There’s a new letter today in which Einstein is pretty explicit about his views on religion, calling it “childish superstition.” I’ve felt that way a lot of times too. I’ve also thought that Marx was right in at least one thing — that religion is the opiate of the masses (except that he got the drug wrong — it’s more like PCP).
But on other occasions, I’ve agreed with an opposing statement from Einstein: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
Most of the time I don’t know what I believe.
So here’s my guess: Einstein, titanically brilliant as he was, was similarly conflicted. That would be reasonable, wouldn’t it? The people who have resolved this issue are the ones who scare me.
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20 Comments
1. tim maguire:There is an unfortunate tendency to think that people who excel on one field excel in all fields–for instance, entertainers who get easy press for their political and social views.
There are plenty of Einstein quote books out there and all they show to me is that he was a perfectly ordinary thinker outside of science.
May 13, 2008 - 8:24 am 2. Charlie (Colorado):Well, if you’ll grant he was a perfectly ordinary highly educated, profound thinker I might agree with you Tim.
I think on this stuff, Einstein suffers from being Einstein: people don’t attend to what he says as much as they want to believe he thinks the same thing they do, because he’s Einstein, very ideal of genius.
On this whole thing, though, Einstein was pretty explicit: he said he believed in God, but Spinoza’s God: an infinite transcendent nature, a “substance”, a “ground of reality.”
(Buddha nature? That’d make a cool term paper.)
So, there’s no contradiction there: he believed in God, somehow, but he thought religion — with the continued miraculous interventions — as childish superstition.
May 13, 2008 - 9:05 am 3. rjschwarz:“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” shows a level of naivety in the political arena that is somewhat scary. If he indeed said it. I have to agree with Tim.
He’s brilliant when it comes to science, less so when it comes to politics and fashion.
May 13, 2008 - 9:18 am 4. patrick neid:If you read his personal papers he pursued mathematics, as did so many other mathematicians then and now, to prove that there was an organizing principal behind creation.
What he did do however is dismiss organized religion as we know it.
May 13, 2008 - 9:45 am 5. Lem:So here’s my guess: Einstein, titanically brilliant as he was, was similarly conflicted.
We are a kind of Microsoft release that hasn’t been patched since Adam
At this point it’s not about who created us, it’s more about getting ‘validated’.
May 13, 2008 - 10:10 am 6. CT Tom:If Einstein were around today he would definitely be asked to talk more about subjects outside his expertise. Unfortunately, for all his genius, he’d probably do well on the Noam Chomsky circuit.
May 13, 2008 - 11:04 am 7. David Thomson:Albert Einstein apparently was a theological modernist. He believed in God, but not any specific theological doctrines. The high likelihood is that that today he might feel comfortable attending services in either a Reform Jewish setting or among the Unitarian-Universalists.
May 13, 2008 - 2:12 pm 8. freetotem:To condemn all religion as “childish superstition” is to engage in an ignorant reductionism. To see no difference between a rote-spouting fundamentalist and, say, a Zen master, is either blind or ignorant. Or, in the case of the Bill Mahers of the world, its own kind of metaphysical assertion without sufficient evidence.
All religion is not simplistic mythic religion. And it’s fine if you’re not curious about what else there might be out there beyond mythic religion, but a rational, openminded person would in that case not have an opinion about it. If you do not know advanced mathematics, then your opinion about quantum physics can fairly be dismissed as without interest. If you know nothing of religion beyond childhood notions of myths, then your opinion about higher religion can also be safely ignored. Regardless of your accomplishments in other fields, whether you are Einstein or Richard Dawkins.
To reduce religion to its pathological abuses, Bill Maher’s favorite rant, is simply a childish kind of irrational bigotry fueled by personal prejudice and psychopathology The complete lack of self-knowledge about this by the Mahers of the world is one of the many ironies of the day.
May 13, 2008 - 2:40 pm 9. BobWang:We need a Super Bowl for Religions.
May 13, 2008 - 3:48 pm 10. Ray Zacek:Heck, even a BCS will do.
David Thomson: having once attended a UU church, I suspect Einstein would have opted for Reform Judaism. Better coffee served at services and better food after services.
May 13, 2008 - 4:26 pm 11. A B:This fits in with Einsteins belief that the universe is completely deterministic. “God does not play dice,” is his famous comment, disparaging quantum mechanics. Everything is calculable and thus predictable. Someone who believes in a deterministic universe has no room for God in his or her beliefs.
Of course, quantum mechanics is now completely accepted and has been called the most thoroughly tested theory in history. The universe is not completely mechanical or calculable. And the most widely accepted model of quantum mechanics, the ‘Copenhagen model,’ practically demands that human beings live both inside and outside the universe simultaneously. It’s very weird stuff.
