Regarding Einstein and religion: the following is quoted verbatim from The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics As The Language Of Nature by Heinz R. Pagels, in the chapter headed "The Last Classical Physicist":
Quote:Einstein’s mother and father encouraged the young boy’s curiosity. In a psychoanalytic study of Einstein’s childhood, Erik Erikson called him “Albert, the victorious child.” Something in Einstein’s character and upbringing encouraged a profound sense of trust in the universe and life. That trust and the confidence it brings is the foundation of the autonomous mind living at the boundary of human knowledge.
His family had a liberal secular orientation. They were not especially intellectual but they respected learning and loved music. His parents, not being religiously observant, sent the young boy to a Catholic school, where he became involved with the ritual and symbolism of religion. This involvement was not to last. He wrote about his early emotional and intellectual odyssey from religion towards science when he was sixty-seven. These “Autobiographical Notes” display a simplicity and strength that characterizes his prose:
"Even when I was a fairly precocious young man the nothingness of the hopes and strivings which chases most men restlessly through life came to my consciousness with considerable vitality. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. Moreover, it was possible to satisfy the stomach by such participation, but not man in so far as he is a thinking and feeling being. As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus I came – despite the fact that 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 by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a sceptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment – an attitude which has never again left me, even though later on, because of a better insight into the casual connections, it has lost some of its original poignancy.
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 inspections and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in devoted occupation with it. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of the given possibilities swam as highest aim half consciously and half unconsciously before my mind’s eye. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights which they had achieved, were the friends which could not be lost. 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."
What this passage reveals is a conversion from personal religion to the ‘cosmic religion’ of science, an experience which changed him for the rest of his life. Einstein saw that the universe is governed by laws that can be known by us but that are independent of our thoughts and feelings.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
