Jesus, not you again. :smack:
Jesus? He’s Jesus? Wow! I thought he was just some clod.
(Are the two mutually exclusive?)
Here are his religious views.
Then there’s this drivel, lol.
Neither conventionally religious nor atheist.
Yeah, he seems to have prefered the term agnostic. He even said he rejected the term atheist.
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Yeah, he seems to have prefered the term agnostic. He even said he rejected the term atheist.
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For what it’s worth, though, Einstein notes that people who feel as he does have been regarded as atheists:
Of course. Your choice was to, in your own words, “choose not to decide”.
Later on we can tackle the question of whether you’ve made a decision.
“The list of smart atheists, both living and dead, includes both Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.”
Hmm. With that sentence structure, it might be a good idea to include Irwin Schroedinger.
How’s this:
“The list of smart atheists, encompassing both living atheists and dead atheists, includes both Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.”
Those weren’t his words. In case you didn’t realize, those are song lyrics.
I hate false equivalence.
The point of science is to find out about the Universe. It does that by constructing predictive frameworks that explain observational evidence and allow us to predict the outcome of new experiments. We call those frameworks ‘theories’. Into theories we fit ‘laws’, which are equations we use to quantitatively predict what is likely to happen in any given scenario. The ultimate difference between a theory and a law is that a law doesn’t attempt to explain anything; it merely attempts to predict the behavior of given system for which it is relevant.
Now, one of the most important tools science has is that it can discard parts of theories that add no predictive power. The classic example of this is Russel’s Teapot: If I say there’s a teapot in orbit around Mars, but it always evades sensors and nothing we can ever do will detect it, you’d rightly say that my teapot-including theories are overcomplicated by precisely one teapot and that the teapot needs to go unless and until we see evidence for it.
You can apply that logic to phlogiston: Fire doesn’t work based on some mysterious element called ‘phlogiston’ that is undetectable except to the extent it causes fires. It works based on the same theories that allow atoms to stick together and explain light and electricity and why glass is clear and silver is not. The over-arching theory (called Quantum Electrodynamics, by the way) is better than the phlogiston theory because, one, it explains more, two, it allows for more predictions, and, three, it’s simpler because it removes phlogiston.
God is, in some sense, the ultimate phlogiston: Accepting God into theories reduces their predictive power, because “Nobody can know the mind of God” and similar, and greatly over-complicates them by forcing them to include something that is an exception to every law and generally outside the system.
So science does tell us what to do here: Dump God unless we come across stuff we can only explain using a God.
(Also: Science is provisional, religion is dogmatic. History shows that dogmas get battered and bruised bloody by reality.)
Einstein was, and Hawking is, an atheist.
"Amongst the smart atheists, encompassing both living atheists and dead atheists, are such diverse elements as Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Fear, Surprise, Ruthless Efficiency, An Almost Fanatical Devotion To The Pope and… "
I’ll come in again.
I wasn’t expecting that.
I take it from your use of the past tense that Einstein ceased to be an atheist. Did this cessation occur due to death or due to a conscious choice while alive? And if the former, do you mean that he ceased to be an atheist only in the sense that he ceased to be anything at all (ie he died), or do you mean upon dying he became, in an afterlife, a theist?
Clarity is so important 
Specifically, “Freewill”, by Rush, in case you (or anyone else) are curious, kaylasdad99.
When he died and his immortal soul was hauled up before our Lord and Savior, he awoke from the error of his ways, and is no longer an atheist.
So…both. 
Rush? Isn’t he that hate-radio guy?
I hear his hate radio show is tolerable while reading Charlie and the Chocolate factory. Totally syncs up in fact…
So if DT is a cowardly little weasel for this type of behaviour, what would we call someone who does the same sort of thing in GQ?
