RE: [asa] Einstein = 1 for Dawkins

"Einstein, when he once (a long time ago, in his fifties) was dangerously ill, was asked by a friend: Are you not afraid of death? No, said he, I feel so intimately connected with the whole of the world, that I cannot all of a sudden drop out of it." "Schrodinger: life and thought," Walter John Moore, p. 475. This sounds a bit pantheistic.

Moorad

________________________________

From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu on behalf of George Murphy
Sent: Wed 5/14/2008 7:23 AM
To: Ted Davis; asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] Einstein = 1 for Dawkins

I agree - but again would emphasize that there's a big difference between
"puerile" and "toxic," "evil," &c - the kind of language the new village
atheists use.

& it's also worth noting some of the inconsistencies in Einstein's thought,
the most obvious being that between his theoretically strict determinism and
his political and social exhortations for peace, tolerance &c.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ted Davis" <tdavis@messiah.edu>
To: <asa@calvin.edu>; <gmurphy@raex.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 6:56 AM
Subject: Re: [asa] Einstein = 1 for Dawkins

>I don't disagree with George's comments--Einstein & religion is a complex
> topic--but anyone familiar with "the World as I See it" and similar
> writings
> by Einstein will not be surprised that he regarded anything bordering on
> revealed religion to be puerile. He left his own Jewish faith as an
> adolescent, and IMO he continued to regard traditional religion as
> adolescent for the rest of his life. That he had in common w/Dawkins,
> though (as George notes) he didn't want to browbeat religious people.
>
> Ted
>

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Received on Thu May 15 11:59:21 2008