From: emc@doe.carleton.ca (Eli Chiprout)
Subject: Einstein and Judaism
Organization: Dept. of Electronics, Carleton University
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 22:37:56 GMT

I often wonder what the reaction to Einstein would have been 
if he had posted his comments concerning Judaism and
science on this newsgroup instead of presenting them
in lectures etc.  Would he have been met with demands to
"tone down" his remarks if he had posted as an anonymous
poster?  He was after all a Jew raised within the Jewish
community and deeply seeing the need for Israel as a
home for the Jews.  He was even asked to be president
of Israel.

Einstein did once comment that "God does not play dice [with the universe]". 
This quotation is commonly mentioned to show that Einstein believed in the
Jewish God.  Used this way, it is out of context; it refers to Einstein's
refusal to accept the uncertainties indicated by quantum theory.

A better quotation showing what Einstein thought about God is the following:
"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of
what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of
human beings." (Spinoza as a Jew was an interesting skeptic).

Einstein was unable to accept Quantum Theory because of his belief in an
objective, orderly reality; a reality which would not be subject to random
events and which would not be dependent upon the observer.  He believed that
QM was incomplete, and that a better theory would have no need for
statistical interpretations.  

A longer quote from Einstein appears in "Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A
Symposium", published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion
in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941.  In
it he says:

  "The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events
   the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side
   of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature.  For him
   neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an
   independent cause of natural events.  To be sure, the doctrine of a
   personal God interfering with natural events could never be
   *refuted* [italics his], in the real sense, by science, for this
   doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific
   knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.

   But I am convinced that such behavior on the part of representatives
   of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal.  For a doctrine
   which is to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark,
   will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm
   to human progress.  In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers
   of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal
   God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past
   placed such vast power in the hands of priests.  In their labors they
   will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable
   of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity
   itself.  This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably
   more worthy task..."

Einstein had also said:

  "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religous 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."






--
Eli Chiprout
Dept. of Electronics, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
emc@doe.carleton.ca                                     
"Je ne peut etre sauf qui je suis"
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish