Or “I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are details.”
Recently a personal letter written apparently by Albert Einstein has been sold for close to 3 million dollars here. In it, Einstein supposedly claims that belief in God is a representation of human weakness… If that is true, why so many other statements by Einstein seem to support his belief in at least a god?
“God doesn’t play dice” – in reference to the unpredictability of quantum mechanics…
Einstein also never questioned the existence of Jesus. When “Einstein was then asked if he accepted the historical existence of Jesus, to which he replied, “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.” here
So, what is going on here? Was Einstein mad? Was he bipolar? Some claim he had Asperger’s (ASD) because of his abilities to think in pictures (imagining space and time) as his thought experiments were beyond anything one could imagine…
Any thoughts?
From what little I know, Einstein was a Spinozist in his metaphysics and a Kantian in his epistemology. This is good for him, since those are both the correct views. (Though to be sure Einstein is also quite right about what Kant gets wrong, especially about space and time.)
I do not understand what is supposedly incoherent or inconsistent about affirming something like Spinoza’s God (as Einstein did) and denying the existence of an anthropomorphic, interventionist God (as Einstein did). Einstein’s religious yearning, like Spinoza’s, consisted entirely in a desire to understand the fundamentally rational structure of the universe.
Such a God has no anthropomorphic qualities, does not interfere in human affairs, and does not reward or punish ethical behavior with any sort of afterlife.
But one be a Spinozist and still find much humane ethical wisdom in the Gospels as well as in the dialogues of Plato, the Analects of Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita, and so on.
Interesting! I don’t recall ever reading that about Einstein…
Any links, perhaps?
Good, but not morally good, if I understand you correctly. So in what sense is it good? Because you like it?
Does “ethical behavior” include thoughts?
Point taker…Thanks Mung!
Einstein was proven wrong about one thing in particular (quantum entanglement). Some of my Jewish friends reluctantly accept that… If it turns out that he was wrong more than people think, what would that mean for the Jewish people and especially for the scientific society?
WTF 😮
If all truth is moral,(per mung) then if Spinoza’s view of the deity is true, then it is moral.
Most of what I said is already in the Wikipedia page that you linked to yourself in the OP.
In that specific context, “good” in the sense of “congratulations!” or “good for you!”
It never made any sense to me that thoughts or desires could be good or bad. That’s probably the main thing I disagree with philosophically about Christianity; I’m with Aristotle (and also Judaism) in thinking that it’s actions that are morally good or morally bad.
This is the most bizarre thing I’ve heard you say, and believe me, the standard is already very high. Why would Einstein’s being wrong about anything have any bearing on Jews or scientists? Of course he was wrong about something — everyone is!
Why the obsession with Einsteins views on theology ? Ditto for Darwin, etc etc. Does a knowledge of cosmology/biology etc somehow magically spill over into religion ?
The answer to my question is that the Xtians are just trying to get a free ride on the coat-tails of a big name. Its just a cheap trick that doesn’t require any thought.
Can a person control their thoughts?
Likewise what would it mean for males and Germans and everyone named Albert?
Yes and no. One can practice supressing thoughts, it is actually a really weird phenomenon, but I don’t think you can really control what thoughts occur to you.
Have you ever tried meditation? The act of supressing seemingly randomly occurring thoughts and trying to just focus on the present can be strangely revealing of the way in which your thoughts seem to occur spontaneously in your experience.
Not too long ago I was out running and decided to really try and push myself to see how far I could keep up my speed, and as it became increasingly difficult to keep up the tempo, I entered into this really odd state of mind where I would focus to keep going, and it was like a 2nd person was bombarding me with excuses to just stop and take a break.
Every street corner, every tree, every streetlight I passed a thought would spontaneously occur in my mind taking the form of some sort of excuse to stop running and take a breather. Thoughts like “Just stop and walk for a while at this next street corner”, which I had to suppress and resist. It was like an internal debate was happening, a struggle between who aspects of my personality.
