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Personal History
Albert Einstein was born in 1879 of secular parents who lived in Ulm
and then in Munich, where he went to school.
Einstein gave out an independent spirit, as "a typical loner", as he
spoke of himself, without personal religious commitment, but with deep
religious awe, that he cultivated and retained throughout his life
unabated wonder at the immensity, unity, rational harmony, and
mathematical beauty of the universe.
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Self Discovery
Later in life in a speech delivered in Berlin, he gave this
illuminating account of himself:
"Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of
belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth,
beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most
beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the
mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all
serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience
seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind
anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind
cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly
and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am
religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt
humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of
all that is there."
Einstein, who can be called one of the brightest minds of the modern
world, realized the existence of a Being of such stupendous
intelligence that could not be hidden due to all the available
evidence. He succumbed to the limit of humans minds to comprehend such
greatness. By doing so he sheds light on the mysterious characteristic
all humanity shows in acknowledging, in one way or another, the honor
due to a Creator. During one's life time the mind of an individual
will be flashed through with the realization that they owe their
creation to an Omnipotent intelligence far beyond what they could ever
understand.
It's almost like it is innate. Like how an artist signs his canvas
after painting a beautiful picture so that everyone will know who did
it, God has engraved with in the mind of every individual the
impression that they are not their own. When a person really ponders
this concept they cannot stand in defiance of their Creator.
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"God"
to Einstein
Einstein frequently made
terms such as "transcendent" and "incarnate" to speak of "the cosmic
intelligence" which lay behind the universe of space and time, which
seems to indicate that there was rather more than just a way of
speaking in what he said and thought of God. This is clearly reflected
in an interview which Einstein later in life gave to an American
magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, in 1929:
"To what extent are you influenced by Christianity?"
"As a child I received
instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am
enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene."
"Have you read
Emil Ludwig's book on Jesus?"
"Emil Ludwig's Jesus is
shallow. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however
artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot."
"You accept the
historical Jesus?"
"Unquestionably! No one
can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His
personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life."
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God seen in Creation
Einstein spoke of God who reveals himself in an ineffable way as truth
which is its own certainty. Einstein was strongly affected by the
teachings of Spinoza. Spinoza held that "truth is its own standard".
"Truth is the criterion of itself and of the false, as light reveals
itself and darkness," so that "he who has a true idea, simultaneously
knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt concerning the truth
of the thing perceived." Hence once a thing is understood it goes on
manifesting itself in the power of its own truth without having to
provide for further proof. Thus when God reveals himself to our minds,
our understanding of him is carried forward by the intrinsic force of
his truth as it continually impinges on our minds and presses for
fuller realization within them.
In this way Einstein thought of God as revealing himself in the
wonderful harmony and rational beauty of the universe, which calls for
a mode of non-conceptual intuitive response in humility, wonder and
awe which he associated with science and art. It was particularly in
relation to science itself, however, that Einstein felt and cultivated
that sense of wonder and awe. Once when Ernest Gordon, Dean of
Princeton University Chapel, was asked by a fellow Scot, the
photographer Alan Richards, how he could explain Einstein's
combination of great intellect with apparent simplicity, he said, "I
think it was his sense of reverence." That was very true: Einstein's
religious and scientific instinct was one and the same, for behind
both it was his reverent intuition for God, his unabated awe at the
thoughts of "the Old One", that was predominant.
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Science bows down to its
Author
"Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with
the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling,
however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also
belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for
the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to
reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound
faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without
religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
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A
"Religious" Einstein
Count Kessler once said to him, "Professor! I hear that you are deeply
religious." Calmly and with great dignity, Einstein replied, "Yes,
you can call it that. Try and penetrate with our limited means the
secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible
concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and
inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we
can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact,
religious."
That statement comes from his 1939 address to Princeton Theological
Seminary, but far from being unique, it is reflected in statement
after statement he made about science, religion, and God.
"You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific
minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own . . . .His
religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the
harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such
superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and
acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."
It seems clear that he conceived of God as the ultimate spiritual
ground of all rational order which transcends what the scientist works
with as natural laws. When asked if he believed in an entity called
God Einstein answered the following:
"I can't answer with a simple yes or no. I'm not an atheist and I
don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a
little child entering a huge library filled with books in many
different languages. The child knows someone must have written those
books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious
order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is.
That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent
human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and
obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our
limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the
constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire
even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first
philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two
separate things."
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Humbled by Eternity
When pressed with his religious beliefs Einstein said, "What we
[physicists] strive for . . . is just to draw his lines after him."
The deeper one penetrates into nature's secrets, he declared, the
greater becomes one's respect for God."
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Answering a Child
One time Einstein was asked by a child if scientists prayed, the
letter was recorded by Helen Dukas and it reads:
"I have tried to respond to your question as simply as I could. Here
is my answer. Scientific research is based on the idea that everything
that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this
holds for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist
will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by
prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural Being. However, it
must be admitted that our actual knowledge of these laws is only
imperfect and fragmentary, so that, actually the belief in the
existence of basic all-embracing laws in nature also rests on a sort
of faith. All the same this faith has been largely justified so far by
the success of scientific research. But, on the other hand, everyone
who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced
that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly
superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our
modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science
leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite
different from the religiosity of someone more naive."
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Conclusion
Once when Ernest Gordon, Dean of Princeton University Chapel, was
asked by a fellow Scot, the photographer Alan Richards, how he could
explain Einstein's combination of great intellect with apparent
simplicity, he said, "I think it was his sense of reverence." That was
very true: Einstein's religious and scientific instinct was one and
the same, for behind both it was his reverent intuition for God, his
unabated awe at the thoughts of "the Old One", that was predominant.
Albert Einstein, one of the most intellectual minds in history, with
deep reverence declared the undeniable existence of an Omnipotent God.
Could his conclusion be taken lightly with the notion that "Well, I'm
sure I know better than Einstein"! Rationally, if we could think as
deeply as he did we would be able to see the absurdity of believing
there is no God.
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References for Einstein's
quotes:
-Cited in Brian,
op. cit., p. 234.
-George Sylvester Viereck, "What Life Means to Einstein", The
Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929
-The Chief Works of Benedict De Spinoza, Vol. II, Ethica,
Proposition XLIII, translated and edited by R.H.M. Elwes, London,
1889, p. 114; De Intellectus Emendatione, pp. 12-19. Cf.
Hampshire, Spinoza, p. 99f.
-Tractatus de
intellectus emendatione,
ed. Elwes, p. 19.
-Ideas and
Opinions,
p. 46.
-Cited by Brian, op.
cit. p. 161.
-Ideas and
Opinions,
p. 40.
-Brian, op. cit. p. 186
-Dukas and Hoffmann, op.
cit. p. 32f. My attention has been drawn to this passage by Mark Koonz,
formerly of Princeton Theological Seminary.
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