Einstein and God

I've been working my way through Walter Isaacson's biography of Einstein, and a particular passage caught my eye. It comes from chapter 17, titled "Einstein's God", and speaks to the man's religious views:

One evening in Berlin, Einstein and his wife were at a dinner party when a guest expressed a belief in astrology. Einstein ridiculed the notion as pure superstition. Another guest stepped in and similarly disparaged religion. Belief in God, he insisted, was likewise a superstition.

At this point the host tried to silence him by invoking the fact that even Einstein harbored religious beliefs.

"It isn't possible!" the skeptical guest said, turning to Einstein to ask if he was, in fact, religious.

"Yes, you can call it that," Einstein replied calmly. "Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious."

When asked by an interviewer if he believed in God, Einstein's response was:

I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.

And from a piece of Eistein's writing called "What I Believe" comes this little nugget:

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experience there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness.

Science will continue to guide our understanding of the nature which we are a part of. And faith must always be, by definition, a belief in that for which there is no emperical basis for belief. And no matter how much science illuminates about the nature of our existence, for those of us who believe, faith will always be a part of it.

*This post is dedicated to Mrs. G...

The Strangled Heart

Today's assignment in anatomy and physiology is to read the first 17 paragraphs of Chapter 1 from the book How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter by Dr. Sherwin Nuland. As a response to the reading, you can either complete a "Say Something" worksheet, or respond to this post.

If you respond to this post, please pick the one sentence or statement from the reading that stood out to you and write a short paragraph summarizing your reaction to that statement or sentence. Please make sure that you include your name as part of your response so that I can give you credit.

Johnny Got His Gun

"He was a dead man with a mind that could still think. He knew all the answers that the dead knew and couldn't think about. He could speak for the dead because he was one of them. He was the first of all the soldiers who had died since the beginning of time who still had a brain left to think with."

Dalton Trumbo's 1939 anti-war novel titled "Johnny Got His Gun" tells the story of a soldier who gets hit by a mortar shell during battle. The soldier wakes up in a hospital bed and realizes that he has lost both arms, both legs, his entire face and jaw, and both ears.

In anatomy class today we discussed the three general functions of the nervous system: sensation, integration, and response. In this story, the protagonist has retained the integration (thinking, feeling, learning, perceiving) function, but is limited in the other two. Because of this, he is trapped in his own body and has to learn new ways to sense and respond to what's going on around him.

This novel was made into a movie (never seen it, sorry). It was also the inspiration for Metallica's song One.