]!

And why does their spiritual leader claim this is the truth path? Faith. And that's the same problem -- how do you change someones mind that homosexual repression is equally as wrong as black repression, or that having sex in the day is acceptable? Sure we all have some beliefs in our lives but beliefs are generally unhelpful things, for adults.

and quantum mechanics too

[kcokane]

Einstein also didn't believe in quantum mechanics which he famously dismissed with the phrase "God doesn't play with dice."

I guess if you get the 'i before e' thing wrong twice in your own name, you might be error prone in other things.

Re:Absolutely not.

[elucido]

But if you want me to make it simple, nothing exists outside of our minds. You only think that stuff exists but you have no way to actually prove anything exists prior to perception.
Basically I don't believe the universe exists independent of the observer. And if you somehow do believe the universe can exist independent on the observer then the burden is on you to prove something can exist without being observed by anything in the universe.

You sound as if you thought that Solipsism [wikipedia.org] was something new. In fact this line of thinking has existed since a few hundred years BC, along with a number of philosophical problems that come with it, and which it never could solve.

Quoting Wikipedia, Bertrand Russell wrote:

"As against solipsism it is to be said, in the first place, that it is psychologically impossible to believe, and is rejected in fact even by those who mean to accept it. I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician and a solipsist, her surprise surprised me."

-- B. Russel, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits.

I never said my ideas were completely new or alien, or had no basis in history. What I'm saying is that science seems to be proving that the solipsis was of thinking is simply the most reasonable.

I don't mean to discredit any other way or thinking, but no other way of thinking seems to be as reasonable. The other ways of thinking seem to rely on faith, we are supposed to believe that "stuff" can exist outside of our minds, which to me doesn't seem any more reasonable than believing in a God who lives in the sky who we can't see, or aliens in space, or angels, or the devil.

Sure it's all possible, but I'm more likely to believe that it' all in our minds. The main different between what I'm saying and Solipsism is that Solipsism says that the individual mind "mine" is the only mind I know to exist, while I'm saying "our" as in the universal mind is the only thing I know to exist.

Btw what are some of those philosophical problems with Solipsism? And why exactly is it impossible to psychologically believe? Why should you believe anything exists outside of reality?

Re:Absolutely not.

[Dr_Barnowl]

Or, God is the collective mind of all beings in the universe. Is this more clear?

No. It's still an empty assertion. You are claiming that self-awareness can exist independent of a material substrate ; you claim that the creation of the universe was the result of its perception by this ephemeral self-awareness (despite it not actually existing to be perceived). You then go on to claim that simple substrates (rocks, etc) are incapable of self-awareness, implying a correlation between substrate complexity and self-awareness ability and that zero matter has zero ability to be self-aware, which contradicts your previous assertion that nothing, which was self-aware, perceived a universe which didn't exist and therefore created it.

Rocks, dirt, sand, dust, mud, minerals and all which is not self aware, is the junk/noise of the universe. It's simply information which wouldn't exist at all without our perception to perceive it into existence and classify it.

By this logic, I can create entire solar systems just by building a telescope and observing them. Even better, I could produce falsified images of those solar systems and publish them, and they'd be created just by people observing my images.

What's the difference between images recorded by the CCD in my telescope and fake images? The telescope isn't self-aware, it can't possibly have "perceived anything into existence", the only thing I am perceiving is a pattern of excited phosphor spots on a screen, so by your logic either

1. The real solar system isn't there because I didn't perceive it, just a pattern of phosphor spots
   
2. The fake one IS there because people perceived an otherwise identical pattern of light.

In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.

This short quote from Terry Pratchett, despite being severely tongue in cheek and the preface to a work of fiction, is more insightful than your entire page of drivel.

Re:Well...

[chrb]

In his book "Beyond Dogma," he has written that "homosexuality, whether it is between men or between women, is not improper in itself. What is improper is the use of organs already defined as inappropriate for sexual contact." Tibetan Buddhism prohibits oral, manual and anal sex for everyone - both homosexuals and heterosexuals. However, these restrictions refer only to members of the Buddhist faith. 4 From "society's viewpoint," same-sex relations can be "of mutual benefit, enjoyable and harmless." He supports human rights "regardless of sexual orientation." At a subsequent meeting with gay and lesbian representatives, he expressed the "willingness to consider the possibility that some of the teachings may be specific to a particular cultural and historic context."

(source [religioustolerance.org])

you can't have it both ways

[misanthrope101]

I've never seen/heard/read an atheist say that I should be an atheist because Einstien didn't believe in God. I have, on the other hand, had several evangelicals claim that Einstein believed in God, and then ask me "Do you think you're smarter than Einstein?" After I explained that the God Einstein believed in was pantheistic and a repudiation of their own beliefs, I asked THEM "Do you think you're smarter than Einstein?"

I openly asked them if they still find the logic persuasive, but intellectual integrity is just beyond some people. This type of practice is a clear, unambiguous clue that evangelicals don't believe what they believe because of the reasons they cite--they're just fishing around for whatever looks like good ammunition, and they don't really care to follow through the logic they're using.