Where did these thoughts come from? They were not under voluntary control in the sense that I wanted to think them (I wanted to keep going, except for fleeting moments when the negative thoughts occurred), and resisting them was a struggle unto itself. Though it clearly felt like it was me thinking them, I really felt the desire to stop. It was like quickly flipping back and forth between two contradictory states of mind, where one was a desire to stop running and catch my breath, and the other was to just keep going. The mystery to me is how those two states of mind even appear in consciousness. I would like to be able to remain in the “keep running” state of mind and not even have the experience of having the desire to stop, but that doesn’t seem possible to control. Those thoughts WILL occur, they will feel like they are yours, you will feel that desire to slow down to walking, as vividly and personally as you feel the desire to keep going.
Now the question is, if having such thoughts occur to you are not something you can actually control, in what way does it make sense to say you are responsible for thinking them and can be judged for them? The only thing that makes sense to me is that we are morally responsible for our actions, not for the thoughts that occur in our heads.
How would one know?
Still, welcome to the world of the supernatural KN. Around here everyone gets to choose their own God, all they have to do is admit its just faith.
If one truly believed that control was all just an illusion, then the only thing that would really make sense is that we are not morally responsible for anything.
The problem is that no one actually believes that, insistent as they are that they actually do.
But I can certainly relate to your running dilemma. I sometimes wonder if one can exercise themselves to death by just keeping increasing their energy until the heart gives out. It seems a weird contradiction, if the body tells you it can’t do anymore, it seems it would force you to stop one way or another, by simply not being able to let you continue, and yet can our mind do something to override our body, when our mind is part of our body?
KN seems to believe that good means correct, and therefore correct means good.
So Einsteins philosophy (according to KN) is good, so its correct. That is the only reason it is correct, because to him that’s good.
Well people have been known to pass out from too much exercise. Others have literally collapsed and died to a heart attack. Of course it is always possible to give some ad-hoc account of either of those scenarios that shows they are the product of some merely physical process, or the other way around.
On the one had you could argue that your ability to keep going until it kills you shows that state of your mind is not merely determined by the state of your physical exhaustion, on the other hand you can just argue that you have some unusual neuroanatomy that allows you to overrrule the more basic instinctive needs to stop.
Or conversly that the sorts of physiological warning signs or mechanisms that would normally manage to stop a prospective runner from running themselves to death, are defective in the people who do it.
My problem with the free will debate is that I think it is essentially unfalsifiable. In so far as there is any room for doubt, and that at least some of our physiological processes are a black box, it will remain impossible to disprove either options of the dilemma. I tend to side with the people who say that it’s probably not a good idea to tell people they don’t have free will, as I think there’s is good evidence that people who are offered that viewpoint use it as an excuse to bypass their inhibitions and just indulge in behavior that is bad for them.
I’m reminded of a study in which two groups of participants were given a lecture on genetics, behavior, and free will. In group one the lecture basically consisted of the message that neuroscience has shown that people can control their actions. And in the second group they were told we are basically biological automatons with genetically programmed behavior.
The people were then shuttled into a room to wait. In the room was a plate with a lot of cake on it. Naturally, the people who had been told that they were genetically determined to act like they did, were more likely to eat the cake. And the people who had been told that they have voluntary control over their actions, were more likely to abstain.
Rumraket,
Of course people have exercised to death, but I am thinking more in terms of consciously attempting to keep moving until you die, void of any existing heart abnormality. Say your heart is just fine, but you decide you will just try to run until it stops. One would think the body would faint before it lets you do that. Sort of like trying to hold your breath until you die. I am pretty sure that’s not possible.
As a side note, I still find it amusing that people, seemingly thoughtful people, can actually believe that all the systems which allow us to increase so many of our capabilities, simply by exerting more force on them through effort and time, also believe these built in defense systems which increase our resistance, increase our muscles, fortify our blood supply, toughen our skin, make bones stronger and more accepting of strikes, increase our tolerances to hot and cold, fine tune our awareness of inputs that might be distracting by subduing or increasing them-all of these systems, are also part of the “accident that turned useful” art of construction.
I think in the majority of cases, people pass out before they die. Whether it’s exercise to exhaustion, or holding their breath.
I find it amusing that it is overwhelmingly, pretty much universally and without exception, only religious people who believe in some sort of higher power who have such difficulty with it. I find that highly revealing. Particularly when you then read them describe the consequences they think follow of accepting we are the product of evolution.
