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Okcitykid,
You assert a certain theism to Albert Einstein in your messages dated 2nd and 7th of this month. Yet you don't specify which god the Great Man worships. He evinced a great admiration for Buddhism and expressed the thought that if there was ever a spiritual side to humankind it would find its expression best in Buddhism.
I would like to present here reasons why Albert and I disagree with your assertion that he believed in "God".
It is not uncommon for some minds of genius capacity to use slightly eccentric ways of expressing themselves, preferring an oblique reference over a well understood one. This illustrated quite well by the Gould/Eldridge creation, Punctuated Equilibrium, where a more mundane Intermittent Accelleration could have sufficed.
Einstein reified [gave a personal identity to] a non-personal thing, a nebulous thing that for him demanded a distinguishing name, so real was it and so yearning after it was he. He lamented that his knowledge and his genius revealed to him that there was so much more to know which he knew was beyond him. He gave this passionless, indifferent and aloof "thing" a name that could be understood by everyman...........GOD.
The Great Man revealed his thoughts in many letters and essays and I present here a selection of his quotes that bear out my contention......................
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.
I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details.
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the unlimitable superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God
My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the Universe.
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
God reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists.
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Einstein execrated the notion of a personal god who interfered in the affairs of humankind. He admired beyond understanding that which was so beautiful to his mind but which he would never know. In a way he deified that which he could never know.
That, for me, typifies the poetic aspect of Einstein, a man who could admire mystery as much as he did the precision of a matematical equation.
To assign religious belief in a god to Einstein as a basis for believing is for me a trivialisation of all that Einstein represents.
"The heart does the pumping, the brain does everything else"
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