walleye
Banned
- Joined
- Jan 13, 2009
- Messages
- 724
- Reaction score
- 159
- Location
- Spokane, Washington
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Independent
I don't know of any evidence myself to support that claim, and I've even found several particularly unambiguous quotes* that points to him being an atheist. The ironic thing, however, is that I've also found another quote** of his that suggests he might distance himself from me at the appearance of trying to prop him up as a mascot for an atheist movement. The dude just didn't like the idea of being a member of any ideology.
*
- Albert Einstein, letter to an atheist (1954), quoted in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffman
**
- Albert Einstein to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sept. 28, 1949, quoted by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2
He once wrote:
The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness that there is a fundamental cause of all existence
In a 1930 essay entitled "What I Believe," Einstein wrote:
To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.
He also made the following statement in an essay entitled "The Religiousness of Science," which appeared in a collection of his essays published in English under the title "The World As I See It":
"The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation....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. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire."
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