Atheists seem very eager to claim Einstein for one of their own. Richard Dawkins devotes a whole section to Einstein in The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens' Portable Atheist is peppered with Einstein quotations seemingly rejecting all belief in God. Recently an Einstein letter surfaced which showed the great scientist scorning the idea that the Jews were in any sense God's chosen people.
But all that these quotations prove is that Einstein was not an orthodox believer. He rejected the idea of a personal God "who would directly influence the actions of individuals or would sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation." Einstein also rejeted the immortality of the soul, noting that "one life is enough for me."
At the same time, Walter Isaacson in his celebrated new biography Einstein provides ample evidence that Einstein not only believed in a higher or transcendent power, but also that Einstein despised atheists. Here are some quotations, drawn from Isaacson's book with full documentation, that I offer as a needed counterbalance to the one-sided list provided by Dawkins, Hitchens and the others.
On whether he considered himself religious: "Yes, you could call it that. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this foce beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion."
On whether he accepted the historical existence of Christ: "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."
On whether he considered himself an atheist: "I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what that is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the most intelligent human toward God."
On the nature of God: "That deeply emotional conviction of a presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."
On whether science leads to religion: "Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of nature--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."
On how religion motivates scientific inquiry: "The cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research."
On whether science and religion are at odds: "The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
On how he feels about atheist efforts to claim him as an ally: "There are people who say there is no God, but what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views."
On how he regards atheists: "The fanatical atheists...are creatures who cannot her the music of the spheres. I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist. What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos."
Reader Comments ( Page 24 of 24)
346. An appeal to authority is not the truth, and truth alone should always be the authority, that's my entire point. Dinesh typically obfuscates by evoking the name of people like Einstein, and my point is that we can evoke the names of respected thinkers on both sides all day long.
Either way, it proves absolutely nothing, as does Dinesh. On thing is for sure - The god articulated by Einstein is certainly not the god of Dinesh D'Souza's imagination - in fact most Christians I know would say the very same.
So yet again we witness a triple fallacy in just one post: The appeal to authority, the fallacy of "your another" and the appeal to popularity articulated by Renzo. It goes without saying that most well-known Western thinkers believed in a god of some sort. Many great thinkers also believed in ghosts, UFO's and astrology to a degree. Some also thought McDonald's was still worth eating no matter how over weight they got, but that doesn't mean it's something the rest of the world should digest every Sunday.
In short, there are many kinds of intelligence that we are each worse and better at to various degrees: Self-intelligence (being aware of the limits of one's body and psychology)intellectual intelligence, musical intelligence, mathematical intelligence and social intelligence to name a few.
Some of us are even very intelligent when it comes to obfuscating. But when their talent to obfuscate is mixed with a low degree of social and emotional intelligence, we see the tragic arrogance both in this blog and in the taped debates.
No amount of name-calling, attacks on other's education nor fallacious reasoning is going to educate people to the closer realization of your "god". If anything, it draws *many* religious and non-religious people away. Yet another lesson lost on Dinesh, but probably much to his displeasure, we have received a lot of positive emails and comments from both sides of the argument.
Terry Madison at 3:23AM on May 26th 2008
347. Renzo: "Photons aren't the only 'massless' entities: scalar particle (Nambu-Goldstone boson), gauge bosons and gluons are also thought to be massless."
Yes, there are a number of massless particles that we know to exist and a few that are theorised that we don't yet have evidence for quite yet.
You missed the point and fell into a side trap set to see if you'd get distracted - and you did.
The point is that you have no evidence for god.
You claim that your god doesn't exist, which according to "E = m * ( c * c )" means that it won't have any energy. That limits what your imaginary god can do in the real world!
Renzo: "Yet, using your simplistic reasoning, since photons have no mass, they have no energy, so they don't exist."
It's clear that photons do exist and it's clear that you claim all kinds of facts about your god from his existence to what kind of sex is permissible in your bed. Or is that god's existence as a non-existence or some kind of essence of god, I just can't keep track of how many times you're on both sides of that claim that has nothing to do with reality in the end.
Renzo: "photons -- have no mass (i.e. no rest mass); they have momentum."
So you're now going to claim that your god is a sub atomic particle or something like a photon that has momentum?
That's funny.
Ok, let's say your god is a particle. It would be limited by E = MC^2 which means that he can't be omnipotent nor omnipresent nor omniscient since neither particles nor energy can violate the speed of light. Thus with modern physics we can rule out all the main attributes of your god concept in one fell swoop.
That's a lot more than you've been able to do to prove that your god exists.
If you are so smart and educated Renzo where is your well formed falsifiable hypothesis of your god? Come on don't hesitate. We're all still waiting... out with it.
