As mentioned in my earlier post, I am in the presence of a great mind these days. Its in the form of a essays and articles written or spoken by Albert Einstein on various subjects. This one is on how a scientist looks at religion. “You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religiosity of the naïve man. For the latter, God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands, so to speak, in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe.
But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.”
The book like any other thing I appreciate has become an obsession. Whatever spare time I get in between my busy schedule, even if its a 15 minutes break, I end up making a quick visit to one of the many rooms of the man’s mind to return happier than before. Have you picked up the book yet?