There seems to be quite a lot of thinking activity going on here, but there are a few people who seem to believe that thinking is not an action. All the reasoning I have highlighted above, was it not gained through the act of thinking?
But they are not the sort of thoughts that Einstein was talking about. They do involve a lot of thinking but should be classed as personal opinions rather than thoughts.
We need to distinguish between thinking, feeling and willing. If someone were able to run themselves to death then it would be through an act of will or if they decided to stop for a rest it would be because their feeling overcame their will to carry on. In these cases thinking is influenced by will and feeling and so it becomes personal. By willing we are controlling our actions on the world and by feeling we are relating how the world affects us.
But we can take part in acts of thinking in which neither feeling nor willing affect the outcome. If by thinking we reason that two plus two equals four, this is so despite any feelings or acts of will on our part.
This is pure objective thinking and I would say that this is the type of thinking Einstein meant when he said he wanted “to know God’s thoughts”. These thoughts are singular, they do not become a multiplicity, no matter how many minds apprehend them. For any thinking being, even if it is God, it is the same thought that they are experiencing.
Einstein was not wrong about the science. He understood the science of entanglement. He had deeper insights into its metaphysical implications than Bohr and Bohr’s apologists. It was those insights, along with his unshakeable metaphysical preference for locality, which led Einstein to view QM as essentially incomplete.
Most today believe that the experimental results that tested Bell’s inequality have dashed Einstein’s hopes that QM would be replaced by a deeper theory that restored the locality that is violated by QM entanglement.
But there is still a way of avoiding Bell’s results: superdeterminism. It avoids Bell by building into the Big Bang correlations between the scientists choice of what to measure and the results of such measurements.
Superdeterminism is, I think, compatible with a Spinozist view. Although Einstein himself may have rejected it as “too easy”, the same way he rejected Bohm’s realism that had a type of non-locality.
Here is an article about the latest tests related to superdeterminism
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/spooky-action-at-a-distance/516201/
And here is Jim Baggott on how Einstein’s Spinozist views affected his “God does not play dice” statement.
https://aeon.co/ideas/what-einstein-meant-by-god-does-not-play-dice
Of course we can propose another solution to spooky action at a distance. It is that reality exists in a higher dimension. And we in our three dimensional, Euclidean world are unaware of it. In order to get an idea of what it would be like in the higher dimension we can look in the other direction and imagine what it is like for a being that exists in the dimension below ours, a sort of two-dimensional flatland.
If from our three-dimensional vantage point we were to thrust a giant tuning fork through flatland, the beings there would see two independent entities some distance apart. And if they did experiments which caused one of the entities to vibrate they would see the other entity vibrate in unison but they would not see the connection. For them it would be spooky action at a distance.
But because we exist in a higher dimension we do see the connection and there is no need for any speculation about superdeterminism on the part of the flatlanders. Now imagine that it is us who are trapped in the lower dimension.
“Our Euclidean view” in a thread about Einstein!
You have it completely backwards. Its is in a large measure why many people believe in a higher power, because the alternative explanation of life is so feeble.
But even you have at times leaked the possibility that you don’t buy into the entire materialist premise. That you wish to play the sort of KN type third, unarticulated way, to me shows a much greater “desire” for an outcome, rather than going where the evidence leads.
In our everyday dealings with living most of us treat the world around us as being in front or behind us, above or below us or to the side of us. And it is this practical viewpoint which sees the world in a three-dimensional way that I am referring to. Do you disagree that this is the perspective from which most people conduct their lives?
I’m sorry but I think you’re really just having a difficult time uncoupling your own views here from what you think is how other people think about this subject.
No, the principal reasons for rejecting evolution are fear of the consequences instilled in people from religious upbringing. Fear of loss of meaning, fear of loss of morality, fear of loss of community, fear of loss of an afterlife, and so on. Evolution leads to Hitler, abortion, Marxist Stalinist Communism, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, adultery, Feminism and equal rights, Nazism, the Holocaust, eugenics and genocide, “if people believe they come from monkeys they will act like monkeys”, it’s a lie invented by Satan/”The Jews” yadda yadda yadda. Religious believers just can’t stop telling us about the obvious psychological reasons they find evolution so troubling.
