Albert Einstein was my one of my favorite scientists during my school days.A world famous physicist who was jewish in origin but was not an observant of its customs.He was introduced to great philosophical volumes during his school days.He had to struggle for a job after his studies. I always fostered a view of him as kind and compassionate scientist.Of late i was reading his views on God and religion and was bit surprised to know that he was a agnostic.
But what he calls as mystery , the incomprehensible, the limited scope of our reasoning are for me the first steps of realizing the presence of a God who runs this universe.He confesses that our minds are feeble and can only comprehend a very little of what is largely incomprehensible.
Some of his quotes are-
when asked about his religious beliefs he answered by saying that he doesn't believe in a personal god but the structure of the world creates in him an admiration for it.
He had said-
"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.
It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms--it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man"
My feeling is religious insofar as I am imbued with tile consciousness of the insufficiency of the human mind to understand more deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as "laws of nature."
— Letter to Beatrice Frohlich, December 17, 1952; Einstein Archive 59-797
http://www.einsteinandreligion.com/worldsee.html
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive With our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible Universe, forms my idea of God.
— Quoted in the New York Times obituary April 19, 1955
“I believe in the brotherhood of man and the uniqueness of the individual. But if you ask me to prove what I believe, I can't. You know them to be true but you could spend a whole lifetime without being able to prove them. The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap.”
The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility...The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.
—Albert Einstein
quoted in Calaprice, p. 197 from Ideas and Opinions, p. 272
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