Einstein’s God

At Dangerous Intersection, we have often encountered definitional issues when we’ve cnsidered whether someone believes in “God.”  During a recent vigorous exchange several of us invoked the “Einstein” version of God.  Although I had read a few quotes of Einstein regarding his beliefs, I had not comprehensively read Einstein’s own words describing his “God.”

The April 16, 2007 edition of Time Magazine features a new biography about Albert Einstein (Einstein, by Walter Isaacson).  For that reason, I jumped at the chance to read this Time article, which focused on what Einstein actually meant when he said he believed in “God.”  The bottom line? 

[Einstein] settled into a deism based on what he called the’ spirit manifest in the laws of the universe’ and a sincere belief in a ‘God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.

Einstein was born to two parents who were Jewish “by cultural designation and kindred instinct, [though] they had little interest in the religion itself.”  Young Albert ended up attending a large Catholic school in his neighborhood.  While there, he “developed a passionate zeal for Judaism.” At the age of 12, however, he gave this up, concluding that “much in the stories of the Bible could not be true.  From that time on, he articulated (through many essays and interviews) a “deepening appreciation of his belief in God, although a rather impersonal version of one.” 

At a dinner party in Berlin, one of the guests publicly expressed amazement that …

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Confessions provoked by torture are OK, as long as the US is doing the torturing

We're all glad that the British sailors are back home.  Anyone following this story knows that these sailors were treated graciously by their Iranian captors.  Nonetheless, while in captivity, the British sailors admitted that they had been trespassing in Iranian waters when whey were apprehended. But notice some of the things that…

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Beautiful self-organized pattern: the huge hexagon at Saturn’s north pole

Take a look at this beautiful movie image of Saturn taken by NASA:

This nighttime movie of the depths of the north pole of Saturn taken by the visual infrared mapping spectrometer onboard NASA’s Cassini Orbiter reveals a dynamic, active planet lurking underneath the ubiquitous cover of upper-level hazes. The defining feature of Saturn’s north polar regions–the six-sided hexagon feature–is clearly visible in the image.

“Who built that hexagon on top of Saturn?” one might ask.  No one built it.  It’s a self-organized pattern.  And the area of the hexagon is large enough to fit four earths.

This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.

But this striking pattern is merely one of the huge numbers of beautiful self-organized patterns one can find in our universe.  In Dynamic Patterns: the Self Organization of Brain and Behavior (1997), J. A. Scott Kelso describes the mysterious-seeming emergence of such dynamic patterns:

Patterns in general emerge in a self-organized fashion, without any agent-like entity ordering the elements, telling them when and where to go . . . [S]ystems that are pumped

…
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Sam Harris and Christian Pastor Rick Warren discuss religion

You'll find this in the current edition of Newsweek.  Here's an excerpt regarding the source of morality in the absence of religion: WARREN:  Sam, what are the secular sources of an acceptable moral code?  HARRIS: Well, I don't think that the religious books are the source. We go to the…

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Why Republicans deny global warming.

Jonathan Chait of Common Dreams raises a good question: why do Republicans disagree with climate scientists more at a time when climate scientists are accruing new terrifying evidence that human activities are truly responsible for warming the atmosphere? 

Last year, the National Journal asked a group of Republican senators and House members: “Do you think it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?” Of the respondents, 23% said yes, 77% said no . . . So, the magazine asked the question again last month. The results? Only 13% of Republicans agreed that global warming has been proved.

As the evidence for global warming gets stronger, Republicans are actually getting more skeptical. . . . How did it get this way? The easy answer is that Republicans are just tools of the energy industry. It’s certainly true that many of them are. . . But the financial relationship doesn’t quite explain the entirety of GOP skepticism on global warming. For one thing, the energy industry has dramatically softened its opposition to global warming over the last year, even as Republicans have stiffened theirs.

The truth is more complicated — and more depressing: A small number of hard-core ideologues (some, but not all, industry shills) have led the thinking for the whole conservative movement . . .Conservatives defer to a tiny handful of renegade scientists who reject the overwhelming professional consensus.

In other words, the thinking process of most Republicans is worse than …

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