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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."
Reading it, you'd think this would stop the theists from repeatedly dragging the man unwillingly into their camp; but since this well-known remark...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
There's a good lesson here: Poetic/metaphoric language can get you in trouble when people take you too literally. The dice comment is regularly trotted out as "proof" of his religious convictions, but the later statements in which he unequivocally denies that he believes in God somehow get missed.
In any event, this is all a rather sad reverse ad hominem; whether or not Einstein believed in God has no bearing on whether or not God exists. But both theists and atheists try to "claim" Einstein, because having a genius on your side *seems* to add weight to your argument. It doesn't, but there you go.
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When person A comes to visit his neighbour and sees him lying in a pool of blood and shrieks "Oh my God!", does that mean that person A is religious, too?
The word is pretty deeply rooted in the language, so even if you completely dismiss the concept of God, you may find yourself using the word more or less frequently.
It may come as a shock, but people use metaphors or analogies or funny quotes all the time, without actually believing in the thing used as a metaphor.
E.g., we may spew or quote stuff like "Mother Nature always sides with the hidden flaw" or "Mother Nature is a bitch", without actually believing that there is such a sentient entity. Or when Stalin said that "artillery is the god of war", chances are he didn't mean it literally.
E.g., you may have noticed quotes from Futurama's characters before on Slashdot. I'll take a wild guess that most of those people don't actually believe that Bender or Dr Zoidberg are real.
More importantly, look at the context in which he said that. There was _nothing_ theistic about it. Einstein's view of the world was based on the evidenced-based large-scale physics, where stuff is very deterministic. More importantly, there seemed to be no obvious way to reconcile relativity with quantum physics, so one or the other had to be false. Einstein obviously favoured his own relativity, and had plenty of experimental confirmation (at macro level) that it's correct.
If anything, it just shows that even really really smart people can be occasionally wrong, when talking about stuff outside their expertise domain.
But the crucial thing is that it was based on falsifiable evidence, not on some belief in a deity whose will is absolute and whose habits can be guessed. There was nothing inherently theistic about that belief.
Yes, he used the word "god". It was just a metaphor/anthropomorphisation of the universe. He could have just as well used "mother nature" or just personified the universe itself. It was just supposed to get the point across, not be some declaration of faith in a god.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Can an atheist use the expression "The devil is in the details?"
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
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.
He never said self-aware, nor did he suggest anything about how it was created. That's more Hawking's department, anyway. Athiests believe the universe is a complete accident and that everything in the universe is random. And you know pretty much nothing about atheists. Nothing Einstein has ever said in any of his writings support that he believes that the universe is random. No, in fact, he said just the opposite. He ignored quantum mechanics because of that.
However, the fact that he recognized a symmetry in the Universe in no way suggests that he believed in a creator, or that the "God" he believed in was even sentient. He claimed to believe in Spinoza's God. Quoting that Wikipedia article: Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality, namely the single substance (meaning "to stand beneath" rather than "matter") that is the basis of the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect is only understood in part. Sounds to me like Spinoza's God created nothing, but is everything. You could almost say that Spinoza was very much an atheist -- he believed in nothing more than matter, the physical world that we see. But he believed that this was what the Jewish God really is -- kind of like the world being created in six days has to be a metaphor, because we know it wasn't.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Actually, that "reverse ad hominem" has a name: appeal to false authority. You know, X is accepted as a smart and authoritative guy on his domain, X said Y, therefore Y must be true. It's used all the time, sadly. Franklin sad this, Churchill said that, Einstein said that other thing, etc. Often raising somethig that's little more than a wisecrack or thinly veiled jab at one's opponents (Churchill for one was quite the wisecracker) to the rank of absolute truth, beyond all questioning. Just because the great man said it, and obviously someone that great can't be wrong about something outside the domain of his expertise. And very few people seem to be aware that it's a fallacy. In reality, even _within_ one's domain of expertise, one can be wrong all right. Einstein was against quantum mechanics. Tesla didn't believe in relativity. (And in quite the fighting words: "[a] magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king") Lorentz was _rabidly_ against Einstein's relativity, and even denounced it as bolshevism, although it was based on his own equations. Go figure. There's a reason why the scientific method assumes that anything is falsifiable, and nothing is above questioning, no matter how big a genius said it. (Although, you're still supposed to present your evidence if you want to challenge it. Just personal disbelief or contradicting one's pet dogma aren't enough.) Move outside what one really knows, and the association with some authority figure becomes fully irrelevant.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Explain this: if the universe cannot exist without self-awareness, and there was a time when the universe did not exist, then how did the universe came to be? One cannot be aware of oneself if one does not yet exist. Your philosophy sounds an aweful lot like that new-age crap, but let's assume you came up with this yourself. How did you come to this philosophy of yours?
1. God is self awareness.
What is the basis for your core assumption ?
This means, life is real if it's aware of itself. Humans and most mammals are real.
Most mammals ? Which ones are unlucky enough not to make the cut ? Who decides ?
Where do reptiles and fish fit into your scheme ? Or, aren't they cute enough to have feelings ? Do the poor old insects get a raw deal as well ?
What a disgraceful slander.
"Intelligent design" is a sly relabeling of creationism. Einstein was above all a scientist. He would certainly not want to be associated with such intentionally deceptive pseudoscience.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I propose a simple experiment. You say the universe exists only inside one's awareness.
In other words, you believe in magic. But we can easily experimentally verify this state of affairs.
I put you inside a dark room, completely and utterly dark, so that most of your perception is disabled. What you don't know is that there is a hole in the floor of the room : but no worries, nobody is aware of the hole, and it isn't aware of itself : so you won't fall through it.
Obviously if you do fall through : your "philosophy" is worthless and untrue : it failed a prediction.
Your philosophy is different in nothing from any ancient belief that you would call utterly stupid. They believed something that could be trivially disproven and "the world is only what you think about it".
Obviously it's not. The world exists independantly of you.
In your response please do keep in mind that unicorns are pretty and they can do anything they want.
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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: -- 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?
No? Einstein discovered some of the most important principles upon which the Universe is built; he revealed the strange nature of space and time and how the two are related, the equivalence of solid material things and abstract energy, the connection between the propagation of light and the principle of causality itself.
If there exists a creator, then Einstein's study of the creation has told us more about that creator than any prophet ever has.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Please, sir! It is well accepted that Philosophers are permitted a certain amount of hand waving. This one appears to be waving only his right hand, curled into a tubular shape, vigorously about his nether regions.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
It does not state that matter and energy are the same thing.
It states that mass has energy, and inversely, energy has mass.
A body travelling at enormous speeds gains mass because of the mass of its kinetic energy, which is the quantity described by E=mc^2. The body does not gain any matter (it's particle count remains constant).
The constituents of a nuclear fission reaction neither lose or gain mass. No mass is converted to energy. The energy released is the spare binding energy that the larger nuclei required but the more stable products do not. Products like photons with no intrinsic mass of their own carry away the mass of the energy they embody. No mass is destroyed or "converted to energy".
Even in a matter-antimatter annihilation, the products carry energy equivalent to the combined rest mass of the reagents and thus mass and energy are conserved.
If I should ever encounter an entity with god-like powers I'll treat them with a sensible amount of respect, either to gain their favour or avoid their wrath. But god-like powers aren't proof of being creator of the universe. Quite simply I can't conceive of any kind of proof that would make this evident to anyone within the universe. It's an impossibility.
So the atheists are trying to beat on the theists by proving that a really smart guy was one of them?
Frankly, considering the off-kilter nature of genius as we know it, I wouldn't want to lay too much value on having some of the same ideals of other geniuses, or many other people for that matter.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.