Just read this shit: http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FAQ411.html
That was the very first thing that came up when googling “consequences of belief in evolution”.
Click the first twenty links you find and it’s all apologetics about the percieved consequences and the emotional and societal state of human beings if they believe life evolved.
It’s particularly ironic that we are simultaneously told that we somehow “want” to be atheists and believe in evolution because we are “afraid of God”, yet are simultaneously told how an atheistic life is bleak, without meaning or purpose, and leads to all these bad things.
No, sorry. What all this shows is why it is that people like you don’t accept evolution, and it has at bottom nothing to do with logic or evidence.
I don’t think it’s possible to explain consciousness in terms of physics and chemistry, but I also don’t think it’s possible to explain consciousness at all. I don’t see how that could be done.
What this has to do with evolution is anyone’s guess though, since the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, so whether consciousness has been explained or not seems completely besides the point.
That makes zero logical sense. I don’t know what this third unarticlated way is that you speak about, but I can tell you what my position is on any subject if you just ask.
Generally it is this: There are things we know/have explained and we have found out using science, and then there are things we don’t know/have not yet explained, and have yet to find out using science, and then there are things that I don’t see how it is possible to know/explain/find out using science. But for those things which might not be possible to investigate using science, I don’t see what else could be used to investigate them.
And I don’t see any value in just stuffing God into the equation when we run into things that are difficult to explain. If anything, that merely seems to serve as an excuse to stop probing further and declare it is inexplicable except through the will of God. There’s no conceivable phenomenon that was historically resistant to investigation we couldn’t just have declared the exclusive domain of a mysterious God.
I’d much rather just admit to not knowing and have to live with not knowing while trying to find out, than shovel vacuous placeholder answers in.
My experience with mediation is somewhat different, it more of a detachment from thoughts. They still occur, but they are no longer distracting. Hard to explain. The conscious mind no longer dominates. It is opposite of focus. Focus narrows.
That seems reasonable, as I understood in my Catholic period , just having the evil thoughts was not morally reprehensible .It was the dwelling on and obsession with those thoughts which was a behavior that was the problem.
Rumraket,
So you believe in the “No God of the Gaps Theory” then.
It states that whatever we can’t know, and whatever isn’t material can be anything, but it can’t be God, That’s for sure.
Besides, living like an atheist isn’t bleak like they say, I rather like it!
Too bad some people’s God is not so tolerant of other Gods.
Now if you could just wrap your mind that not being sure God exists is the same thing. People have different ideas.
Do you think most people’s perspective on non-locality is that it means that it is not in walking distance?
A different perspective on 4D and block time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdurantism
Its the same thing as what?
What kind of cake? That would make the difference for me.
Same thing as like not all deity believers are the same , all unbelievers are not the same.
Always thought it more an emotional thing.
No. But I do think that their speculations on it begins from a position of their experience of the three-dimensional world. If they want to think about the relative positions of two particles they will probably think of them in terms of spacial coordinates x, y & z. In what other way would you explain the relative positions of the two particles?
I do not think that the next higher dimension should be assumed to be four dimensional.
Isn’t that sort of what I said?
We are finding out there are an awful lot of posters here who doubt the ability of materialism itself to be responsible for the complex result that is thinking and man, but when you press them on what their own brand of supernatural faith is, they kind of scurry off, whispering something about Spinoza, or nature as God, or “Well, it can’t be know, but I am sure its not God…” kind of thing, but “Look I am running late for dinner, why is your God so mean…”
Like I said, a whole bunch of agnostics who are sure their God is buried in some planet in some other universe, as long as he isn’t in the sky, they can feel plenty safe.
