Einstein's Religion

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Ion said:
Maybe you can entertain us and explain us the reason was kept there as proof of evolution?
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You don’t pay me nearly enough to entertain you, especially not when the entertainment is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
 
Ion said:
Maybe you can tell us more about the scientific opinion on the relative positions of sun vs earth, before Copernicus.
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I’m way too busy right now :cool:

Google is your friend :rolleyes:

Sarah x 🙂
 
Oreoracle said:
I have no interest in engaging in a quote war, because quotes prove nothing; quoting amounts to arguing from authority. But it does amuse me to think that, if I gave you a contrary quote from another scientist, you would say that scientists have no expertise in religion, so their opinion doesn’t count. But when the scientist agrees with you, suddenly their quote is supposed to be convincing.
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I agree with this point you have made. 👍

But the reason for quoting Einstein in this context was not to use him as an authority. Sorry I didn’t make that clear. I seriously doubt that Einstein would have viewed himself as an authority on Scripture. The reason for citing him was only to show that reasonable men can give credit to religion when it is due, even when they don’t believe in the religion. Einstein was crediting the Gospels as a believable account of the life of Jesus, even though Einstein certainly didn’t agree with much of what Jesus taught. So Einstein certainly didn’t react to the Gospels the way some people do when they call them a pack of lies, and even raise into question whether Jesus ever lived.

Not you, of course! 😉
 
Oreoracle

I know Einstein referred to himself as an agnostic.

You refer to yourself as an agnostic atheist. Would you please explain the difference? :confused:
 
atheistgirl said:
Likes
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:tiphat:
Charlemagne_III said:
I agree with this point you have made. 👍

…]

The reason for citing him was only to show that reasonable men can give credit to religion when it is due, even when they don’t believe in the religion.
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If you agree with me on that point, surely you would also agree that I could come up with a quote to the contrary and say that reasonable men can express doubt toward Jesus’ existence, at least as it’s recounted in the Gospels.

But I will actually take the route of Christopher Hitchens on this one, and I’ll grant you Jesus’ existence, and even his miracles, for the sake of argument. It still proves nothing about the remainder of Christianity’s claims.
Charlemagne_III said:
Oreoracle

I know Einstein referred to himself as an agnostic.

You refer to yourself as an agnostic atheist. Would you please explain the difference? :confused:
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There was a similar question recently on a different thread. I have copied what I wrote on that thread below:

Oreoracle said:
“Theist”, “agnostic”, and “atheist” are not positions along the same continuum. They are actually answers to entirely different questions. A theist believes in at least one god, whereas an atheist doesn’t. An agnostic believes one cannot have knowledge of gods (including knowledge of their non-existence), whereas a gnostic (for lack of a better word) believes one can. So consider the two questions below:
  1. Do you believe that any gods exist?
  2. Can we know anything about these gods for sure, including whether or not they exist?
Note that one need only lack belief to be an atheist, and one’s agnosticism (their negative answer to #2) doesn’t in any way address the first question. Someone can be an agnostic atheist or even an agnostic Christian. I am an agnostic atheist because I haven’t seen sufficient evidence for any gods and I think that gods are often defined in a way that makes their existence unverifiable even in principle. In other words, gods may exist, but there’s no way a human knows anything about them.

Note also that lacking belief isn’t the same thing as asserting that something isn’t the case. A famous example is Russell’s Teapot. There could be a teapot orbiting a distant planet as we speak. I cannot disprove that, but I see no reason to believe it. Thus I am an “atheist” with respect to the teapot (I don’t believe it’s there), but given the available information, I concede that no one can prove or disprove otherwise, so I refrain from making the claim that it doesn’t exist.
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Oreoracle said:
There was a similar question recently on a different thread. I have copied what I wrote on that thread below:
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So an agnostic atheist doesn’t believe in God but doesn’t rule out the possibility that God exists? 🤷
 
Oreoracle said:
That is correct.
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If you don’t believe that God exists, on what grounds would it be possible that God exists?

That is, what would it take to convince you that God exists? Would God have to appear to you in person? 😉
 
Charlemagne_III said:
If you don’t believe that God exists, on what grounds would it be possible that God exists?

That is, what would it take to convince you that God exists? Would God have to appear to you in person? 😉
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As I said, I am agnostic, which means that I think knowledge of gods is impossible. Strictly speaking, nothing could convince me.

Now before you exclaim “AHA! The atheist is biased!” from the rooftops, hear me out. God is defined to be omniscient. Suppose he appeared to me in person to convince me of this. I could ask him the most difficult questions my poor mortal brain could muster to test his omniscience. Supposing that he answers all of them correctly, does this prove that he knows everything? No, it only proves that he knows more than I do, which, considering that I’m a mortal, isn’t much. He could probably even make things up and I would be none the wiser.

