Friday, January 09, 2009

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.”


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


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.


6 comments:

Ludwig said...

The lady doth protest... You may have jumped the gun, young Vyas. And possibly misinterpreting the position of the people behind the bus? Don't want to put words in the mouths of the campaigners, but I shall anyway!

The "God" in the poster is, will you agree, most likely a reference to the sort of Omniscient Dude/tte In Sky Who Listens to Us, Answers Prayers, Watches Us And Dispenses Judgment And Whose Truest Teachings Are To Be Found In Book/Prophet/Myth XYZ. Isn't this what many "religious" people mean when they talk of "God"? In fact, the campaigners are probably referring specifically to the god of the "great monotheistic faiths" by saying "There is probably no God." rather than, "There are probably no gods." Shall we assume this is the case?

If so, you will find Comrade Einstein's list of utterances replete with explicit rejections of such an entity.

"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."

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."

"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms."

etc. See this for example. The internet, that Ineffable Mystery, seems to indicate the existence of others. Usual caveats apply, this is the internet, anything that can be manufactured already has been. Probably.

Do you know what quotes of Einstein they're actually planning to put on public transit? Now if the sayings that they are planning to use, are from one of the above (say), isn't "falsified evidence in a bid to influence the masses" putting it a bit strongly?

We arrive at a bit of a paradox, because there seem to exist simultaneously instances where Einstein talks of the existence of a god and others where he rejects it. There may be at least 2 explanations.

1. He kept changing his mind, so there isn't a single solid thing such as "Einstein's final opinion on the existence of God." If this is the case, there is almost no point in sifting through the corpus, because for everything that "bolsters" one group's position, there's something for the other side.

Einstein wasn't particularly well-known for being correct on things throughout his life. Especially after the 1920s, when the "rest of physics" moved on with quantum mechanics and so on, Einstein spent several futile decades trying to reconcile gravitation with nuclear forces and electromagnetism. He was a bit of an odd fellow in mid-20th century physics, somewhat sadly. So there's a possibility that he was deluding himself about the existence of a single ineffable reality etc. just as he was (up to that point) deluding himself about a grand unification in physics.

But he was also one of the most prodigiously competent physicists ever, and so who knows, maybe he will be proved right after all... Which brings us to the second possibility.

2. He was actually not being inconsistent. All he was claiming is that there are mysteries in the universe that possibly beyond current understanding, and possibly all understanding, and he is simply labeling the feeling of wonder/awe/exaltation that he experienced "religious"/"God".

Then we're just bandying terms. I don't think most "atheists" will have a problem acknowledging that there are things that are currently beyond our "understanding" and there will probably be such things for ever, maybe even that we feel/ought to feel a sense of mystery/delight/whatever when we come across this. The only quibble is with calling it "religious" or "Godly" (in the narrow sense of Dude In Sky stuff). And also with someone thinking that they have the right to wake us up at 5 a.m. with a bhajan or an azaan or whatever over loudspeaker, because "it's a faith thing".

This morning when running on Tank Bund, somewhere between the 5 k.m. and 7 k.m. mark I was clipping along serenely with my mind in an indescribable state, breathing all steady, something like an out-of-body experience. There are such feelings, they are probably accessible to everyone, through different ways. If I was "religious" (in the "conventional" way), maybe I would ascribe it to the Parabrahmanandam or something. There may or may not be a biochemical explanation for it involving neurons and endorphins. If there was an explanation, I would be happy to understand it. But if there isn't (or I can't) why should that take away from anything?

It's slightly unfortunate that this bus poster campaign had to happen, IMO. "atheist" is a poor choice of label, it's like saying "non-philatelists" or "non-carnatic lovers". But to each their own...

Anyway, so somehow my first blog post for 2009 is a comment, you bad person! So, in conclusion, the important points recapitulated:

1. You and bus campaign wallas are probably not even contesting the same ground.

2. It's not at all clear one way or the other what Einstein did or did not believe or say in respect of this issue.

3. The only really useful thing you can learn from all this is that I'm back in town (for a week) and this may be the bestest chance of retrieving your precious (not?) jacket and T-shirt.

QED

Ludwig said...

And have you really gone and turned off your RSS feed pipeline thingy? Deliberately? Why am I missing all posts since September 2008? The horror, the horror...

