The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion.
Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom
this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and
lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is
impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest
wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are
intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ...
that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and
in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.
The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is easier to
denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.
The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should
transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both
the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious
sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual
as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is
any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be
Buddhism. (Albert Einstein)
I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the
actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on
creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact
that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in
doubt by modern science. [He was speaking of Quantum Mechanics and
the breaking down of determinism.] My religiosity consists in a
humble admiratation of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals
itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory
understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest
importance -- but for us, not for God. (Albert Einstein) Albert
Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman,
Princeton University Press)
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for
reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. (Albert Einstein)
The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am
unable to take seriously." (Albert Einstein) Letter to Hoffman and
Dukas, 1946
The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the
sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature
and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a
sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single
significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already
appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms
of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned
especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a
much stronger element of this. (Albert Einstein, 1930)
In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to
awaken this religious feeling and keep it alive in those who are
receptive to it. (Albert Einstein, 1930)
Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of
belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth,
beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most
beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the
mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all
serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this
experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense
that behind anything that can be experienced there is 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. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets
and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty
structure of all that is there. 5
http://www.ctinquiry.org/publications/reflections_volume_1/torrance.ht
m
"I want to know how God created this world, I am not interested in
this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I
want to know His thoughts, the rest are details."
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious
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." — Albert Einstein
It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is
entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic
conception of God corresponding to it."
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this
kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived
in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central
teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics
of every age that we find men who were filled with the highest kind
of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their
contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in
this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are
closely akin to one another."
"The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of
the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a
being who interferes in the course of events--provided, of course,
that he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously.
"For example," he says, "a conflict arises when a religious community
insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in
the Bible. This means an intervention into the sphere of science;
this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of
Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of
science have often [tried] to arrive at fundamental judgments with
respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in
this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These
conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.
"What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus
ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and
constructive mind. What these blessed men have given us we must guard
and try to keep alive with all our strength if humanity is not to
lose its dignity, the security of its existence, and its joy in
living."
Thus I came--despite the fact I was the son of entirely irreligious
(Jewish) parents--to a deep religiosity, which, however, found an
abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular
scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the
stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a
positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression
that youth is intentionally being deceived...Suspicion against every
kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical
attitude... has never left me..."
From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have
always been an atheist.... 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 being."
"In my life," he said once, explaining his great love for music, "the
artistically visionary plays no mean role. After all, the work of a
research scientist germinates upon the soil of imagination, of
vision. Just as an artist arrives at his conceptions partly by
intuition, so a scientist must also have a certain amount of
intuition."
While he did not believe in a formal, dogmatic religion, Dr.
Einstein, like all true mystics, was of a deeply religious nature. He
referred to it as the cosmic religion, which he defined as a seeking
on the part of the individual who feels it "to experience the
totality of existence as a unity full of significance."
"I assert," he wrote for The New York Times on Nov. 9, 1930, "that
the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest
driving force behind scientific research. No one who does not
appreciate the terrific exertions and, above all, the devotion
without which pioneer creation in scientific thought cannot come into
being can judge the strength of the feeling out of which alone such
work turned away as it is from immediate, practical life, can grow."
