George Murphy a écrit:
> Wendee Holtcamp wrote:
> >
> > Does anyone know whether Albert Einstein was a Christian?
> >
> > I have seen many quotes of his professing faith in God, but am not sure if he considered himself Christian and have been unable to find this info.
>
> No, he was not. He was a Jew who respected the Jewish tradition & Jesus, but he
> did not believe in a personal God. He was a pantheist who identified his beliefs in
> many ways with Spinoza, who though that speaking of "God" was simply another way of
> speaking of the totality of nature (_deus sive natura_). The place to look for more on
> this would be Max Jammer's _Einstein and Religion_, published last year by Princeton
> U.P. My review of this was published in the January-February 2000 _American Scientist_,
> p.90.
> Shalom,
> George
>
> George L. Murphy
> gmurphy@raex.com
> http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
Reading your comment on Einstein's religious faith being pantheistic raised a question in my mind. Over a fifteen years ago I was plowing my way
through a book written by himself on Relativity, and in one particular place he referred to God as "The Old One" and the context in which it appeared
made me stop and think hard. I was not a Christian at the time. I had never before heard such a deep personnal sounding referrence to God. For me
that was a milestone that ushered the long chain of events that led me to become a converted Christian a few years later. The question this raises is:
would pantheism permit a person to speak about God as a Person having a character of His own?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 23 2000 - 07:04:55 EDT