Einstein and other world renowned scientists like Stephen Hawking have often been exploited by religious folks as proof of the coexistence, or even the mutual necessity of science and religion. After all Einstein did talk about god. Quotes like, “God does not play dice”; “God created the integers”; are the kind of phrases that religious apologists ignorantly use to consider Einstein, Hawking and many other scientists with absolutely no theistic beliefs that slip into using religious terminology, as one of their own. Even worse is how these phrases are often perverted to explain beliefs that are totally irrelevant of what these authors really mean, because Einstein also said,
‘I have never imputed to Nature as a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism’
‘I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.’
Einstein’s religious views have often been described as pantheism (Spinoza’s God), which as opposed the dominant belief system on Earth, theism (organized religion), doesn’t entail any supernatural entities. Pantheism is a belief that God and Nature are equivalent, absolutely nothing to do with a creative deity. Einstein made it very clear that it was a lie that he believed in a personal god; one that listens to prayers, forgives sins etc. He did not believe in anything beyond the natural and physical world; a creative intelligence or any form of celestial totalitarianism that is in control of natural phenomena; qualities found in all religions today. Religion for Einstein was only and simply one’s attitude towards nature at large.
One might find it difficult to fundamentally differentiate between Pantheism and Atheism, or as Richard Dawkins neatly describes it in The God Delusion, ‘Pantheism is sexed-up atheism’. Carl Sagan gives us his interpretation of the word God ‘if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity’.
Aside being one of the greatest physicists of all time, Einstein was a philosopher of science, and a beautiful poet. Einstein was using the word ‘god’ as a kind of metaphor for that we don’t know, and religion as our pursuit of the unknown about the universe and nature. Replace this very definition with any of Einstein’s quotes and his poetic account will be clear. ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ simply means ‘Could the universe have begun in any other way?’ Translation of ‘God does not play dice’ by a theist will sound something like, “God is conscious and has intended a purposed universe”; when Einstein was actually referring to the queerness of quantum theory and his deterministic philosophical opinion about the universe.
‘Science without religion is lame’ means that science without the feeling a sense of hunger for answers about the universe is lame. In other words, asking questions about the universe is religion. ‘Religion without science is blind’, must therefore be true as science is our one and only universal candidate with the potential to discover truths about our universe; absolutely nothing to do with what we today call religion.
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