mindstalk | (Reply)

*double-checks the overdue library book*

Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: 'To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.' In this sense I [Dawkins] too am religious, with the reservation that 'cannot grasp' does not have to mean 'forever ungraspable'. But I prefer not to call myself religious because it is misleading. It is destructively misleading because, for the vast majority of people, 'religion' implies 'supernatural'. Carl Sagan put it well: '... if by "GOd" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."

...Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs, and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two, is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

Whew! I started typing all that to show Dawkins seems to feel Einsteinian religion/reverence is perfectly compatible with being a proselytizing atheist and being optimistic about human nature, at least in the right environments. I'd forgotten that the next paragraph ended with high treason... harsh language, but I easily see his point, having seen Einstein trotted out by many a Christian to defend their side. You can probably guess which words in your second paragraph he'd pick at (as would I, were I to go pick.)

I've noted that my own tolerance is inversely proportional to exposure. In a time under Bush and attacks on abortion and gays, in Indiana, and when I've been exposing myself to Orthodox Jews on Usenet, I'm a lot more militant than I was at Caltech or San Francisco under Clinton.

Glad you liked (heck, read!) the review.