He is a part of the national pride: one of the most intelligent and most influential scientists who ever lived…
Just like Copernicus is for the Poles… they have saying that “…Copernicus stopped the Earth and moved the Sun…” something like that…
When the initial results of the particle accelerator showed that particles can travel faster than the speed of light there were a lot of somber faces among the Jews all over the world…When the apparent discrepancy in the measuring equipment was found I was bombarded with calls and reminders that Einstein still stands vindicated…
The science had to be saved along with one of its gods just like cosmology had to be saved after the CMB results have proven the axis of evil…
The scientific lies have been preserved for the “better good”…to restore the credibility of science by promoting falsehood…
If things can travel faster than speed of light, as “the outer parts of the universe” do or quantum entanglement indicates, then everything about fundamentals of cosmology could be wrong, including the age of the universe…science needs the old universe…Darwinism does…
Cosmology needs a spontaneous, undirected big bang 14 billion years ago and not a directed act of creation as indicated by the axis of evil… Who would need cosmology if the universe has a direction pointing to the Earth? We are supposed be insignificant. The Earth is not supposed to be special…Science doesn’t need purpose in the universe because science doesn’t need ID or God…
The end of story…
Rumraket,
Very well put.
In other news, I hereby nominate “quantum entertainment” as autospellcheck of the year.
DNA_Jock,
Jock agrees with Rumraket, he would
The preferred stance of the agnostics who are sure there is no God, because, well, its not bleak.
The Semi-supernaturalists. A lot of those here. The answer is out there, its just buried in the ground of a planet on another universe.
Of course…There is no spookiness at the distance if there is no such thing as a distance or the distance doesn’t matter on subatomic level…
It would certainly explain the instantaneous action of the entanglement as well as the backloading of the history supposedly reaching back billions of years in the John Wheeler’s thought experiment involving the delayed choice quantum eraser…
But if there is no distance on subatomic level or it doesn’t matter..then neither does time….
I believe in the “not stuffing anything into a gap of knowledge but letting it remain a gap until we have reason to think we have actually found the answer”-theory.
Never heard of it and don’t know anyone who thinks like that.
If God is actually the explanation for something, then great, I’d just like to know how one can determine that. I know that merely finding out that we don’t know is not itself somehow evidence that God is the explanation. There have been countless phenomena through history which weren’t understood at the time, and for the duration which those gaps persisted, God was not the explanation. Thor was not the explanation for thunder and lightning until electricity was discovered and understood. Poseidon was not the explanation for hurricanes and tsunamis until atmospherics and earthquakes were understood, and so on. Gods are not the explanation for things we don’t understand until such a time as we have actual evidence that Gods are the explanation.
Great, maybe you should email all these religious institutions and apologists and tell them that.
No amount of lectures on any subject could keep me from the pies. If there’s a God, it has ordained that I consume them. That is my eternal, objective purpose both in this life and the next.
Your posts have moved from incoherent to racist. I knew TSZ had no rule against incoherence, but I was surprised to learn that there seems to be no rule against racism.
It’s just shows how pointless it is to converse with you…
My favorite is DNA-Jerk, Or Down-Jock or DNA-Joke …
Is it against the rules not to read someone’s comments or opinions?
I don’t read 99% of yours… You don’t have read mine…
Yes, I understand you have your own perspective on these matters. I am afraid I am not interested in exploring that perspective, so I will exit this exchange by wishing you all the best in the new year.
Charlie,
“People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”- Albert Einstein
The question still remains: Did Einstein reject time or the distinction between past, present and future?
For me, one of the greatest objections to the divinity of Jesus is there is no mention of pies at the Last Supper. If I were God and had one more meal in my earthly body , pie would be certainly on the menu.
Robert Byers is still permitted to post here long after he was banned from Uncommon Descent for his anti-Semitism.
The first part about deities , yes.
With non-believers you seem to have a less than one dimensional concept.
And that surprises you? That if one rejects dogmatism of one view that they must be a dogmatist on an alternate view?
No offense, but given your style, why should they respond to your pressing?
And there it is. Perhaps you interpret disinterest as not being able to answer your tough questions.
But strangely you agree, despite your mocking, your version of God values faith, faith requires uncertainty. God values uncertain knowledge.
Many non-believers are searching that uncertainty. Seems to me, that is closer to the divine will than just merely declaring faith as a resolution to uncertainty.
However no matter what, we can know what Spinoza thought about God with a little effort. Those guys loved to talk about it.
We know why some versions your God is so mean. That is what people want Him to be.
And being late for dinner is nothing to risk.
Interesting metaphor, does the belief that God is in the sky looking down make you feel unsafe?