Ragged Clown

It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing…


Apr
12
2007

Einstein’s Triangular Beliefs

The second most striking thing about Einstein’s religious beliefs is that he really, really did not want to be pinned down.

 “There are people who say there is no God,” he told a friend. “But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.”

The words that he uses to describe his beliefs are almost exactly the same words that I would choose for my own (he probably copied me)

 “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”

“Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”

and yet he was adamant that he is not an atheist.

“The fanatical atheists,” he wrote in a letter, “are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who–in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’– cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

He must have known Bertrand Russell. And he must have known that Russell heard the music of the spheres. The only rational explanation is that he had his own private definition of atheist.

 “What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos,”

The most striking thing is that everyone wants to claim that Einstein’s beliefs are just like their own.