NOGO

"Einstein was an Atheist"

Yup! I believe that he was.

"Einstein was a deeply religious man"

I believe that too.


I also believe that Einstein did not see the Bible as the source of his religiousness. I doubt that he prayed to Yahweh.

IvanK

His settled views, so far as I am familiar with them, are consistent with the Deist position that there are universal principles behind the cosmos that human beings can discover through scientific and philosophical inquiry. This places him in the same philosophical category as Jefferson, Malthus and other Deists.

At the time when he wrote that he decided to call himself an atheist. I call myself an atheist at times, too, but if you held a gun to my head I'd have to admit that philosophically I'm an agnostic since I admit that with my neccessarily limited knowledge I have no way of knowing that at no time or place in the universe has there ever existed a being such as those described as gods in any of the various religions.

There's more than enough evidence that Einstein was not a believing Christian and that's good enough for me. I'll call anyone who says otherwise but frankly I tire of this arguing among freethinkers about which figure from the past properly belongs in which non-believing category.

Totalitarianist

He wrote that in 1953, two years before he died.

Edit: Oh, sorry. 1949.

[ June 19, 2002: Message edited by: Pseudonym ]</p>

Totalitarianist

Read <a href="http://www.skeptic.com/archives50.html" target="_blank">this</a>

Jayhawker Soule

Me too. By the way, to which retards were you specifically referring?

Totalitarianist

Why am I so clever?

"I have never pondered over questions that are not really questions."

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When Einstein said he was "deeply religious", he meant that he was fascinated by the mysterious.

"In that sense, I am deeply religious."

[ June 19, 2002: Message edited by: Pseudonym ]</p>

SanDiegoAtheist

A Deist believes in a personal (i.e. individual, willful, intelligent, and discrete) God, even though Deists believe that his sole interaction with the universe was as creator and sustainer of the universe and natural law.

Einstein was on record several times as disbelieving in the concept of a personal deity, so it's unlikely that he would've fit the Deist mold.

However, one can be an atheist, and still be deeply religious. Buddhists & Taoists for example.

As far as I've ever been able to discern from Einstein's writings and biographies, the only deitylike thing that he believed in was the universe, and it seems obvious that while he regarded the universe as ordered, he also regarded it as without will or intelligence. To me, that seems to be pointing towards Einstein as an atheist.

Cheers,

The San Diego Atheist

Totalitarianist

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[ June 19, 2002: Message edited by: Pseudonym ]</p>

IvanK

So, who's taking who out of context now, boyo?

The Deist conception of god, such as it is, has never seemed to me particularly personal. It's fairly indistinguishable from the concept of an impersonal, cold and uncaring universe with its impersonal, cold and uncaring laws.

Panta Pei

"What? You were Catholic? "

I was told I was by my Grandfather, went to catechism, took communion and generally checked out all the nicely attired ass when I hit my teens. My Yochi Grandmother, however, kept me well versed in all the pantheistic shamanism she could hold on to.

PS BTW I am also the bastard child of an ex-roman catholic nun from the Kathryn Drexel's Lady of the Blessed Sacrament, to put things in perspective for you