It’s impossible to know if Einsteins atheism led him to dismiss quantum mechanics or the reverse. Either way, I take his error in one to suggest error in the other.
May 13, 2008 - 5:24 pm 12. docweasel:My take on this is, who gives a shit what Einstein thought about religion? Just because someone excels in one field, there is a tendency to consider them an oracle on all the “big questions” in life. Steven Hawking has voiced some pretty stupid opinions regarding world politics, for example. This is not surprising, its only surprising that people want brilliant people to give them the reassurance that if you ask the right brainiac, Man has the answers to all the questions that are plaguing our society. Well, maybe no one does, no matter how brilliant they are. Maybe Einstein and Hawking and Leonardo friggin’ DaVinci are just as clueless about the answers to God and “why are we here” and “is there life after death” as the rest of us morons.
Whenever I read something like this Einstein article I always think about back when I was doing construction and a home owner from an existing home in a development in which I was working walked up to the jobsite to get some help with putting up a ceiling fan. I went over to take a look, and the guy had so screwed it up I advised him to take it back and get another one and I’d put that one up for him, he’d put it up unsecured and it had spun the wires right out of the housing. Turns out this guy was literally a rocket scientist working at nearby Canaveral. He probably wasn’t the best guy to ask where the fish were biting or what’s the date to put out your tomato plants either.
Sometimes brainiacs can be really obtuse about common sense matters, and God and Death and such are probably going to end up being common sense forehead slappers when we finally do get the answers. I’ll bet Einstein was lousy at cooking and playing cards and stuff like that. For these big questions, you’re probably better off asking a philosopher, like a bartender or a barber.
May 13, 2008 - 9:01 pm 13. tioedong:a lot of religion is superstition…but then a lot of belief in science is superstition too…because most people have a life and keep these things at a simplified level.
I think Einstein too could recognize the difference between “pop religion” (or “pop science”) and the real thing.
May 13, 2008 - 10:46 pm 14. LTEC:freetotem –
What exactly can “zen masters” actually do? They don’t seem to say anything very interesting, they can’t prove theorems or design rockets or install a ceiling fan, they can’t beat up people or cure them. In what way exactly are they any better than Christian fundamentalists? No, change that. In what way are they better than Christian masters?
May 14, 2008 - 4:16 pm 15. Fontessa:Einstein may have been, well—Einstein, but other than that he was a petty, nasty man who treated everyone around him like you know what. And because he was “smart” they all put up with it, instead of punching his lights out like he deserved.
May 14, 2008 - 7:38 pm 16. Barrett:I think that in the end good science and good theology will be in harmony. However, as humans are finite and now we know in part, even though the body of knowledge is expanding rapidly. It leaves us with paradoxes, which are reflected in some of Einstien’s comments.
All would benefit if both scientists and theologians would show humility. In all instances, pride comes before the fall.
I believe the latest scientific example of this will be the absolutists in the global warming camp. It is much more complicated than most want to acknowledge, which is why it is almost a certainty that the models are wrong.
May 14, 2008 - 8:53 pm 17. Buddy Larsen:well I feel sorry for him. All day, every day, he had to listen to people saying “Way to go, Einstein” and “Oh, that was just brilliant, Einstein”.
May 15, 2008 - 1:19 pm 18. Buddy Larsen:“Who do you think you are, Einstein?”
>> “Uh, yes.”
“Oh excuse me, sorry, yes of course you do. I mean, yes of course you are.”
May 15, 2008 - 1:25 pm 19. freetotem:LTEC raises the old “practicality” argument, which assumes a certain, and limited, realm of the real and the significant and then simply dismisses everything outside it.
What all religious and spiritual endeavors throughout the ages have done is attempted to address the most profound questions of life. This would include questions such as, no matter how many ceiling fans, rockets, cured or beat up people we have, our lives are characterized by a fundamental sense of lack or insufficiency. The sense that my real life will begin when…I have more of the things I want and less of the things I don’t. Then I’ll really live. Why is that? I know, you’re too busy fixing ceiling fans to bother to ask. Yet you are qualified to dismiss thousands of years of spiritual discovery by others. Hand me a screwdriver.
You can dismiss all forms and levels of of spiritual endeavor (and wisdom of the ages) as insufficient to fix a ceiling fan, and that’s cute. But when you are staring up at that ceiling fan on your death bed, wondering if just maybe you forgot to ask the most basic things about your life, let alone seek answers, may glibness suffice you. It’s fine to not be curious about questions deeper than ceiling fan maintenance. Or imagine that exploring outer space is more important or amazing than “inner” space. But just don’t make claims of understanding about areas you neither know nor care anything about.
May 15, 2008 - 2:37 pm 20. docweasel:I think the “ceiling fan” reference might have been talking about my comment above, in some oblique way.
May 16, 2008 - 11:30 am