Pantheism | the Hunt for Truth

Tags

Albert Einstein, atheism, Baruch Spinoza, consciousness, Einstein, Existence of God, Faith, God, Pantheism, Religion & Spirituality, Religon, spirituality

This is a dramatization
According to Einstein (but not exactly)

I want to keep this short. The video is of course only a dramatization of some of how Einstein diminished atheist philosophies. However, the little story is not complete. I’ll report just a bit of what he himself said regarding his beliefs.

Albert Einstein‘s religious views were reported comprehensively. He believed in the “pantheistic” God of Baruch Spinoza, not in a personal god. Einstein had, “an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.” [1]

Einstein says that he abandoned the faith of his early childhood:

“I came—though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents — to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment — an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections.

It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the ‘merely personal,’ from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings.

Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.

The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit.

The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they had achieved, were the friends who could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.” [2]

1 Isaacson, Walter (2008). Einstein: His Life and Universe.
New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. 390
2 Einstein, Albert (1979). Autobiographical Notes. Chicago:
Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 3-5

I read a lot more but the above summary is all that I need to understand that Einstein was not an atheist. I’ll suppose that his scientific imagination materialized by nature of his rebellious personality.

Here is a video (longer) including the above information: