Einstein by Max (Moshe) Yamer

Einstein abandoned traditional religion as a child and became a free thinker. Did Einstein's abandonment of the religious paradise lead him straight to relativity? This week, Prof. Moshe Yimer Mauni' Bar-Ilan, who was Einstein's student and wrote a book about Einstein's original religious philosophy, passed away.

Prof. Max Yamer, the physicist and philosopher of science from Bar Ilan University passed away on December 18 at the age of 95. Yamer belongs to the generation of physicists who worked in Einstein's environment. Ymer was a colleague of Einstein and met him at Princeton. Einstein wrote the following about Max Yemmer in 1953, "But the limitation in the individual's ability and working capacity is such that we rarely find a person who has the philological and historical training necessary for a critical and comparative interpretation of the source material, such as is scattered over hundreds of years, and who is at the same time can appreciate the significance of the discussed concepts for science as a whole. I have the impression that Dr. Yamer, through his work, demonstrated that in his case these conditions are largely met for him".

Yamar wrote several books on the history of physics and a book on Einstein, Einstein and religion. Einstein's biographers have not addressed the question of Einstein's approach to religion and Einstein's philosophy of religion. In addition, often - if they briefly referred to his views on the subject of religion - they distorted Einstein's religious views. In his book Einstein and Religion, Yamer analyzes Einstein's philosophy of religion and his approach to religion. I will bring some of Yamer's ideas in his book.
Yimer says that four months after Einstein left Germany, in May 1933, the Gestapo stormed his apartment at Haberlandstrasse number 5 in Berlin. The excuse was a search for anti-German propaganda literature. The Gestapo found a pair of Tefillin in Einstein's apartment. Einstein never put them down. They also found a prayer book along with pictures and valuable cutlery. Needless to say, everything was looted.
Einstein, the humanist, the Jew and the pacifist became a political and ideological target. His theory of relativity was accused of being a typical product of Jewish physics, which tries to remove the true Aryan physics from its foundations. As a result, the Nazi ideologues tried to show that relativity was influenced by the Talmud, the Mishna and the Gemara; The principle of constancy of the speed of light per diem stemmed from the Bible and the Torah. And it was even necessary to develop an elaborate mathematical instrument to show this, according to the Nazis, an instrument whose name was the Jewish theory of relativity. They even attributed the Sabbath laws - according to which one must not travel more than a kilometer and a half - to the Jewish theory of relativity.
"If we ignore the anti-Semitic tone," writes Max Yemer in his book, "we can ask: Are there philosophical and religious motivations in the theory of relativity?" The important question for Lemer is not only how much religion influenced Einstein's work, but also, conversely, how deeply Einstein's work - and especially his theory of relativity - influenced theological thought in general.
Yamer studied the interaction between modern physics and theology and how it sheds light on the debate about the relationship between religion and science. Einstein abandoned traditional religion as a child and became a free thinker. Did Einstein's abandonment of the religious paradise lead him straight to relativity? "Such an approach may lead us to think that science and religion are antagonistic and irreconcilable," says Max Ymer. "However, Einstein himself never thought that the relationship between science and religion was an anti-thesis." "On the contrary," says Yamer, "he saw science and religion as complementing each other, or instead dependent on each other. On this topic, Ymer quotes Einstein as saying: "Science without religion is lame, while religion without science is blind."
What kind of religion did Einstein mean? Einstein sometimes defined himself as a pantheist (identifying God with nature, advocating seeing the world as a reflection of the divine). He said about himself: "I am a very religious person. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or who has a will of the kind we experience ourselves." Yamer says that in 1929 Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein from the New York synagogue asked Einstein in a short message: "Do you believe in God?" Einstein replied: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the organized harmony of what exists, and not in a God who deals with the destinies and actions of human beings."
And then Einstein was often accused of being an atheist or agnostic (does not disbelieve in God but advocates the view that man and science cannot know about the existence of God). Ymer says that at a charity dinner in New York when he spoke to a German anti-Nazi diplomat, Hubertus zu Loewenstein in 1941, Einstein said the following: "In light of such harmony in the cosmos that I, with the help of my limited human thought, am able to understand, there are still people who say there is no God. But what really angers me is that they quote me as a supporter of such views." After all, atheists deny the existence of God, and it doesn't matter how God is defined. And Einstein denied only one concept of God, the concept of a personal God.
Indeed, we argued that Einstein's statement expresses atheism, since if God - according to Einstein - is not concerned with the actions and prayers of man, he is surely useless to pray to. There is therefore no need for a synagogue, a church, or a mosque and any religious mitzvah and the worship of God and any other characteristic of religion. The whole point of religion is the almighty personal God dealing with man's destinies and actions. indeed?
Einstein's God is Spinoza's and is completely deterministic, and in some ways can be translated into a scientific formula. And it can be argued against him that he is not God at all. However, Yamer says, Einstein himself made a sharp distinction between his disbelief in a personal God and atheism. He did not think that religious education was worthless and that belief in a monotheistic personal God should be condemned. He opposed this only when they sought to teach the laws of religion instead of scientific progress and ethical values.
The concept of an omnipotent personal God is incompatible with the thesis of determinism. Yamer writes that Einstein believed in what he called cosmic religion, a kind of cosmic pantheism, and in this sense he used the term religion and not religion in the traditional sense of the word. Religion for him was in the harmony of the laws of nature, in beauty and belief in the logical simplicity and order of nature, in the imperfect understanding and moral obligations, when there is a "superior intelligence", which according to Spinoza's thought is revealed in the unlimited determinism and causality of nature. This was Einstein's religion, a religion that was based on a firm belief in determinism and an uncompromising denial of anthropomorphism in the concept of divinity.
The problem arose then and surfaced for her, as criticisms were heard against Einstein's view, if God is impersonal and is embodied in space-time, there is no moral order, since the omnipotent God (all-powerful) goes hand in hand with the moral responsibility of man: God was not all could if he had not made man free. And in this situation, who is responsible for removing Professor Einstein from Germany? Is it Hitler? Or is it just a collection of space-time combinations in nature that made Einstein act and leave Germany?
Yamer says that when Einstein denied the concept of a personal God, a historian and president of a historical association in New Jersey told Einstein: "God is a spirit and cannot be found through the telescope or the microscope... As everyone knows, religion is based on faith, not on knowledge." And some were angry and told him after he arrived in the USA: "Take your wrong and crazy theory of evolution and go back to Germany where you came from, or stop breaking the faith of the people who blessed you when you had to flee your homeland." Not only did they confuse here between Einstein and Darwin - hated by the church, but anti-Semitic undertones were angrily attributed to Einstein's choice of Spinoza's religion and his opposition to the personal God.

