Log24

In a recent Edge article, “The Vagaries of Religious Experience,” a Harvard psychologist, Daniel Gilbert,  quotes Einstein on his own religious vagaries:

“(I had) 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 by the state through lies. It was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment– an attitude which has never again left me.” (Autobiographical Notes, 1949)

Gilbert adds,

“Einstein’s orgy* of freethinking forever changed our understanding of space and time, and the phrase ‘Religion for Dummies’ became, in the view of many scientists, a redundancy.”

Here is another Einstein quotation, from the paragraph in Autobiographical Notes following the paragraph quoted by Gilbert:

“It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the ‘merely-personal,’ from an existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes and primitive feelings.  Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.  The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation…. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it.”

Einstein describes “the road to the religious paradise” as “comfortable and alluring.”  He might therefore have profited by the book saluted in the previous entry… a book that might be described, to adapt Gilbert’s charming phrase, as “Religion for Dummies like Einstein.”

For an approach to the contemptible religion of Scientism that is more subtle than Gilbert’s, see “Einstein’s Third Paradise,” by Gerald Holton, another Harvard savant.

* In the original, the words “orgy of” appear in square brackets to indicate an interpolation by the editor, Paul A. Schilpp, a Methodist minister (pdf).  Einstein’s own words were “eine geradezu fanatische Freigeisterei.”  Gilbert’s omission of the brackets indicates both the moral slovenliness typical of those embracing Scientism and the current low standards of scholarship at Harvard.  (Related material: The Crimson Passion.)