Since you don't have one I'd say you failed the most basic test taught by the other kids in that most vicious place of them all, kinder garden. The test being:
Does Santa exist? Most of us learned the answer to that is NOPE, he only exists as something fun and salable. God is much more marketable especially in the forms of the major religions. There's a god sucker born every few seconds and if you look in the mirror you'll see one Renzo.
Peter at 3:27AM on May 26th 2008
348. Frankly, I am a person who believes that there are only things that we do not understand YET. Frankly, one day MILLIONS of years in the future, we might understand exactly how the universe was created and...... SHOCK OF SHOCKS! THAT WE CREATED IT OURSELVES!
That is more possible to me than one person creating the whole ENTIRE universe by themselves. Simply put, there is NO ONE who could or WOULD be that powerful alone, period and done with.
Maybe a group of MILLIONS of people created this universe, but not one person..... or a concatenation of NUMEROUS spirits and people's working together.
Christopher at 6:10AM on May 26th 2008
349. "Somebody needs to give professor x a hot lead enema."
I agree totally with that statement, Linda.... just another INSANE religious person who wants to tell other people what to do and frighten them into doing what HE wants them to do with the idea that it is some 'omniscient, omnipotent, always right god' telling him that he is right and everyone else is wrong.
Christopher at 6:14AM on May 26th 2008
350. There's a high confidence level among many that Dinesh creates sock puppets or has one working for him who won't fess up to it. Whata way to fuck up a blog. It's quickly evident that D'Souza sock puppets have identically huge egos, insight into what Dinesh's "really meant" and are too identical in the hard-headed insistence that his sophisms are universally accepted as logical. They even use the same Karl Rovian - Ann Coulter excuse when caught hitting below the belt - "You did it first and I'm not perfect so I'm not above stooping to it also." Intellectual criminals habitually think like that.
162. Do you think "Renzo" is a pseudonym, pboy?
I have suspected as such.
Linda at 6:22PM on Apr 18th 2008
165. Well, Linda...
I think that we are talking to cavilling ray two-truths, educated eric et al. Whether they are all D'Souza himself is not important. They are all 'friends' of 'Dinesh', and try to drag his drivelings out from pure propaganda to philosophy classroom musings every time.
not-pboyfloyd at 6:43PM on Apr 18th 2008
166. Renzo's Dinesh's latest sock-puppet. No wonder he jumps on Dennett and Dawkins.
I don't see them talking about how we need to believe in natural selection as a way of life. How does one even DO that? If I'm hungry I kill my neighbor?
Renzo, or Dinesh, or Eric, or Ray, or whoever the hell you are, your distortions and prevarications and convolutions are tiring. What a waste. No matter how you try, you can't spin truth so it's a lie and a lie so that it's true. But you still keep trying.
And if you are Dinesh, you make your daily bread by taking advantage of the simple and arguing for their side with a somewhat more eloquent voice than most of them posess, not due to your intellect, but due to the lack of theirs. You think you're a big fish in a small pond; the reality is that you're a somewhat literate good liar fish in a pond full of really ignorant ones that will buy anything.
You never argue to find the truth. You don't even care to know it. Your only concern is winning, or seeming to win, by baffling us all with your bullshit. It only works on your little flock of pet hypochrists, though. The rest of us can see what you are. A stuffed-shirt. And a useless waste of protoplasm.
Godless Heathen Brian at 6:46PM on Apr 18th 2008
167. I see the trend here. D'Souza's crap is put up here for 'shit-fer-brains' brian et al to take at face-value or ignore completely and rant against atheism.
If the post is 'beaten to death' using science, out pops one of these philosophy types to dazzle us with a different set of wordmagic!
not-pboyfloyd at 6:54PM on Apr 18th 2008
580. Oh, and renzo's here. Speaking of fake personalities.
Renzo's amazing. I can ask him a ten word question and he occuppies himself with it for a half hour, providing everything but venn diagrams. Nobody can blow smoke up your ass better. Except perhaps Dinesh D'Souza.
It's like if satan went and got a degree in philosophy and logic, and then for some reason decided to come here to practice his new improved and updated lying style.
The man is heartless, soulless, but unfortunately not brainless.
It's the smart ones that scare me. All that potential devoted to deception. Fucked up.
Godless Heathen Brian at 11:28PM on May 18th 2008
581. i have a suspicion that after ONE taping of "to catch a predator" these idiotic posts by jesse, preterist, and renzo will hastily cease
Richelle at 11:29PM on May 18th 2008
And that's just a few of many snippets. Like the others, I've ran across many suspect Dinesh aliases I don't have time to cut and paste. But most of us get the point. I can understand anonymous comments and if they're anonymous who gives a fuck what name they use. The author of the blog is not anonymous so doing it is another matter because it shows how thin-skinned and weak his arguments always are.
clueAll at 6:32AM on May 26th 2008
351. Isn't it interesting that Dinesh hasn't commented in response as himself in any of the comment threads that I've read?
