[QUOTE=John Mace]
x-ray: I just don’t understand where you are going with this discussion. I asked why non-belief in a “personal god” = atheist. If someone believes in God, but not a “personal God”, then that person is not an atheist. That’s is all.
[/QUOTE]
Theism – as opposed to Deism – is defined as a belief in a personal god.
ETA and Einstein called himself an atheist in at least one letter, so there’s that.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
Theism – as opposed to Deism – is defined as a belief in a personal god.
[/QUOTE]
No, see above. Theism has relatively recently come to be defined as you find it convenient to use it, by people who also find it convenient to use it thus. I’ve wavered in my use of the term even in this thread, hoping that some communication will be accomplished. So far, not so good. Theism, in the classical-ish sense, means the belief in one or more divinities or deities. Atheism is the denial of or non-belief in one or more divinities or deities. Those who adopt the term “theism” to their own purposes with a definition something like “a belief in (generally) one divinity or deity identical to mine” do so, generally, because of a desire to define everyone who does not believe the same as an atheist. The idea that “theist” and “deist” are mutually exclusive arises from a similarly disingenuous manipulation of meanings. A “personal relationship with God” is not a Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s not even a Christian tradition until relatively recently, and it’s certainly not a universal tenet of Christianity now.
If there’s monotheism and polytheism, they have theism in common. Must polytheists have a personal relationship with all the Gods? How many Gods must an atheist not have a personal relationship with? What if he’s on good terms with some and not so much with others?
[QUOTE=John Mace]
x-ray: I just don’t understand where you are going with this discussion. I asked why non-belief in a “personal god” = atheist.
[/quote]
You also said you were unclear on the difference between a “personal god” and a "god " and I linked to a web page that I thought would help answer the question for you. That, I guess, was the point you didn’t get. It wasn’t meant to be a point; I was just trying to be helpful.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
If someone believes in God, but not a “personal God”, then that person is not an atheist. That’s is all.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think it’s that simple. If someone doesn’t believe a god that can make choices, cares, creates at will, etc., then by most definitions that person is not a theist. Theism deals with “a personal god”, and if one is without theism, I think it’s fair to say that one is an atheist. IMO, Pantheism is atheism as it seems to be labeling “the universe” or “everything” as “God”. I wouldn’t call labeling things as which we already know exist “God” as “theism”, but of course that’s debatable and not something I’m interested in debating.
[QUOTE=Tabula Rasa]
No, see above. Theism has relatively recently come to be defined as you find it convenient to use it, by people who also find it convenient to use it thus. I’ve wavered in my use of the term even in this thread, hoping that some communication will be accomplished. So far, not so good. Theism, in the classical-ish sense, means the belief in one or more divinities or deities. Atheism is the denial of or non-belief in one or more divinities or deities. Those who adopt the term “theism” to their own purposes with a definition something like “a belief in (generally) one divinity or deity identical to mine” do so, generally, because of a desire to define everyone who does not believe the same as an atheist. The idea that “theist” and “deist” are mutually exclusive arises from a similarly disingenuous manipulation of meanings. A “personal relationship with God” is not a Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s not even a Christian tradition until relatively recently, and it’s certainly not a universal tenet of Christianity now.
If there’s monotheism and polytheism, they have theism in common. Must polytheists have a personal relationship with all the Gods? How many Gods must an atheist not have a personal relationship with? What if he’s on good terms with some and not so much with others?
[/QUOTE]
A “personal relationship” is neither here nor there. The word “personal” in the the phrase “personal god,” does not refer to a relationship but to the conceptualization of a deity as a personality – as a sentient being – as an uber “person,” if you will. Theism is further distinguished from Deism (and I assure you, this distinction is used academically, it’s not a question of personal “convenience.” No definition is any more convenient to me personally than any other) by the belief that a theistic god stays aware and involved with the universe. It doesn’t mean the god has to have a “persona; relationship” with anybody, only that the god can and does intervene in the universe for whatever purpose it likes.
