Did Einstein try to destroy science?

God does not play dice.

randman writes:Percy, are you saying that Einstein merely asserted that the universe is deterministic a priori?

He actually thought of the universe as the handiwork of God and saw the rules and such as something God laid down. Stating he saw nature the same as God is not what he said in that quote. He saw God in nature.

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically, one is inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. 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. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.It is therefore easy to see why the churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees.On the other hand, I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.
....
A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.

The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition.

randman writes:He was still bringing his theology into science. He could have stated the universe is deterministic due to the data, but he pointed to determinism via God.

Einstein's theology was Spinozan, which equates the universe to God.

Personally I think the statement was just plain wrong in a lot of ways, but I think it was refreshing that a physicist would make such a statement about one potential conclusion of QM and that the physics community would not reject the statement a priori just because God is mentioned.

"I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

Which End Is Closer To God?We have a way of discussing the world, when we talk of it at various hierarchies, or levels. Now I do not mean to be very precise, dividing the world into definite levels, but I will indicate, by describing a set of ideas, what I mean by hierarchies of ideas.
For example, at one end we have the fundamental laws of physics. Then we invent other terms for concepts which are approximate, which have, we believe, their ultimate explanation in terms of the fundamental laws. For instance, "heat". Heat is supposed to be jiggling, and the word for a hot thing is just the word for a mass of atoms which are jiggling. But for a while, if we are talking about heat, we sometimes forget about the atoms jiggling- just as when we talk about the glacier we do not always think of the hexgonal ice and the snowflakes which originally fell. Another example of the same thing is a salt crystal. Looked at fundamentally it is a lot of protons, neutrons, and electrons; but we have this concept of "salt crystal", which carries a whole pattern already of fundamental interactions. An idea like pressure is the same.
Now if we go higher up from this, in another level we have properties of substances- like "refractive index", how light is bent when it goes through something; or "surface tension", the fact that water tends to pull itself together, both of which are described by numbers. I remind you that we have to go through several laws down to find out that it is the pull of the atoms, and so on. But we still say "surface tension", and do not always worry, when discussing surface tension, about the inner workings.
On, up in the hierarchy. With the water we have waves, and we have a thing like a storm, the word "storm" which represents an enormous mass of phenomena, or a "sun spot", or "star", which is an accumulation of things. And it is not worthwhile always to think of it way back. In fact we cannot, because the higher up we go the more steps we have in between, each one of which is a little weak. We have not thought them all through yet.
As we go up in this hierarchy of complexity, we get to things like muscle twitch, or nerve impulse, which is an enormously complicated thing in the physical world, involving an organization of matter in a very elaborate complexity. Then come things like "frog".
And then we go on, and we come to words and concepts like "man", and "history", or "political expediency", and so forth, a series of concepts which we use to understand things at an ever higher level.
And going on, we come to things like evil, and beauty, and hope...
Which end is nearer to God, if I may use a religious metaphor, beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? I think that the right way, of course, is to say that what we have to look at is the whole structural interconnection of the thing; and that all the sciences, and not just the sciences but all the efforts of intellectual kinds, are an endeavour to see the connections of the hierarchies, to connect beauty to history, to connect history to man's psychology, man's psychology to the working of the brain, the brain to the neural impulse, the neural impulse to the chemistry, and so forth, up and down, both ways. And today we cannot, and it is no use making believe that we can, draw carefully a line all the way from one end of this thing to the other, because we have only just begun to see that there is this relative hierarchy.
And I do not think either end is nearer to God. To stand at either end, and to walk off that end of the pier only, hoping that out in that direction is the complete understanding, is a mistake. And to stand with evil and beauty and hope, or to stand with the fundamental laws, hoping that way to get a deep understanding of the whole world, with that aspect alone, is a mistake. It is not sensible for the ones who specialize at the other end, to have such disregard for each other. (They don't actually, but people say they do.) The great mass of workers in between, connecting one step to another, are improving all the time our understanding of the world, both from working at the ends and working in the middle, and in that way we are gradually understanding this tremendous world of interconnecting hierarchies.

Then you would be interested to know the reply to that statement Einstein made to one Neils Bohr. Mr Bohr replied "Einstein, stop telling God what to do."

Altar-Ego writes:Adminnemooseus (posting for Minnemooseus, who does not have permissions in this forum)

randman writes:Prove it. Substantiate your point.

Einstein was a deeply religious person that argued his religious convictions in the arena of science and vice versa.http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm#RELIGION

Also, keep in mind that by arguing Einstein was referring to a Spinozan idea of God or the Divine, that you are actually conceding the point that Einstein was mixing science and religion. Additionally, Spinoza did not just argue that was the universe, but that God causes the universe.