Originally posted by: BeauJangles
Originally posted by: OILFIELDTRASH
Albert Einstein believed in God. I guess you guys would consider him a naive fairytale believer and that you have superior intelligence too.
If you bothered to read anything Einstein wrote instead of echoing talking points, you'd realize that his conception of god is nothing like the conception we're talking about here.
"I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. 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.
IMO, after reading what he's written on the subject, that is probably the best single-sentence summary of his beliefs. He was neither a deist nor an atheist. He wholeheartedly rejected the idea of a god who could / would / did intervene in the lives of people. Basically, his belief of god was like many people -- he used god to fill the gaps in our knowledge, to contextualize his existence, and to address some of the unknowns that existed in the universe.
To use him as proof that atheists are wrong or something like that is utter nonsense.
Never understood why he didn't simply call himself a Pantheist, but I guess that is the intelligent side of him speaking - to say you fall under a simple label is denying more information to everyone else.
Everything else in my other post is my opinion based on every other quote I remember. Technically he might not be a pantheist, because he used atheist-agnostic messages, such as the above quote, to really express his understanding of everything. He used God to refer to what we couldn't entirely explain with our limited knowledge, but never goes on to express a belief in a deity, and never makes an attempt to discuss the concept of a deity existing as an impossibility.
And that, my friends, is why only the completely ignorant folk ever use the word atheist without any further qualifiers. Very few "atheists" actually exist, and they are the most painful people to have a discussion with.
Then there are "atheist-agnostics", and then simply "agnostics".
Agnostics are simply just sort of "there" in a belief pattern - they mostly just don't care, and don't trouble themselves with trying to define themselves in faith. They neither believe nor disbelieve in a deity, and see it as a situation of "a deity might exist, but I don't really know either way". They are neutral.
Atheist-agnostics are a little below neutral. They basically state they don't believe in any deity, and subscribe mostly to scientific explanations for things (unless they have personal beliefs of science being wrong, that's not unheard of in those that subscribe to science - it's an evolving system of knowledge). But they refuse to completely go out on a limb and say there is absolutely no way a deity exists, because these people acknowledge the very point of this thread itself - proof of existence of a deity(ies), and/or proof a deity does not exist, are believed to be impossible to realize. And to say something cannot possibly exist without any evidence of it not existing, is really the same faith as believing something DOES exist without evidence. But they do take a stance, unlike agnostics as described above, and say they do not believe a deity exists but describing further that at some point evidence could come along describing otherwise.
I'm an atheist-agnostic myself. I basically believe no deity exists, specifically a deity as described as the ultimate creator, but mostly avoid dabbling into "he does exist/he does not exist" and rather completely ignore that vagueness and go for the natural explanations for everything.
I don't believe in god, but given that it's impossible to prove one way or the other, I'm open to the fact that I guess it is theoretically possible for an invisible, undetectable, omnipresent, omniscient sentient force to exist, but I just don't think so. But I'm not arrogant enough to say that I know for sure one way or the other. But the very premise just seems laughable to me.
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