It is clear that Einstein did not believe in God, in any way, as any sort of personality or consciousness – as a “being” of any sort, and that makes him atheistic by just about any metric you want to use – arguably even Deism.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
A “personal relationship” is neither here nor there. The word “personal” in the the phrase “personal god,” does not refer to a relationship but to the conceptualization of a deity as a personality – as a sentient being – as an uber “person,” if you will. Theism is further distinguished from Deism (and I assure you, this distinction is used academically, it’s not a question of personal “convenience.” No definition is any more convenient to me personally than any other) by the belief that a theistic god stays aware and involved with the universe. It doesn’t mean the god has to have a “persona; relationship” with anybody, only that the god can and does intervene in the universe for whatever purpose it likes.
It is clear that Einstein did not believe in God, in any way, as any sort of personality or consciousness – as a “being” of any sort, and that makes him atheistic by just about any metric you want to use – arguably even Deism.
[/QUOTE]
If it is clear, then it is provable, so please prove it.
You are using dictionary-grade, popularized, sloppy, and inaccurate definitions of technical, philosophical terms. This makes it difficult to reason with you in a technical, philosophical way.
Please review these simple, but philosophically accurate definitions from philosophypages.com:
theism
Belief in the existence of god as a perfect being deserving of worship.
Recommended Reading: Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Clarendon, 1993) {at Amazon.com}; J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism (Blackwell, 1996) {at Amazon.com}; Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (Cornell, 1990) {at Amazon.com}; Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Clarendon, 1991) {at Amazon.com}; and Stephen T. Davis, God, Reason, and Theistic Proofs (Eerdmans, 1997) {at Amazon.com}.
Also see ISM, Richard Swinburne, Nicholas Rescher, Alvin Plantinga, ColE, and James F. Sennett.
deism
Belief in god based entirely on reason, without any reference to faith, revelation, or institutional religion. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, advances in the natural sciences often fostered confidence that the regularity of nature reflects the benevolence of a divine providence. This confidence, together with a widespread distrust of the church, made deism a popular view in England and on the continent. Thus, in distinct ways, Toland, Lord Herbert, Paine, Rousseau, and Voltaire were all deists.
Recommended Reading: John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious: Text, Associated Works and Critical Essays, ed. by Alan Harrison, Richard Kearney, and Philip McGuinness (Dufour, 1997) {at Amazon.com}; Thomas Paine, Age of Reason (Lyle Stuart, 1989) {at Amazon.com}; William Stephens, An Account of the Growth of Deism in England (AMS, 1995) {at Amazon.com}; and The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680-1750, ed. by James A. Herrick and Thomas W. Benson (South Carolina, 1997) {at Amazon.com}.
Also see IEP on English and French Deism, ColE, ISM, CE, Marian Hiller, and World Union of Deists.
Seems to me this debate is hung up on terminology, exactly because of the great prestige of Einstien. It is like everyone wants to posthumously recruit him for their “team”, when, if I understood anything of his writing, he was clearly uninterested in being so recruited. 
To my mind, Einstein wasn’t one thing or another - he was above all a seeker. I think from his writings he felt instintively or intuitively that worship was the correct attitude towards the misteries of the natural laws of universe, and in that sense was probably more akin to a pantheist - but he explicitly denied being one (sometimes), though he was clearly attracted to Spinoza’s notion of the Diety. In short, he felt the obligation of worship but was unsure what the subject of that worship was … hence his waivering in self-description between atheist, agnostic, pantheist, and “religious”.
I have a lot of sympathy for his views.
[QUOTE=Tabula Rasa]
If it is clear, then it is provable, so please prove it.
[/quote]
Already provided above – in abundance.
I’m sorry but I don’t think you really know what you’re talking about. I am using the distinctions I learned as a Religion Major in college (to say nothing of a copious amount of reading and study outside of college). The fact that you don’t even understand the definition of “personal god,” rather undercuts your supercillious tone here.
If it’s really that important to you, I will concede that it’s technically possible to define Deism as a subset of theism (though the latter term is almost always used to refer to an interactive “personal” god in actual practice), but it’s immaterial vis-a-vis the Einstein question becase his statements rule out Deism too. He did not believe in a “personal god.” Any definition of theism (even if you include deism as a subset) defines “god” as a sentient personality, ergo, Einstein was an atheist any way you slice it.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
Already provided above – in abundance.