Space Bar said...

Luddoo: Yes, Young Vyas explained somewhere about turning off RSS when I also expressed outrage.

How theology and the lack of it brings us all out of the woodwork, no? Having recently ingested a lot of JK, I will soon dig out suitable quote. Something to do with opposites (and the 'real' lack of them): that, going slightly OT here, if the existence of greed is a fact, then the opposite is not a 'fact' but a mere aspiration, or a moral imposition with no basis in any understanding.

Not sure what my point is, but I think one can apply to this here god thingy.

Shweta said...

Ludovic : Wow! Indeed,nothing to churn up an atheist like a discussion on god, what? Welcome back temporarily, dear boy.
You know by now that I am a little woolly-headed with a cold in my head but I will try to focus my attention on your impassioned comment with the help of salient-points list that you drew up.

1)< You and bus campaign wallas are probably not even contesting the same ground. >
No two people ever talk of the same god. There are probably as many gods or non-gods as sentient beings. (The delicious Vedanticness of that had me chortling myself into a coughing fit.) So I hope I am never tempted to be foolish enough to contest theological "grounds". As I was at pains to explain in the post, the only ground I am contesting is the appropriation of Einstein's ardent soul-searchings in a bid to plump-up a rationalist viewpoint when anybody can see that the whole concept of religiosity was one, which to his mind, writhed with emotion and the inexpressible. This man - born into the rigid confines of an Old Testament society, in times which threw up some of the most crucial moral and ethical crises in history, struggling with a blinding cosmological intuition without the benefit of a sufficiently kindred philosophy - I feel a sharp affection for him. I have felt it ever more keenly since I glimpsed his conflicted faith when I chanced upon Max Jammer's Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology. And it is an affection that is not lessened because he twisted himself into the then-unfashionable GUT knots towards the end of his career or that he was not the victor in the Bohr-Einstein face-off. I don't like to see his personal beliefs and conflicts being either used as a rationalist prop or discarded as the ramblings of oddball scientist who leapt off the mainstream bandwagon.
2) < It's not at all clear one way or the other what Einstein did or did not believe or say in respect of this issue. >
What conclusion Einstein reached at the "end of his life" I am interested in only in as much as I hope that it gave him hope and succour. I am not about to, or would indeed advise anybody to, base spiritual beliefs on his or anybody else's authorisation. I was only trying to, in a sentimental way, stand up for him when he is unable to, rather than hope to prop myself against him. But I think I repeat myself.

Now my question and answer - Poor Einstein found himself in the cramping atmosphere of a world whose theology had been entirely hijacked by Society, where there was only one available option for anyone wishing to reject these confinements – to align themselves with the other dominant paradigm of 'Reason', installed via Enlightenment. Not much choice for a man with vast and enquiring mind; it is small wonder he sounded undecided and unconformist.
But you and I, Ludwigman, have been born to modern India, where the more fortunate of us encounter a dozen shades of religiosity in a day. We are sufficiently exposed to tell the difference between religion as identity, a social-control tool and religion as an epistemological and truth seeking device, to tell the difference in fact between religion and god. How then do you bring in the issue of basic communal tolerance or lack of (as is the case with prayer meetings and azaans, which are entirely social issues) confusing it with a cosmological worldview? Also when you speak of 'general religious types', 'accepted dudettes in the sky' 'being religious in a conventional way' 'just calling something God, because it feels like god but (god forbid!) not the religious god’, when you quote Einstein on Spinoza's god as if it were not a valid belief system, you talk like someone who has never encountered plurality, as if the fundamentals of our land's thought are not based on it.
So when you invite me to assume anything about another’s stand-point about Belief, I, with my pluralist socialisation, am compelled to decline. But I just wondered if I am to understand from what you say that there are sub-cults of atheists to match their religious counter-parts, such as Christian-ashiest and Jain-atheists etc? That each objects exclusively to their chosen God? Paradoxically and I apologise, contrarily, I am afraid I don’t see the difference between God and Gods. But then, that’s just me.

Anonymous said...

Shwetha,

This was probably one of Eintein's most profound delibration on God.

"I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."

Take care, a wonderful post!

Shweta said...

Hey Hemanth! good to see you here and thank you.

You are right in that his delibrations on God were certainly deep and driven.