Yes, purposeless and meaningless, not pointing to anything other than itself. The insight itself is neither religious nor non-religious.
That's completely unrelated to what Einstein actually said. Think, for a moment, about context. Einstein was raised in the West, and although Jewish he was an atheist. Recall also that until recently, the reason people in the sciences received PhDs was because they were now "doctors of philosophy". Finally, recall that the philosophical tradition Einstein was familiar with and talked about was Western, and that during his life German intellectuals like Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Marx, etc. had written or would write about how ultimately there was no purpose or meaning in anything. There was no God, no higher truth, nothing beyond the material world. Einstein was a German intellectual. Like all of the above, he believed that there was no ultimate meaning or absolute/higher truth- that everything is material and there is nothing spiritual that isn't a product of mere human fantasy/wishful thinking.
And, like all of them, he found a way to experience something
like religious, spiritual, and/or mystical experiences. For Einstein, that was spirituality: a sense of wonder at the material things in life. Which is why he is quite clear about the one and only way he can be counted as religious.
You've got things backwards
I looked at the whole picture instead of focusing on the details. I not only looked at the essay holistically, but the context in which it was written. When you focus on little details, like what this or that word means in a single quote from one paper, you miss the big picture. Try looking at the quotes not in terms of little details like the nuances of this or that word, or this or that phrase, but try to see the big picture: the whole paper and its context.
The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.
Albert Einstein
He doesn't end there. That's from a speech given for Max Planck, and he ends by saying to (and of) Planck: "
May the love of science continue to illumine his path in the future and lead him to the solution of the most important problem in present-day physics, which he has himself posed and done so much to solve. May he succeed in uniting quantum theory with electrodynamics and mechanics
in a single logical system."
At last! I have a quote that you use, ripped from context, that I can give you the context to: "
Motives for Research".
That's where your quote is from, and here is the context (emphases added):
""What place does the theoretical physicist's picture of the world occupy among all these possible pictures?
It demands the highest possible standard of rigorous precision in the description of relations, such as only the use of mathematical language can give. In regard to his subject matter, on the other hand, the physicist has to limit himself very severely: he must content himself with describing the most simple events which can be brought within the domain of our experience;
all events of a more complex order are beyond the power of the human intellect to reconstruct with the subtle accuracy and logical perfection which the theoretical physicist demands"
Einstein (as you can read for yourself) follows this by noting that this precision comes with severe limitations, as so much of the universe is in some way beyond the reach of the physicist. Rhetorically, he asks whether (given the limitations physics has when it comes to understanding physical reality), whether the name "physics" is justified. And he answers:
In my belief the name is justified; for
the general laws on which the structure of theoretical physics is based claim to be
valid for any natural phenomenon whatsoever. With them, it ought to be possible to arrive at the description, that is to say,
the theory, of every natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction, if that process of deduction were not far beyond the capacity of the human intellect. The physicist's renunciation of completeness for his cosmos is therefore not a matter of fundamental principle."
That last line is right before the part you quoted. In what you quoted, Einstein notes that while physics itself is severly limited by precision, and that it is logical deduction which is required to understand the laws of the cosmos, you don't need that precision to
test whether or not some hypothesis about the structure of reality is correct.
"In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically.
But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest."
So while intuition, guesses, wild hunches, even accidents can and have led to scientific discovery, the reason there are not "any number of possible systems" which are "equally well justified" is because that guess, accident, intuition is barely the start. It is just what allows the rigor and logic of physics to demonstrate whether or not some hypothesis about reality is justified. Further, what motivates the scientist to continually test and experiment in order to arrive at a sound, logical, coherent theory is a "state of mind...akin to that of a religious worshipper", as the effort is motivated by a love of, and a passion for, sicence.
Literally, if we want to know what Nature looks like then we have to construct a picture. As Steven Strogatz eloquently puts it, without direct visualization we are dynamically blind. (Strogatz, The Next Fifty Years, p.23.)
Again, context. First, it isn't from "Strogatz, "The Next Fifty Years", because
The Next Fifty Years is a volume edited by Brockman which includes a paper by Strogatz: "Fermi's Little Discovery" and the Future of Chaos and Complexity Theory".
Second, the quote is actually from Thad Roberts (former NASA intern who was sentenced to prison for stealing moon rocks from the Johnson Space Center Lab). He quotes Strogatz' without direct visualization we are dynamically blind.. Now, as I'm sure you read Strogatz' excellent intro text to nonlinear science, you'll know that he emphasizes the importance of graphical (i.e., geometrical) analysis of nonlinear systems. Which is why visualization is so important to understanding dynamical systems, because without such geometrical depictions we'd be "dynamically blind".
Einstein addressed this issue more poetically when he said,
Knowledge exists in two forms lifeless, stored in books, and alive in the consciousness of men. The second form
is the essential one.
Knowledge exists in two forms lifeless, stored in books, and alive in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensible as it may be, occupies only an inferior position."
Why does Einstein contrast lifelessness versus being alive? Because he was honoring someone who had recently died (Morris Raphael Cohen) at an event in november of 1949 organized in memory and in honor of the Cohen (specifically, the Morris Raphael Cohen Student Memorial Fund".
You do realize that most of what you quoted was not by Einstein or Strogatz but by an ex NASA intern who is most known for his groundbreaking accomplishments in...stealing from his employers and getting caught trying to sell what he stole.