Logic and accuracy do not matter to them, and they'll knowingly use illogical arguments based on bad data if doing so will convert a soul. This is also why you basically can't trust them when it comes to evolution, the age of the earth, etc. It isn't just that they're wrong on any given issue, but that intellectual integrity is of so little importance to them compared to their perceived role as a soldier for Christ against the forces of Satan.

Re:Well...

[mdwh2]

After learning more about arguments for/against and generally more about religious ideas I've realised that agnosticism is a much more rational position on the whole idea of a god.

As much as agnostics love to claim how they are in a more rational position, there is often no difference other than what they think the word "atheism" and "agnosticsm" mean, which is a semantics issue (and where there is a difference, either one may be the more rational position, depending on the meanings used).

Do you believe in God? If you answer "No", we both share the same position, but just use different labels.

I could make the point in reverse - if you make the claim that God is unknowable (which is what agnosticism actually means), then firstly this is not mutually exclusive to atheism, but moreover, how is this positive claim without evidence a "more rational position" to those who don't make such a claim?

Anti-theism & the Cosmological Constant

[geoffrobinson]

This ranks with his cosmological constant as his biggest mistake.

Actually, they may be related. There are theistic implications to there being a beginning. Maybe Einstein didn't like a beginning (hence the need for a cosmological constant) because he didn't like the implications that there was a Beginner.

More reflection would have also noted that if you have laws you need to assume a Law
-giver. If you have free-floating laws of physics not grounded in anything, you have no valid reason for assuming they won't change. This is the problem Hume raised and which atheistic materialism cannot account for.

Re:Well...

[hesiod]

> Then there should be a statistical difference between the mortality of praying Christians and non-praying. There isn't*, so again, it is proved wrong.

Not exactly the same thing, but I saw a study that found an inverse correlation between a patient's hospital stay and the number of people who said they were praying for the person (unbeknownst to the patient, as I recall). I consider it likely that the people who said they were praying for the patient thought they were doing enough just by praying, while those who were not actually went to see the person, putting them in better spirits. And a positive attitude will almost always shorten a hospital stay.

Re:Well...

[Simon Brooke]

Iesu ben Iussuf, a carpenter's son from Nazareth who became a radical rabbi, probably existed. There's no contemporary documentary evidence, but there is plenty of evidence of radical Jewish religious movements about the same time and the later emergence of Christianity is reasonable corroboration. However, whether or not Iesu ben Iussuf existed casts precisely no light whatever on whether God exists.

Re:Anti-theism & the Cosmological Constant

[geoffrobinson]

A theist can give a rational accounting for unchanging laws of physics. An atheist cannot. We both assume they don't change. A theist can give a rational accounting of why they don't change. That was the general point. "We observe they haven't yet changed" is not a basis for future events since you still have laws hanging in mid-air, so to speak.

In terms of Big Bang cosmology, I didn't say there must be a beginner. Just that Big Bang cosmology strongly lends support to the theistic worldview.

Also, your arguments that there must be infinite regress with that logic doesn't work. Every cause needs and effect. But there is no reason there can't be an uncaused Beginner.

Re:Well...

[BytePusher]

Thanks for the reference to Spinoza. I did not read the whole entry, but I did read the section "God, or Nature." Very interesting and if Einstein completely agreed with Spinoza, I understand your interpretation to a point. From what I read I don't think Spinoza necessarily thought that the substance of all things is material, but all things deterministically proceed from the Nature of God. The section did not venture to say what things might proceed from the Nature, simply that since they did proceed their proceeding was determined before they proceeded, by the Nature of God.

I am in total agreement with Spinoza regarding the concept that Nature must exist as it is and that God would no longer be God if this nature and all the events of nature up until now did not happen as they have. However, I am not sure how this leads to an impersonal God, simply because there is no will other than the Will that is. A God with only one Will could still have a will for individuals as something which proceeds from the nature of the Divine Will. I am also not sure how this necessarily leads to a God without compassion or a God that does not desire happiness for all of Nature, including God.

You may have realized by now, that I consider happiness to be a(if not the only) fundamental good and also a fundamental aspect of God. God must be happy, because he is happy. Therefore the things that proceed from the nature of God are necessarily tending toward happiness. I believe this is, "the noble truth that is the way leading to the end of suffering." I also believe that the suffering which exists is necessary for the happiness of God and of all things which proceed from God. So, I see that if happiness is an attribute of the nature of God it is possible that all things may be tending toward this goal. Where the goal is not chosen by God, but is part of the Nature of God himself as teeth are part of the nature of lions.

I might also add, that I took the liberty to make a distinction between God and Nature. In that it only seems logical that God is the manifestation, existence and singular instance of the divine nature. Thus, as an oak tree has a nature it is the actual oak tree which is the expression of the nature, which is of course part and in part indistinct of the greater expression of Nature or God.