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: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.