Einstein Letter Goes on Sale

ErkDemon writes "For any Slashdotters who want a piece of frameable Einstein memorabilia, a letter from A.E. to Eric Gutkind goes on sale at Bloomsbury Auctions today (May 15th). The content of the letter mostly deals with Einstein's views on religion. (Einstein pronounces himself rather unimpressed by the whole idea and rejects it as "childish.") The Guardian has printed a translated excerpt from the letter."

Comments

Do people still write letters?

[symes]

Einstein's letter raises another issue - do scientists, the great, good and so forth still write letters? My feelings are that people nowadays just type out emails or long journal articles. The letter writing industry seems to have disappeared - which would be a terrible shame. Letters written by big historical figures like Einstein provide important insights into their thinking that other forms of communication seem to lack.

Re:Well...

[Adhemar]

Spinoza didn't believe in a personal God either. In Ethica, his philosophical masterpiece, Spinoza says that God is "immanent" in nature, not some supernatural entity beyond the world, interfering or having feelings.

Spinoza's concept of Deus sive natura (the God from nature) does not fit in the concept that most people mean when they speak of God. Schopenhauer wrote that because Spinoza called the substance God, he created his own problem of people misunderstanding him. Schopenhauer thinks Spinoza used the term God to make his ideas less objectionable. If only Spinoza choose to call his God-concept by any other name, his ideas would be understood more frequently for what they are: atheism in awe for the Beauty of Nature and the Universe; not theism, or pantheism, etc.

Einstein has the same problem: he stated many times not to believe in a personal God; the quote from this letter is just one quote among many others, many times equally clear as in this letter. But because Einstein, like Spinoza, did use the term God (for instance in the dice comment), even if it meant something that falls outside of most people's definition of God, theists like to talk about him as if he were one of their own.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins explains why Einstein's God-quotes do not contradict his unbelief.

This is a quote from Albert Einstein, which summarises his position best (in my opinion):

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. I have never imputed to Nature 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. The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.

Re:Absolutely not.

[elucido]

But if you want me to make it simple, nothing exists outside of our minds. You only think that stuff exists but you have no way to actually prove anything exists prior to perception.
Basically I don't believe the universe exists independent of the observer. And if you somehow do believe the universe can exist independent on the observer then the burden is on you to prove something can exist without being observed by anything in the universe. You sound as if you thought that Solipsism was something new. In fact this line of thinking has existed since a few hundred years BC, along with a number of philosophical problems that come with it, and which it never could solve.

Quoting Wikipedia, Bertrand Russell wrote:

"As against solipsism it is to be said, in the first place, that it is psychologically impossible to believe, and is rejected in fact even by those who mean to accept it. I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician and a solipsist, her surprise surprised me."

-- B. Russel, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. I never said my ideas were completely new or alien, or had no basis in history. What I'm saying is that science seems to be proving that the solipsis was of thinking is simply the most reasonable.

I don't mean to discredit any other way or thinking, but no other way of thinking seems to be as reasonable. The other ways of thinking seem to rely on faith, we are supposed to believe that "stuff" can exist outside of our minds, which to me doesn't seem any more reasonable than believing in a God who lives in the sky who we can't see, or aliens in space, or angels, or the devil.

Sure it's all possible, but I'm more likely to believe that it' all in our minds. The main different between what I'm saying and Solipsism is that Solipsism says that the individual mind "mine" is the only mind I know to exist, while I'm saying "our" as in the universal mind is the only thing I know to exist.

Btw what are some of those philosophical problems with Solipsism? And why exactly is it impossible to psychologically believe? Why should you believe anything exists outside of reality?

Re:Well...

[Simon Brooke]

Iesu ben Iussuf, a carpenter's son from Nazareth who became a radical rabbi, probably existed. There's no contemporary documentary evidence, but there is plenty of evidence of radical Jewish religious movements about the same time and the later emergence of Christianity is reasonable corroboration. However, whether or not Iesu ben Iussuf existed casts precisely no light whatever on whether God exists.