I have made the point previously that a God who is so remote from us that we will miss Him if we don’t seek long and diligently is a God who is hiding
See where you are at? You don't care if He exists, whether He is hard to find or not. I don't believe He is. In point of fact, only one who understands the way their universe necessarily has to work would seek Him. By default, you either have to be not too contemplative with truth, or 'purposefully' going the other way (Einstein calls the formal dismal, and the latter 'dead').
What you said about Spinoza makes me wonder if I have been mistaken in assuming your views were essentially in line with most creationists. When you said
This is because you don't get progression. Start with a basic something, build off of it. Logic ever and only works this way. You start with a premise and build off of truths that necessarily must follow. A philosophy class or two would not hurt you a bit and would, in fact, keep you from being myopic. Think 'Renaissance man."
Doesn’t that force God to be a product of, not a cause of, the universe?
Your mind automatically obfuscates. You cannot reason nor logic if you miss what is pertinent and cannot anticipate the next set of proofs. Nobody will ever be able to prove God exists to you and it will be/is your own fault.
Though I know rather little about Spinoza, I am somewhat familiar with Einstein’s views on God and Christianity and the Bible. And unless your information is wildly at variance with mine, if Einstein really “nailed it”, then Christianity is dead in the water.
Sure, if you want to mine quote instead of being aware of all of his writings. His own theology changed over course, but his letters to seminaries were powerful enough to declare Judeo/Christianity as proper, regardless of his struggle over a personal God involved with us. Probably the encapsulation of your one-sided view is found
here However, try as vanity might, it is second-hand clips that an entire letter by Einstein to Princeton Seminary completely washes away. In his
Creed, for instance, he calls the atheist dead or blind. Indeed, whenever you might see Einstein say something against a theist, he is right there calling down the atheist as dead or worse, insincere. When you read these scathing reprimands, Einstein always
sides on deism, and therefore, God, if not organized religion nor a literal interpretation of the scriptures, but in that camp fall liberal theologians, and not, in fact, agnostics nor atheists. Think more of Spinoza as panentheism, than pantheism, as well. Both he and Einstein expressed a belief in an intelligence behind creation. In the 30's Einstein wrote more from a pantheistic viewpoint and against organized religion as fearful or morality focused. However, just 9 years later he wrote to Princeton Theological Seminary that a detachment from the spiritual, of which education and specifically science was moving toward, was, in his words "crass" and "one-sided."
Einstein's Ideas and Opinions
In fact, Einstein was adamant that a purely scientific material mind was inadequate:
Einstein said:
The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
He then says religion is of 'utmost' importance to mankind:
Einstein said:
To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man.
Make no 'academic' slight-of-hand mistake here. Einstein was simply and clearly decrying the dismal scientific mind without religion, God, and purpose, and also calling the 'religious' to guide as first-import. This, dear Davis B, is no atheist. In fact, he has strong words against agnosticism and atheism here and in many other places. Strong words for theists? Yes, but ONLY in regards to whatever is antiquated in his mind. I pray your mind is enlightened and adequately corrected. There is absolutely no sense that Einstein was ever an atheist. That mistruth/lie is obfuscation of the highest order. No rational mind would entertain it specifically because Einstein himself said no rational mind would. Irrational? Yep.
