Just to be clear, atheism is defined as an absence of theism, not as a categorical denial of theism, but just a lack of belief. Einstein had no theistic beliefs and said so clearly and repeatedly ergo he was an atheist. QED.
I’m normally an agnostic but I’m willing to worship anyone who brings me a couple of pizzas, a six-pack of root beer and a comfy chair. At least until the root beer runs out.
He said:
“There are many intellectual atheists who proudly call themselves Jews and observe Jewish rites, perhaps out of loyalty to an ancient tradition or to murdered relatives, but also because of a confused and confusing willingness to label as ‘religion’ the pantheistic reverence which many of us share with its most distinguished exponent, Albert Einstein.”
In chapter 1, near the start.
Ah, I thought he insisted that Einstein was a pantheist. My mistake.
Wait, you’re arguing against your own OP now?
I would absolutely agree that Einstein was a deist. He believed in a being who is responsible for the existence and state of the universe. However, the likening of his belief to “Spinoza’s God” needs to be revised. If you read the book There is a God by Anthony Flew and Roy Varghese, they discuss this at length. Einstein originally said that he believed what Spinoza believed, but later in life he acknowledged that he’d read very little of Spinoza’s writing, and that he found Spinoza’s God too impersonal and unthinking.
You obviously think that it matters, since you opened the thread and are posting in it.
I’d be interested in seeing a cite for this.
Because ITR is Christian. That certainly doesn’t imply alone that he must think Einstein’s god is therefore the same as his own, but I believe that it is reasonable to think that that is what he is suggesting, based upon his past threads, as well as his use of “a God” in his final paragraph in the OP, rather than “a god”.
Like I said, I wouldn’t be hugely surprised if a letter turned up where Einstein explicitly spelled out his Deism; that seems to me to be the furthest we can go as far as putting belief in his mouth. OTOH, the furthest away would seem to be agnosticism; he says too much about the possibilities of some force working behind the scenes and the inability to fully understand the universe for him to be an atheist, I would say. To me, it rather seems as if what he sees is the effects, rather than the cause; that is, he himself does not appear to have any kind of personal relationship with God (or any god), some actual belief in a particular being, but he does see interesting things about the universe for which a god or powerful force of some kind might well be behind. Something that might have created, might simply be maintaining, but overall is unknowable.
No he didn’t. He explicitly said just the opposite. He did not believe in God as a “being” whatsoever.
Cite for Einstein saying this?
Incidentally, I love how Anthony Flew has now become a hero of religionists. No one had ever even heard of the guy before he got taken in by some bogus, creationist “statistical evidence (Flew is a philospher, not a scientist. He got flim-flammed),” and now he’s held up as a trophy convert, and as yet another fallacious appeal to authority.
I’ve got news for you, appeals to authority don’t work with empiricists. Religionists use them because that’s all they’ve got. You guys think evolution has something to with Darwin’s opinions or that the semi-conversion of someone like Flew has evidentiary value. It does not. Atheists do not imbue other atheists with authority. They never imbued Flew wih any authority. His reasoning for switching to a belief in a Prime Mover is flawed and based on his own personal misunderstanding and lack of education in science.
Agnosticism is a subset of atheism. Or all agnostics are atheists, but not all atheists are agnostics. Or however you wish to put it.
I disagree. You can have agnostics that are closer to one side than the other, but overall, they’re in the middle, not in the atheism “camp”.
Plus hot chicks to open the bottles for you. I wanted that part to be a surprise.
Someone already (partially) pointed out that, as late as 1954 (one year before his death), Einstein said:
This does not sound like someone who believes in a personal god, nor like someone who has disavowed Spinozism.
People take interest in trivial things all the time, of course. This is no more or less trivial than your other head-scratchingly roundabout attempts to debunk atheism by embarrassing atheists.
This is a juvenile retort. Einstein’s view’s in and of itself do not matter but your misinterpretations of them do.
I don’t have statistics. I got the meme from Sean Carroll’s paper: Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists – Sean Carroll
Sean Carroll also doesn’t have concrete statistical surveys embedded within his paper either. He works at the same university Richard Feynman (actually occupies R.F.'s old office) and has visited many conferences and universities as guest lecturer. Cosmology physicists is a small community so he’s pretty much plugged into the entire scene. I assume his blanket statement is correct which jives with my personal experience with scientists in general.
I’ve already provided a cite.
I do not believe this or anything like this. If the best you can do is make up fictional beliefs and try to pin them on me, then the best you can do is evidentally not very good.
Look, when Einstein himself accuses you of lying when you say Einstein believed in God, then the game is pretty much over, no?
There are two “camps”. People who believe in a deity, and people who don’t. Agnostics are in the latter, and are thus called atheists.
Or, senility. When questioned about ideas in the book, Flew seemed unfamiliar with what was there. Had he even read it? Maybe he did, but just forgot, which would then be a hint that it was written by Varghese.
No; agnostic theism is an entirely valid philosophical position that holds that a god exists, but cannot be experienced in the physical world, i.e. that his existence is strictly unknowable.
No. He described the god that he believed in as a “mind” or alternately a “spirit”. He did this on many occasions, not just on one. A mind must think, by definition. So Einstein concluded that the existence of the universe, and the laws that government the universe, were established by thought from a mind. I would agree that describing his god as “a being” is somewhat tenuous, since it’s possible that he believed in a mind with no physical body. Nevertheless, he believed in a mind.
Further evidence is in his quote likening human experience of the universe to a child in a library. He clearly states that the child knows that “someone”, not something, is responsible for writing the books in the library, and for establishing and arranging the entire thing. He says that the right attitude to take towards the universe.
Einstein did not say that belief in a unspecified higher being was “childish” and “naive”. He used those words in regards to specific doctrines, not to the general concept of a higher being.
Could you define “exist” please?