I’m not saying the man was not an amazing individual, but lets remember that personality has many dimensions and the fact that Einstein was an amazing physicist and mathematician does not mean that what he says regarding politics, philosophy or whatever is necessarily the last word or even that well informed.

In the end, whether or not Einstein was religious or agnostic or atheistic doesn’t mean much. Brilliant people can be completely wrong. It’s totally irrelevant what he believed. The fact that he was Einstein does not make everything he said or believed true. He was a human and entirely fallible.

        Q said:

How did I know it was going to eventually go down this road?

Perhaps magic.

?????

I have never come across Eric Gutkind and don’t know too much about Einstein other than he seems to have been a brilliant man ahead of his times in thought and deed. Looking at the wording, Einstein seemed to be making a definite reference to his and Gutkind’s religion; two walls of pride. Reminding him, that Einstein did not consider himself superior to others based on his religious background and neither should Gutkind.

In other words, Einstein might not have ‘bought’ into the idea that Jews were ‘The Chosen Ones’. If that was part of his intention in his letter to Gutkind, albeit veiled, he was indeed a radical thinker and must have rattled quite a few cages in his time.

        aegis said:

THEREFORE, I embrace scientific proof but only until such time that science progresses far enough to explain the unexplainable, to progress beyond a point of progress into an area that jeopardizes our own existence as we understand it now OR provide a solution.

What you are referring to is the Singularity

The Singularity is an event horizon in the truest sense. But instead of a cosmological event horizon caused by a black hole’s gravitational pull, it’s a social event horizon caused by our inability to extrapolate the trajectory of human civilization beyond a certain point of technological sophistication. It therefore describes a futurological problem — a blind-spot in our predictive thinking.

There is a certain amount of letting Eric Gutkind know that he shouldn’t expect Einstein to cut him any slack because they were both Jewish, in that passage. Keep in mind that Gutkind was asking Einstein to endorse Choose Life, Gutkind’s latest screed, and this letter was the answer. Einstein obviously thought the book was a crock (which it is) and he was letting Gutkind know it.

To clarify, to some extent, Einstein formed his beliefs on experience and the era that he lived in. He had the ability to ’step outside’ convential attitude and base his opinion on experienced religious insight and a highly developed scientific mind.

However, concepts and science have progressed.

What we once perceived God to be has been re-evaluated and, no doubt, will be again in the future.

THEREFORE, I embrace scientific proof but only until such time that science progresses far enough to explain the unexplainable, to progress beyond a point of progress into an area that jeopordises our own existence as we undertand it now OR provide a solution.

Einstein hit the nail on the head when he stated ‘In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew’.

Not only was Einstein a brilliant scientist, he appeared to be a man deeply concerned by common religious thought.