"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." (hell, atheist)
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Albert Einstein was the man. That quote just summerizes the Religion vs Science up so wonderfully. To bad blood will be spilled in order to make one the "right" way.
Now all you need to do is look at what Einstein meant by religion. Here's a hint - it doesn't have much to do with gods or worship in any traditional sense. I'm OK with that, but I doubt most religious believers would be.
Einstein believed in "Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony of what exists."
"I want to know how God created this world, I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details."
"The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms -- this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religion. --Einstein said ("Einstein, Albert" in The Enlightened Mind, ed. Stephen Mitchell; New York: Harper Collins, 1991)"
"I am not an Atheist"
"Mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all."
"I am a deeply religious nonbeliever... This is a somewhat new kind of religion."
Sounds he had a deep reverence for the common ancestor of both science and religion...the urge to make guesses about the world around us.
Going to agree that religion doesn't have a lot to offer science though, so long as religion is defined as concrete viewpoints about what is, which don't necessarily relate to what seems to be.
If religion is something that merely fills in the cracks leftover after the studying of the world around oneself and finding questions un-answered, then it's a necessity for everyone, and everyone has one...atheists, agnostics, and nihilists just haven't named theirs...although I don't know if that's what Einstein meant.
Spinoza's "God" was essentially Nature - or, all-of-existence. This God was not anthropomorphic (did not have human qualities such as passions, intelligence, plans, prohibitions, etc.), so traditional religion is not possible using Spinoza's ideas. It's the "god" of the philosophers, the scientists - so it makes perfect sense that Einstein would invoke such a phrase.
As another poster pointed out, however, many proponents of traditional religious systems will point to Einstein's comments and assume that they apply to their religious system - having never studied Spinoza - and conclude that "gee, if a great scientist such as Einstein believes in God, well..."
We still have to wonder how sincere the Mechanists were being when they posited natural laws, but at the heart of it all - a god. Freedom of Speech was not so liberal as to prevent certain speakers from being killed for their efforts. Spinoza's God might go by a different name, if written today.
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. (Albert Einstein, 1954) From Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press
Why does it even matter what Einstein thought about god? He'd have been better off if he had stuck to physics.
Because there are religious folks who use Einstein's thoughts on "God" in an attempt to "prove" that one of the greatest scientific minds of the last century was - despite what he knew about science and the cosmos - convinced that there was a God responsible for it all. Not caring to delve any deeper into Einstein's actual words (that he was speaking of Spinoza's God, essentially), they attempt to use his words as justification for their own religious tradition.
That is why it matters to the religious. It should matter to the irreligious because it works against science and everything Einstein stood for, in all actuality.
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