Monday, January 11, 2010

God according to Albert Einstein, Baruch Spinoza, Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan writes,

Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Others—for example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein—considered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws.

And Einstein states:
I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. (Albert Einstein)

And Spinoza writes:
Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived. – Baruch Spinoza

We feel and Know that we are eternal. – Baruch Spinoza

God is the indwelling …… Baruch Spinoza

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand. – Baruch Spinoza

Einstein believed that “God” exists in everything. He is the same kind of atheist as Baruch Spinoza. One that believed “God/Nature” is all there is.

"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." (Albert Einstein, 1954)

Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived. – Baruch Spinoza

“I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”
Albert Einstein – 1949

However, Einstein’s God was not the God of most other men. … Einstein’s God appears as the physical world itself, with its infinitely marvelous structure operating at atomic level with the beauty of a craftsman’s wristwatch, and at stellar level with the majesty of a massive cyclotron.
Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, New York: World Publishing, 1971, pp. 19-20.

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