I find that curious. Has any comment (other than his articles (shivers)) ever been claimed to be from him?
Peter at 6:48AM on May 26th 2008
352. Peter, a lot of people have wondered why D'Souza thinks he's too good to respond to us mere mortals. Some apparently have concluded that they wasting their time with Dinesh and all his aliases in his blog. The arrogant prick obviously thinks he's better than everyone. He comes across the same way as his alias' at his debates all the time which even my religious parents can't bare to watch. A typical negative review of D'Souza at Dinesh's best and just one of many found in blogs outside AOL, this one by Malkin:
Why Dinesh D’Souza sucks
May 22, 2008
I’ve seen Dinesh D’Souza mentioned on various atheist blogs in the past (I love the blogs Bing McGhandi did on him last year), and most of it wasn’t very positive. Yesterday, I watched debate (split in 15 parts on YouTube) between Dan Dennett and D’Souza. Although he sometimes almost makes good points, I’ve seen too much dancing around questions and topics to take his take on the truth in Christianity seriously. When he pretends to say whatever the person asking the question is thinking, he throws his voice in a very degrading matter, but exclusively when the person is in disagreement with him.
Another thing I noticed is that his reasoning sucks. He likes abusing sound scientific principles, twist them a bit to his liking and use them as proof for the existence of God. He doesn’t deny evolution (you have to give him credit for that) but does agree with some of the ID movements reasoning (and at that point the credit he just earned is taken back for safe keeping). For instance, he argues that the dials of the Universe - the weight of particles, the rate at which the Universe expands and such - that all these are fine-tuned to support human life and that this implies that a creator is responsible for that. He was quite enthusiastic about that, and earlier abused a misinterpretation of Occam’s Razor to make a point. Well, within his misuse of that principle of logic; human life exists because it is possible within the way this universe is structured, not in existence because it was structured to support human life. If the dials at the Big Bang had been slightly different, it is credible that life had still been possible in the Universe, just not life as we know it. (The simplest solution to a problem is often the correct one.)
Another point I can safely say he got on my tits for is a poke he takes at Dawkins. I’ve seen him make the same poke, at the same target, using the exact same words in a debate with Hitch. His statement is that Dawkins should shut up and not expand ‘Darwinism’ to other area’s outside biology and he tries to kick it into the goal with the remark “I guess that is what happens if you let a biologist out of the lab” or something very much along those lines. When he says it - both during the debate with Dennett as well as Hitchens - you can see him all giddy, chuckling at his cleaver little pun.
My response in Dawkins defense (although Dawkins is quite capable to defend himself against slurs like this one) is: D’Souza, you are an arrogant little turd of a hypocrite and you totally suck.
D’Souza throws into Dawkins’ face that he talks about various scientific fields in which he does not hold an academic title. But D’Souza loves making his point by usage of scientific principles, theories, literature and facts used in physics, history, philosophy, cosmology, biology and more… while he holds an academic title in English. That isn’t even a scientific study roughly near the field you studied in, you asshat!
D’Souza then calls a kettle and states “Hey, kettle! YOU’RE BLACK!”, hangs up and giggles emphatically.
What a moron.
clueAll at 7:36AM on May 26th 2008
353. I'm a little late to this party, but I feel the need to chime in. Who cares whether Einstein was Christian, Buddhist, Zen, Atheist, or Other? He was a brilliant scientist, a great man. You're dragging his name and ideas through a compost heap by constantly arguing about that which has NO MEANING on the legacy he left behind.
If you want to stir some crap, let's argue about how Christian Jesus was. Being Jewish and all.
Strados at 7:28AM on May 28th 2008
354. From Einstein's various statements, including all those quoted by D'Souza, it is plain that Einstein rejected as childish any belief in a god of the sort posited by Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other such religions. That much is certain.
Beyond that Einstein's penchant for poetic obfuscation renders less certain our understanding of what he had in mind. He appears largely to equate god (as he uses the term) with the wonders of nature. He aligns himself with agnostics who recognize that they do not know or comprehend any such nature/god.
In this respect, he appears to think much as many atheists do. As used today, the term "atheist" commonly refers to those who lack a belief in a god largely because they see no evidence of one. Even Dawkins has said he could say he believes in a "god" of the natural or poetic sort Einstein speaks of, but he prefers not to risk confusing people by using such terminology.
