Einstein and the atheists

I was accosted on a London bus once by a pushy, pious evangelist. With what I am sure he assumed was his noblest smile he asked me if I believed in god. I leaned in wide-eyed, feigned shock “Of course! What’s not to believe?” He was a little deflated I think on being cheated of a cosy preach but left me with his pamphlets which I accepted with what I assume was my most gracious smile.

I was irritated, mildly, that a complete stranger would want to influence what are to me my most intimate and fundamental beliefs. I thought it was ruder by far than meeting a person’s eye on the Underground. So I was not entirely without sympathy when I learnt that the atheists in London were garnering funds for a London bus ad campaign. I was even amused to learn that they had far exceeded their own fund-raising expectations. A lot of people were willing to put down their own real money to prove a thing unreal. A rationalist/aethiest taking on the onus of proving a non-existence has got to be the juiciest paradox, after God.

All this to say, that per se, I have no objection to the campaign. But I learn from this morning newspaper that they are planning to quote certain famous persons to bolster their claim. To be specific, Emily Dickinson, Albert Einstein, Douglas Adams and Katharine Hepburn. Now Emily Dickinson would have had no option; if you need to stay really angsty you can’t afford to believe. Douglas Adams, since he had managed to convince himself that he did not believe, was delusional, ergo does not count. Katherine Hepburn – lovely lady and all but somehow I find myself indifferent to her religious views.

But Albert Einstein is a different matter altogether. Really can’t stand to see his name being bandied about by every budding agnostic who has learnt to say ‘no proof’. Especially when I’ve learnt that the very same thing distressed the man. Indeed, to a man of such profound intuition it must have been abhorrent to be lumped with and quoted by a bunch of narrow-minded persons waiting in near-religious smugness for the boundaries of science to expand and reveal all. He would have dearly loved to say, I think, a thing or two about the boundaries of the mind. He is dead and gone but thankfully the whole world loves to remember and quote the man. And since I think it is really annoying and unfair that he should be so misrepresented, I am pulling up a few quotes of his that I had especially collected for such an occasion as this.

"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.”

“The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.”

“Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there.”

"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.”

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What Albert Einstein or anybody else thinks need not influence anyone’s feelings about faith. Faith or lack of it cannot be transmitted cerebrally in any case. We none of us require each other’s religious views to prop our own which makes organised religion or organised atheism somewhat ridiculous. But Man has never let the consciousness of the ridiculous affect his social endeavours. We can however, attempt to draw the line at falsified evidence in a bid to influence the masses.