Of course Einstein's cosmic religion was incompatible with Judaism, Christianity and Islam and all theistic religions. This is because of his denial of a personal God who punishes and rewards and performs miracles, a God who violates the causal orders of nature. And so Einstein did not believe that one should pray to God in order to ask Him for something, in the sense of traditional religion.
David Ben-Gurion, who visited Einstein in Princeton a year before he was invited to become the country's president, felt something in common with him. Both - says Max Ymer - were passionate admirers of Spinoza and the cosmic religion. It is worth noting that Ben-Gurion was interested in Spinoza for different reasons than those of Einstein. If God is identified with nature, then everything is not in the hands of heaven and Israel is not the people chosen by God. The Jews therefore have to work hard to establish a state. The Zionist idea is based on work and creation and not on religious ideas. Here, of course, comes the question of religion and the state.

Ymer points out that in his autobiographical notes Einstein does not mention Spinoza and his ethics even once. Einstein only talks about David Yom and Immanuel Kant as philosophers who influenced his path. And so one can ask, can we find influences of the ethics of Spinoza - the philosopher who is more popular than Einstein on the subject of religion - in the theory of relativity? This is a worthy question, says Yamer, when examining Einstein's philosophy of religion.

If so, asks Max Ymer, did Einstein's concept of religion or his religious sentiments influence his scientific work? Two questions are involved here: 1) Was his religiosity a spiritual or psychological driving force that inspired him in his work? 2) Did his religious concepts affect the very essence of his work? That is, were his physical theories influenced by his so-called cosmic religion? Einstein never indicated that his religious feelings strengthened his ability to work. At the same time, music for him - playing the violin - was an expression of religious feelings and many times while playing the violin he suddenly found a solution to a scientific problem that had been bothering him for some time. For example, general relativity.

Einstein wrote to Max Born in 1926 the saying that became a famous saying, "God does not play dice". Einstein opposed the new quantum mechanics at least partly for religious reasons. God is impersonal and therefore he cannot play dice, beyond being a deterministic god... But whenever a theory appeared to Einstein as forced he said, "God does nothing like that", or "God is witty, but he is not evil"....

At the same time, Einstein once said to Edgar Meyer on January 2, 1915, "Why do you write to me, 'God should punish the English?' I have no close connection to it or the others. I am only sorry that God punishes so many of his children for his countless follies, that he himself may be guilty of it. In my opinion, he can only be forgiven for not existing."

* Editor's note - no matter how Einstein described his religious approach, it is clear that the most correct definition of his thoughts is atheism, since the embodiment of God in nature itself does not have any religious significance, however, Einstein is considered a much better Jew than many religious Jews due to his being a Zionist, he He visited the Technion and laid the cornerstone for the Hebrew University, and also participated in fundraising events and bequeathed the intellectual property resulting from the use of his image to the Hebrew University.
. Avi Blizovsky