Einstein's God

[cardw]

Within the dialog around god and no god is the mystery of first cause. Krista Tippett has written a new book on Einstein's views on god and the order within the Universe.

This link gives a number of podcasts and articles on this discussion that can give you an excellent background on Einstein and his views. Please read this and listen to the podcasts before commenting.

Einstein's god

To start things off let me state one of the points of discussion.

One commentator mentioned that science and religion come at the problem of origins from two different starting points.

Science questions everything and looks at what is left.

Religion states a position and then makes an attempt to provide evidence for its existence.

[Bravus]

Will have a listen to this tomorrow and comment in more detail, but let me just say I think your final two sentences are over-simple, and don't recognise that there are kinds of evidence other than the empirical.

[cardw]

They are too simple. It's a starting place.

[skyblue888]

There is always the danger of getting lost in the maze of human speculations. There is science, true science, and science falsely so-called.

True religion and true science do not contradict each other but compliment each other.

sky

[cardw]

sky,

These types of platitudes are so general that they really don't say anything and they are used to imply all kinds of things while retaining plausible deniability.

I would suggest that if you want to contribute to this conversation that you address a specific point. There are plenty of them.

If you stay with specifics you won't get lost. Generalizations are what get people lost.

[cardw]

One of Einstein's early statements on science and religion said that science can only address what is, not what should be. And outside of this domain value judgements are still needed.

Science has attempted to make value judgments through the scientific method. Einstein felt that this was not only a mistake, but not possible since values are established through the domain of subjective human experience.

Religion is one way to establish value judgments, but certainly not the only way. Religion, according to Einstein, could not establish the relationship between facts.

For example when religion makes the claim that everything in the Bible is absolutely true it creates a conflict between what science tells us is on a factual basis and what the Bible says. This is an intervention of the Bible into the realm of science and created the conflict with the findings of Galileo and Darwin.