Re: virus: Newsweek - Science finds God

Eric Boyd (6ceb3@qlink.queensu.ca)
Sat, 01 Aug 1998 16:27:48 -0400


Hi,

"Hakeeb A. Nandalal" <nanco@trinidad.net> wrote:
> I'm very pissed that Einstein wasn't an atheist. I guess that
> God was playing dice when He put him in the theist camp.

Actually, I sort of like Einstein's position on God -- allow me to quote
the man himself:

"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."
-- Albert Einstein, _The Human Side_

To know that what is impenetrable to us really
exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and
the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can
comprehend only in the most primitive forms -- this
knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true
religiousness. In this sense, and this sense only, I
belong to the ranks of the devoutly religious men.
-- Albert Einstein

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
-- Albert Einstein

A longer quote from Einstein appears in Science, Philosophy, and
Religion, A Symposium, published by the Conference on Science,
Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of
Life, Inc., New York, 1941. In it he says:
The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the
firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side
of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him
neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an
independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a
personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted,
in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge
in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able
to set foot.
But I am convinced that such behavior on the part of representatives
of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine
which is to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark,
will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm
to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of
religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal
God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past
placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their labors they
will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of
cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself.
This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more
worthy task ...

(the last quote there basically stands as a manifesto for what I think the
CoV should become)

ERiC