Einstein and His God

Einstein was not religious in the conventional sense, but it will come as a surprise to some, aware of his statements such as that God does not play dice, to learn that Einstein clearly identified himself as an atheist and as an agnostic.

Thus I came—despite the fact I was the son of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents—to a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived… Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude… which has never left me.

Albert Einstein

Boston’s Cardinal O’Connel attacked Einstein and the General Theory of Relativity and warned the youth that the theory “cloaked the ghastly apparition of atheism” and “befogged speculation, producing universal doubt about God and His creation.” On April 24, 1929, Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of New York cabled Einstein to ask:

Do you believe in God?

Einstein’s return message is the famous statement:

I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist… I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. 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. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being.

The Life and Times, by the professional biographer Ronald W Clark (1971), contains one of the best summaries on Einstein’s God:

However, Einstein’s God was not the God of most men. When he wrote of religion, as he often did in middle and later life, he tended to… clothe with different names what to many ordinary mortals—and to most Jews—looked like a variant of simple agnosticism… This was belief enough. It grew early and rooted deep. Only later was it dignified by the title of cosmic religion, a phrase which gave plausible respectability to the views of a man who did not believe in a life after death and who felt that if virtue paid off in the earthly one, then this was the result of cause and effect rather than celestial reward. Einstein’s God thus stood for an orderly system obeying rules which could be discovered by those who had the courage, the imagination, and the persistence to go on searching for them.

The Principle of Falsification

The Rev Dr Paul Sheppy of Reading objects to the claim that, while science determines truth from falsehood by experiment and maths by self consistency, there is no basis for determining theology’s assertions. In a letter to the press, he said it is “the sort of knock-down argument that the average first year student of philosophy of religion should be able to demolish in fairly short order”. His reason is that the “verification” or “falsification” principle is itself incapable of verification or falsification and is in it own terms, therefore, meaningless. He continues to say that Wittgenstein showed many universes of discourse exist, each with its own grammar, syntax and logic, and rules cannot sensibly be moved from one such universe to another. So:

the application of the rules of the natural sciences is unlikely to work with disciplines that make extensive use of metaphor. “Bill’s a brick” is not a scientific statement. As science, it is either untrue or meaningless. But Bill is a brick, and very fine member of my congregation. Moreover, I see the truth of what he believes by my experience and observation of him!

The reverend doctor needs to go back to school and study a little more, preferably in a universe that demonstrably makes sense. The principles of scientific method—including the falsification principle—have indeed been verified because they are subject to constant falsification, and have not yet been thus falsified. The criterion is simple, and, indeed, biblical (Dt 18:22). God explained how a false prophet could be discriminated from a true one. The prophecies of the false prophet were not true. They were not verified in practice. It is the same as the principle he attempts to lambast, and, incidentally, on this God given criterion, the Christian god, Christ, is a false prophet.

Science validates itself by selecting hypotheses that can be demonstrated not to be false—they work in practice. It is a criterion that was good enough for God but is not good enough for his theologians whose true vocation is obfuscation and mysticism to keep themselves employed by gullibles who cannot discriminate fact from fiction.

As for “Bill is a brick” not being scientific, we must concur, but there is no reason at all why it should not be. Science is a part of human thought, and each of us builds it up from infancy as a succession of increasingly complex metaphors based on our experience. Science consists of these metaphors, concepts like magnitude as height, understanding as grasping, time as a journey or a landscape, and so on. There is no fundamental reason why “Bill is a brick” should not be meaningful scientifically providing that the metaphors are defined and Bill’s brickness is falsifiable.

What is the basis, then, for the theological claim that we live on when we have ostensibly died?

More on Judaism and Christianity at http://www.askwhy.co.uk

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Gluten, the hidden poison

Gluten is increasingly added to food for no obvious reason, yet it is a dangerous poison to many people, and in added quantities probably to many who otherwise would be tolerant. You will find it added to many foods to improve its texture with no regard to its harmful effects.

clipped from www.elivinghealth.com Gluten intolerance is now being linked to some major brain development and immune system disorders, and the pathway is not exclusively through the gut.� Depression, migraines, ADHD, autism, obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, balance problems, epilepsy, inability to concentrate, autoimmune thyroid disease, and dermatitis, are amongst the many non-digestive disorders that have now been linked to gluten intolerance.� �Dr. Lewey suggests that gluten intolerance affects as much as 10% to 30% of the population.� When you consider the number of people on medications for the above mentioned brain and immune system disorders, it’s possible that the numbers are even higher than Dr. Lewey suggests.� �

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Zero Time. Did it ever happen?

 

Sorting the terms gives this simple equation:

( tv )² - ( to )² = ( tc )²

Using the difference of two squares, it reduces to the same form as the original hypothesised equation. When we trace back our observed time to zero at the Big Bang, universal time has the value tc, the time that corresponds with T in our original surmise, the time we took to be Planck’s time, a fundamental unit of time. For universal time to reach zero, our observed time has to become imaginary. It suggests that there never was a Big Bang. On the miniscule scale, time is eternal. Perhaps that will actually please Christians.

Source: askwhy.co.uk

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Tags: ZERO | UNIVERSE | Time | observed | God | Culture | BIG | BANG

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