I’m sorry but I don’t think you really know what you’re talking about. I am using the distinctions I learned as a Religion Major in college (to say nothing of a copious amount of reading and study outside of college). The fact that you don’t even understand the definition of “personal god,” rather undercuts your supercillious tone here.
If it’s really that important to you, I will concede that it’s technically possible to define Deism as a subset of theism (though the latter term is almost always used to refer to an interactive “personal” god in actual practice), but it’s immaterial vis-a-vis the Einstein question becase his statements rule out Deism too. He did not believe in a “personal god.” Any definition of theism (even if you include deism as a subset) defines “god” as a sentient personality, ergo, Einstein was an atheist any way you slice it.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t agree about Einstein. I am much more sympathetic to Malthus’ accounts of Einstein’s beliefs. The deism/theism distinction is possibly immaterial vis-a-vis the Einstein question, except that you used it as a way of “proving” his atheism. There may be good arguments for his atheism, up to a point – even though he went way out of his way to distance himself from the adjective and to explain why, carefully – but they are not definitional sleight-of-hand tricks. And - if you want to play the pissing with credentials game – I am using the distinctions as I learned them as a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy of religion/history of philosophy (“to say nothing of a copious amount of reading and study outside of college”).
Ok, so we define god as a perfect being worthy of worship. The only way you could claim Einstein believed in god is if he believed the universe is perfect and worshiped it. Is there any reason to believe this?
[QUOTE=Tabula Rasa]
I don’t agree about Einstein. I am much more sympathetic to Malthus’ accounts of Einstein’s beliefs. The deism/theism distinction is possibly immaterial vis-a-vis the Einstein question, except that you used it as a way of “proving” his atheism.
[/quote]
No, I used his stated disbelief in a “personal god” as a definitional proof of atheism. Any god with a personallity is a theistic god, even a deistic god.
Yet not very accurately, and I have cited at least one occasion on which he explicitly claimed that he was an atheist.
I just used actual definitions, not tricks.
Funny you never learned the definition of a “personal god,” then, Doctor.
I wasn’t trying to make any claim to being especially credentialed – only that I can do a little better than googled internet definitions.
[QUOTE=Snarky_Kong]
Ok, so we define god as a perfect being worthy of worship. The only way you could claim Einstein believed in god is if he believed the universe is perfect and worshiped it. Is there any reason to believe this?
[/QUOTE]
Don’t forget being a “being”, which infers having consciousness.
[QUOTE=Snarky_Kong]
Ok, so we define god as a perfect being worthy of worship. The only way you could claim Einstein believed in god is if he believed the universe is perfect and worshiped it. Is there any reason to believe this?
[/QUOTE]
That, I think, is where this gets interesting. I don’t think it’s going too far to say he thought the universe was (is?) pretty damn neat and stood in awe of it. Would he have used the words “perfection” or “worship”? Probably not “perfection” in the sense of unerring (from a moral perspective), but possibly, at least during some periods of his personal and scientific life, he might have used the word “perfection” or something closely akin, in the sense of unerring (in a sense of being consistent). If he could not bring himself to use the word perfect, it might well have been because he questioned himself as a judge of perfection. He knew, with every, theory he advanced, that something eluded him with regard to a perfect predictability of a universe that he had reason to suppose might be perfectly predictable to a man of further advanced science…so he tried to advance science. I’m inclined to suspect that his appetite for unified theory was a product of a wish/ambition/something like that to describe as a single result the product of a single cause. If prayer to a single “personal God” is a form of worship, then perhaps descriptive study of a unified single divine cause is also a form of worship.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
An interesting exchange of letters here between Einstein and a Navy officer named Guy Raner (an Ensign serving in the Pacific theater at the time) who asked him some questions about this issue.
Raner (6/10/1945):
Einstein responds (7/2/1945)
Raner writes again 4 years later (9/25/1949):
Einstein (9/28/1945):
To me, this exchange spells out an even more explicit atheism (as much as he may have resisted the label) than the one in the OP.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t see how you can possibly say that when he explicitly says he prefers the term “agnostic” (and he gives much the same reason for it that I speculated he would earlier in this thread). He clearly has thought about this a lot, and is picking his words carefully.
