Welcome to my Blog

A warm welcome to my Blog

I shall post some news of interest to Sri lankans about life in Sri Lanka in the period 1950-1960 mainly. This will feature articles on music, general history and medicine. I am dedicated to humanism and refuse to judge people according to labels they are born with. Their actions and behaviour shall be my yardsticks, always cognizant of the challenges they faced in life.

Monday 27 April 2020

Did Albert Einstein believe in God?

Whether he was Atheist or not is hotly debated. From all what I have read, and I can give you references, Einstein believed in God in a Mathematical sense. He always said that he has no belief in a "personal" God who listens to prayers and has qualities such as love, forgiveness and limitless power. To say he was an Atheist is wrong. Here is one quote-" I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist,” he once said when asked to define God. “I believe in Spinoza’s God,” he told Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogues of New York, “who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists.”  Another - " There are still people", he remarked at a charity dinner during the War, "who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for support of such views”. “There are fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics,” he said in 1940.  

He believed in a Cosmic religion or some type of Cosmic order responsible for the precise mathematical laws that appear to exist in Nature but he was passionately against a belief in a Personal God. If you define Atheism as a rejection of a personal God, then Einstein was an atheist but most intellectual scientists and physicists who believe in God do not have the "Old man in a beard" type of personal god concept. I think it is fair to say that a true Atheist is one who rejects both components, i.e cosmic intelligence and a personal God who have an influence on us. I certainly know highly intelligent and well-read people who believe in God but it is almost always a belief in a Cosmic intelligence rather than a personal god. 

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