Einstein distances himself from what he calls "professional atheists", by which he appears to mean those who affirmatively believe there is no god. Atheists of that sort are few and far between. The vast majority, including Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris, simply lack a belief in god(s)--of the sort posited by the world's major religions.
Doug Indeap at 5:00PM on May 28th 2008
355.
"Evolution exhists, but so does God.Neither science or Religion can disprove the other."
How soon we forget the past, and all the gods since the dawn of man, that the search for the truth has disproved. Rejoice, you have been freed from the wrath of all these gods. NASA can also prove that the earth, complete with fruiting trees, did not exist before our sun, as is proposed by the Christian god and religion. Science can also prove that women existed before the rib incident as well, in the garden of Eden.
ATOMIC SKUNK at 12:45AM on May 30th 2008
356. What intellectual dishonesty! DD goes to great pains to cherry pick Einstein quotes favorable to religion, but doesn't even relate the meat of Einstein's letter. Here's the heart of it:
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
If you look at it honestly, Einstein was really closer to atheism than Christianity. The same can be said, incidentally, of Chris Hedges.
skylights at 5:02PM on May 31st 2008
357. god how sick it is that you are so perverse that you throw a way everything that you learned in india. didnt you learn anything about the sickness of religion? are you the untouchable? you base your exsistance on a book. you know who has more books? athiests that do not claim to know the answers. we are telling you the things that we have a good idea about. we are not damning anyone to hell. hitchens is not here for you. he does not care if he changes you. that is not his motive. he is not pretending to be a instrament of change. you are already lost and cannot be changed. all that we ask is that you do not preach this ignorance to your children. i have children and ill be damned if someone teaches him creationism. put your child in special ed. seperate your kids from reason. one book. when there are thousands that proove you wrong. 10,000 dieties that prove one thing or anouther. they all say they are right. what makes your ignorance so special? the muslims say you are wrong.so does everyother religion. your religion is geographical. if you had been born in iraq you would be preaching how 70 virgins are your cup of tea. all i ask is would you do the rest of us a favor and leave your bs for your own children and not pollute mine. my child "WILL NOT" believe in talking snakes so piss off with your bs. Im not gonna give you money or read your books because you sir are a lie. just like that prick that just died. and by the way mr hitchens owned you and he is a rockstar. so please do not waste your time saying that you where the victor. i am not a hatefull person but when it comes to my children if you are trying to brainwash my kids you can drink the friggen flavoraid. just listening to that audio where those kids are screaming and crying asking mommie why. for some holier than thou prick like you. you cant even explain why all you can do is say its so. i wish there where a hell for you and those evangilists. that live in mansions. i hope you all die. and anybody stupid enough to give money should be sterilized. i have no problem with the religious but i do have a problem with the damning to hell asshole holier than thou pricks. like you know what god wants. if god hates me for having an opinion than i dont want his bullshit anyways. totallitarian bs like a finite north korea. all the self profesed holier than thou christians ive met. id rather spend eternity in hell than be hooked for the rest of eternity with these pricks. keep your ignorance to your self. the world will be much better off.
darthaardvrk at 4:29AM on May 31st 2008
358. fuck you double d u ignorant republican prick i hope u die when are you gonna realize that we are your slaves you rich pricks and if we cant afford to buy cars who is gonna afford them? where are your children gonna work? nafta? lies quick buck at the expense of us all. when we live in huts?
id love to meet your republican orielly ass in a dark ally. id fuck you up. screw you and your communist god. incase you didnt know. christ was a commie. maybe you need to read that book that you swear by. if your gonna believe in bullshit at least back it up. you wouldnt last 10 seconds at my shop. mr i worked for my living. god i would love to kick you in your face. little slut. well maybe god will tell you why you are soo much better than me.
darthaardvrk at 4:33AM on May 31st 2008
359. no comment. there is no backup to why no one lived in the belly of a whale. no talking snakes, not once in 2 yrs. and you wonder why hitchens is an anti thiest?
not one of these morons can debate the stupidity of someone living in the belly of a whale, not one of these idiots can say there truly was a "virgin birth" ignorance plain and simple. believe in the easter bunny. believe that some asshole lived in the belly of a whale. my child will not be ignorant. push off that shit on your own kids. you dullards. i hope you are sterilized so that you can not pollute the world. drool on yourself u ignorant bastards.
darthaardvrk at 7:56AM on May 31st 2008
360. Tom 3 Subt.....which god? There are thousands of them. How can rational people have "incredible fear and hatred" towards something they don't believe in because there is no proof of such a "holy god"?
The lies that believers will stoop to to make themselves feel good about their superstitions are what's really "incredible".
RMEB at 8:58AM on Mar 17th 2009