Oh, yeah, CubaDiver brings up a good point: there’s the being issue. “Being” might imply consciousness, but does it necessarily require consciousness? Going way back to Aristotle, there’s the idea of a “First Cause”/“prime mover”. That may be something like Einstein’s perception of the awe-worthy in the universe, though he might just have thought that theorizing consciousness or a lack thereof in something about which we have so little concrete information was either a silly errand or profound hubris.
I think this quote of Einstein’s from Diogene’s post #40 pretty much sums it up:
“You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. 4 I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”
Emphasis added. He saying that we just don’t/can’t know. Which is exactly my position, btw. Great minds think alike. 
I’m not entirely sure what I even hope to add to this debate with my post, but maybe just some different wording could help push it along one way or another; I kind of hope to shed a little more light on my own thoughts as well.
I don’t know any more about Einstein’s philosophy than what I’ve read here, but it does sort of hit home with my personal feelings. So, IMHO…
To me, God as a ‘who’ is simply a name to thank or damn when there are no simply better options.
God as a ‘what’ is what I like to call either “the space in between” or “the shape of everything”. It is, when you break each thing down in to smaller and smaller parts, that separation between protons, neutrons, electrons(or whatever makes up those) That unseen web that on an eventual level intertwines with my hand and the air around it. The ultimate order of it all.
Forces, waves, energies etc…- I guess I would say are an extension/appendage of the ‘what’. The figurative ‘hand of God’ perhaps? Though that might fit more with God as a ‘how’ or ‘why’. I dunno. I suspect I might be nearing something like String Theory, but I know very little, if anything, about that to say one way or the other. I would welcome any reading suggestions that might fit here and with my ‘what’ perspective(something not to wonkish/technical though).
FWIW, I would call myself agnostic and of all “ancient texts” the Tao Te Ching resonates the most with me. In everyday practicality I give way to science and reason over magic and superstition. I honestly don’t have much of one, but as long as I have the littlest bit of imagination left in me, I just can’t cross that line in the sand to call myself an atheist. Sometimes I might walk right up to it, but never beyond it.
[QUOTE=Tabula Rasa]
Probably not “perfection” in the sense of unerring (from a moral perspective), but possibly, at least during some periods of his personal and scientific life, he might have used the word “perfection” or something closely akin, in the sense of unerring (in a sense of being consistent).
[/quote]
A consistent universe is an unerring universe? This is worse than a “dictionary-grade, popularized, sloppy definition” you accused Diogenes of using earlier.
[QUOTE=Tabula Rasa]
If prayer to a single “personal God” is a form of worship, then perhaps descriptive study of a unified single divine cause is also a form of worship.
[/QUOTE]
Do you think anyone will be convinced by this argument? I think it’s pretty evident that you’re stretching word definitions to define the universe as “a perfect being worthy of worship”.
[QUOTE=Tabula Rasa]
“Being” might imply consciousness, but does it necessarily require consciousness? Going way back to Aristotle, there’s the idea of a “First Cause”/“prime mover”.
[/quote]
And where is a “First Cause”/“prime mover” that doesn’t have a consciousness ever described as a “being”? You are stretching the words “perfect”, “being” and “worship” in order to fit your needs. It’s pretty apparent.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Emphasis added. He saying that we just don’t/can’t know. Which is exactly my position, btw. Great minds think alike. 
[/QUOTE]
I think this is the point x-ray vision was making earlier. If you don’t know, you are without belief. If you are without belief, you are an atheist by most definitions of the word. It doesn’t matter if you are Einstein don’t like the label.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
I don’t see how you can possibly say that when he explicitly says he prefers the term “agnostic” (and he gives much the same reason for it that I speculated he would earlier in this thread). He clearly has thought about this a lot, and is picking his words carefully.
[/QUOTE]
He laso explicitly says “I am, and have always been, an atheist.”
Beyond, that, his exprssed disavowal of a belief in a personal god makes him antheist, by definition, whetrher he liked it or not.