God is defined to be omnipotent. Suppose he performed astonishing miracles to convince me of this. Would any of his miracles prove that he could do literally anything that’s logically possible? No, how should I know how much power it’s possible for one to have over a universe, or other logically possible universes? Impressing my mortal mind with flashy miracles doesn’t demonstrate omnipotence.

So God is defined in a way that is beyond our epistemological limitations. I suppose I could be convinced of the existence of powerful beings with intellect that surpasses ours, however.
 
Oreoracle said:
As I said, I am agnostic, which means that I think knowledge of gods is impossible. Strictly speaking, nothing could convince me.

So God is defined in a way that is beyond our epistemological limitations. I suppose I could be convinced of the existence of powerful beings with intellect that surpasses ours, however.
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And yet you’ve said that the existence of God is possible.

So what if there is a God, and that God is the Christian God? Is that also possible? :confused:
 
Charlemagne_III said:
If God is possible, and God does exist, how would you know that God could not reveal himself as knowable in ways of His choosing?
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Again, I would cite my previous arguments about how God’s omni- qualities aren’t demonstrable to humans. I suppose God could alter our capacities to make the knowledge possible, but that’s moving the goalposts completely out of the ballpark. The religious people who do claim to know their gods clearly do not possess mental powers that you and I lack. They merely have a very low standard of evidence.
 
According to Bishop Fulton Sheen, Einstein’s view of God was that he could not have given man free will, because to do so would have made God less than omnipotent. to which Sheen replied: “… it seems much more in accordance with sound reason to argue that God would not be all-powerful unless He could make man free. It takes more skill to make a machine that runs itself than it does to make a bird house. In like manner, it takes more power to make a self-determining human than it does to make an automaton. An omnipotent god, Professor Einstein says, would make man irresponsible. It is just the contrary, for how can there be responsibility without personality? The moral order assumes law, and law is based on Mind, and Mind is personal. If God is only Space-Time, there is no moral order; then Hitler is not responsible for driving Professor Einstein out of Germany. It was only a bad collocation of space-time conglomerations which made him act that way.”

Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion
 
Oreoracle said:
Again, I would cite my previous arguments about how God’s omni- qualities aren’t demonstrable to humans. I suppose God could alter our capacities to make the knowledge possible, but that’s moving the goalposts completely out of the ballpark. The religious people who do claim to know their gods clearly do not possess mental powers that you and I lack. They merely have a very low standard of evidence.
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Even if God’s omni-qualities are not demonstrable in ways that satisfy your criteria, it does not follow that God does not exist. So, without being able to demonstrate that God does not exist, you have chosen to believe the unknowable … that God does not exist?

The standards of religious people are not really low. They believe God revealed himself to them, and there is no higher standard for knowledge than God’s revelation.
 
Charlemagne_III said:
Even if God’s omni-qualities are not demonstrable in ways that satisfy your criteria, it does not follow that God does not exist.
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I agree. It does, however, follow that God’s existence can’t be known, hence my agnosticism.
So, without being able to demonstrate that God does not exist, you have chosen to believe the unknowable … that God does not exist?
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No, I thought we were past this. I am not asserting that God exists or that he does not exist. I am only making claims about how much we can know about gods given our limitations.
The standards of religious people are not really low. They believe God revealed himself to them, and there is no higher standard for knowledge than God’s revelation.
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But when we ask how God has revealed himself to individuals, their testimonies seem incredible at best (in the sense of literally not being credible) and absurd at worst. It requires especially low standards to use someone else’s testimony as evidence for one’s own belief–to take another’s word for it. Contrast that with science, where evidence must be reproducible.
 
Oreoracle said:
But when we ask how God has revealed himself to individuals, their testimonies seem incredible at best (in the sense of literally not being credible) and absurd at worst. It requires especially low standards to use someone else’s testimony as evidence for one’s own belief–to take another’s word for it. Contrast that with science, where evidence must be reproducible.
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Do you mean to say that God can only be known to exist if we can see Him through a telscope or on a petri dish? :confused:
 
Charlemagne_III said:
Do you mean to say that God can only be known to exist if we can see Him through a telscope or on a petri dish? :confused:
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No. As I’ve argued, God cannot be known because he has essentially been defined to be unknowable, at least to human intellects. People have ascribed to him qualities that cannot be demonstrated to humans, even if God himself wanted to do the demonstrating.

As I mentioned before, perhaps he could adjust the human intellect to make his qualities demonstrable, but that’s an entirely different matter. We would no longer be humans after such an adjustment has been made. It takes an omniscient being to recognize an omniscient being, so we would practically have to become gods ourselves for that to work.
 
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