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Originally Posted by Whatsitoosit
Interesting, Einstein didn't consider himself an Atheist. He believed in a higher order and from what I have read he believed in Spinoza's God. “I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings”.
this is interesting, an intereview with Einstein for the Saturday Evening Post in 1929.
"To what extent are you influenced by Christianity?"
"As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene."
"Have you read Emil Ludwig's book on Jesus?"
"Emil Ludwig's Jesus is shallow. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot."
"You accept the historical Jesus?"
"Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life."
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I can also find quotes.
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Originally Posted by Wikipedia
Einstein clarified his religious views in a letter he wrote in response to those who claimed that he worshipped a Judeo-Christian god: "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."[57] In his book The World as I See It, he wrote: "A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man."
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The main point of my last post is that creationists often use such quotes in a misleading manner. If you're gonna quote Einstein, you might as well use the quote that said "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this".
When you remove a quote from it's context, it quickly becomes misleading. One of the most infamous examples is this :
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"To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."
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This is a quote by Charles Darwin that's been printed in several creationist books and put up on various webpages .. yet the full quote goes this :
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Originally Posted by Charles Darwin
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.
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In other words, the full quote actually says
the opposite of what creationists want you to believe.
Maybe scientists should stoop as low as the creationists. We could make up quotes from Jesus saying God doesn't really exist or support science by posting quotes from people who used to be creationists but now believe in evolution. Wait, that would be stupid.
The sad thing about tactics that rely on misinformation is that you're then competing with the truth .. and the truth stays true in the face of evidence while lies do not.
05-19-2009, 11:20 AM
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