Friday, May 27, 2016

Einstein's religious views

1923: "My comprehension of God comes from the deeply felt conviction of a superior intelligence that reveals itself in the knowable world. In common terms, one can describe it as pantheistic."

1929: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony all that exists, but not a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of human beings."

1931: "It is very difficult to elucidate this cosmic religious feeling to anyone who is entirely without it. The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it."

1934: "You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religiosity of the naive man. For the latter, God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father."

Date unknown by me: "In every true searcher of nature, there is a kind of religious reverence, for he finds it impossible to imagine that he is the first to have thought out the exceedingly delicate threads that connect his perceptions."

Date unknown by me: "A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people."

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