Delete this comment.
Why delete? It’s a reasonable request
Water and air are real. You cannot see air, but you can breath in and smell air i.e. it is sensible. Water is visible and sensible.
I believe in free will, but that’s determined by my theism. But then my theism is a conclusion drawn from observations and not my upbringing. So if you’re not a theist it makes it hard to accept we should have such a freedom.
I responded hastily without having read the entry I was responding to, and felt it bad form.
Judaism is a religion, and Einstein was likely raised to believe in God. We can assume that anything challenging conventional physics might have conflicted with his personal beliefs.
I’m afraid this is sadly mistaken. Einstein said all his life that religion is childish and that if there was a God, He would have no interest in what humans asked of him. He wasn’t atheist, in that he believed the order of the universe bespoke a higher intelligence, but he had no time for religion.
Einstein was rattled by the idea that the universe is based on indeterminacy, famously using the metaphor of God not playing dice to reject the notion. His concept of a ‘material world’ seems, it appears, to have been influenced by his ‘religious’ upbringing.
Einstein did not have a religious upbringing. His parents were Jewish but secular. He went through a religious phase aged 10-11 but thereafter did not advocate for any religion.
We can safely say that no one has ever actually seen God, but then who hasn’t see a church, a mosque or a synagogue. The point being that religion is very real and rejecting it is not rejecting the concept of a god. Regardless any acceptance of a material world is an acceptance of a material god.
Yep, a good honest answer there. I would push back on your last line though: just because your beliefs entail free will exists it doesn’t follow that people without your beliefs would find it difficult to believe in that concept.
There are plenty of atheists who believe in free will.
And to be clear on my own position: even though I don’t think “free will” is a coherent concept, I think we’re as free as it is possible for an entity to be. Based on our understanding and predilections, we make a decision as to the best possible course of action. It’s just that both my understanding and my predilections are going to be traceable to states and events outside of me. And this is true whether the universe is deterministic or not.
Can you give any quotes for the belief in a higher intelligence?
From my understanding, he said he believes in Spinoza’s god
– which is unfortuantely vague enough that it could mean a “higher intelligence”, or it could mean he’s using the word God interchangably with the unthinking order/structure of the universe.
Sure. But don’t attribute to Einstein motivations there is no evidence of him having had.
I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written these books. It does not know-how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.
From Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, p. 386
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I feel the answers to these things, and to the question of Time, is there, but I lack the logic or the words, as you clearly have, to express them (For example I use Bing AI rewrites with some of my posts, this one included).
Thanks, interesting quote
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No evidence??? Who exactly are you quoting in the above quote you posted. An Excerpt: “That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God”. From that it sure looks like he accepted a ‘higher intelligence’ that is he had a degree of faith, and something that the emerging quantum theory at the time challenged.
Again - he said was not an atheist, but he also frequently stated that he thought religion was childish superstition. Maybe you could say he was 'spiritual but not religious.
None of which had any bearing on his views of quantum physics.
Apparently he also said
“The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.”
So I think it’s fair to say that what, exactly, he means by “God” is at least a little bit ambiguous.
There are too many deep issues that are colliding in this discussion.