Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

This outstanding article by Brian Gallagher, published in Nautilus, provides deeper insight into Albert Einstein’s views on religion and science.

Not long ago, I heard an echo of Albert Einstein’s religious views in the words of Elon Musk. Asked, at the close of a conversation with Axios, whether he believed in God, the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla paused, looked away from his interlocutors for a brief second, and then said, in that mild South African accent, “I believe there’s some explanation for this universe, which you might call God.”

Einstein did call it God. The German-Jewish physicist is famous for many things—his special and general theories of relativity, his burst of gray-white hair—including his esoteric remark, often intoned in discussions of the strange, probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, that “God does not play dice.” A final or ultimate equation, describing the laws of nature and the origin of the cosmos, Einstein believed, could not involve chance intrinsically. Insofar as it did—it being the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics—it would be incomplete. (The consensus now among physicists is that he was wrong; God is indeterminate. ‘All the evidence points to him being an inveterate gambler,’ Stephen Hawking once said, ‘who throws the dice on every possible occasion.’)

But what was with Einstein’s God-language in the first place? The question may be considered anew, in light of an auction at Christie’s, in New York, of a 1954 letter Einstein wrote that a couple years ago unexpectedly sold for $2.9 million. For the occasion the Princeton Club hosted a panel discussion on the conflict, or lack thereof, between science and religion, which featured theoretical physicist Brian Greene, philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo, and Rabbi Geoff Mitelman, founding director of Sinai and Synapses, an organization dedicated to fostering respectful dialogue about religion and science. The event was open to the public, and I was excited to attend. (Full disclosure: At the time I was a Sinai and Synapses fellow.) I believe Einstein can still offer some insight on how to think about religion and science.

“I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

What Einstein said, in a note to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, whose book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt Einstein was reviewing, was nearly as scathing as any contemporary critique of religion you might hear from Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Christopher Hitchens. ‘The word God is for me,’ Einstein wrote, ‘nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me.’

It is no wonder why, for decades, Einstein’s views on religion became muddled in the popular imagination: The inconsistency is clear. Here, God means one thing; over there, another. Just going off his letter to Gutkind, Einstein appears to be an atheist. But read Einstein in other places and you find him directly declaring that he is not one. “I am not an Atheist,” he said in an interview published in 1930. ‘I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.’ Einstein was asked whether he was a pantheist. The rest of his response is worth quoting in full:

“May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvellously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.

Benedict Spinoza, the 17th century Jewish-Dutch philosopher, was also in his day confused for an atheist for writing things like this, from his treatise Ethics: ‘All things, I say, are in God, and everything which takes place takes place by the laws alone of the infinite nature of God, and follows (as I shall presently show) from the necessity of His essence.’

In 1929, Einstein received a telegram inquiring about his belief in God from a New York rabbi named Herbert Goldstein, who had heard a Boston cardinal say that the physicist’s theory of relativity implies “the ghastly apparition of atheism.’Einstein settled Goldstein down. “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world,’ he told him, ‘not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.’

What that amounted to for Einstein, according to a 2006 paper, was a ‘cosmic religious feeling’ that required no ‘anthropomorphic conception of God.’ He explained this view in the New York Times Magazine: ‘The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.’

So, as Einstein would have it, there is no necessary conflict between science and religion—or between science and ‘religious feelings.’

Brian Gallagher is an associate editor at Nautilus. Follow him on Twitter @bsgallagher.

Link:https://peacelilysite.com/2025/04/01/how-einstein-reconciled-religion-to-science/

By Adam Frank

Here is one thing author Robert Wright and I agree on when it comes to Buddhist meditation: It’s really, really boring. At least, it’s boring in the beginning. But there is another thing we agree on, too. That initial meditative boredom is actually a door. It’s an opening that can lead us to something essential, and essentially true, that Buddhism has to teach us about being human.

Wright’s insight on this point is just one of the many truths in his delightfully personal, yet broadly important, new book Why Buddhism Is True.

The “true” in Wright’s title doesn’t refer to the traditional kinds of scriptural truths we think of when we think of religions and truth. Wright is explicitly not interested in the traditional aspects of Buddhism as a religion. The book, for example, makes no claims about reincarnation or Tibetan rainbow bodies or the like. Instead, Wright wants to focus on Buddhism’s diagnosis of the human condition. The part that is relevant to the here and now. It’s Buddhism’s take on our suffering, our anxiety and our general dis-ease that Wright wants to explore because that is where he sees its perspective lining up with scientific fields like evolutionary psychology and neurobiology.

To his credit, Wright is more than cognizant that exploring just these aspects of Buddhism means he is filtering out quite a bit of its history. As he reminds his readers:

“Two of the most common Western conceptions of Buddhism — that it’s atheistic and that it revolves around meditation — are wrong; most Asian Buddhists do believe in gods, though not an omnipotent creator God, and don’t meditate.”

Wright also acknowledges that even within this “scientific” Buddhism he is interested in, there are also enormous differences between various philosophical schools of thought, many with 1,000-year histories.

“I’m not getting into super-fine-grained parts of Buddhist psychology and philosophy,” he tells us.

“For example, the Abhidhamma Pitaka, a collection of early Buddhist texts, asserts that there are eighty-nine kinds of consciousness, twelve of which are unwholesome. You may be relieved to hear that this book will spend no time trying to evaluate that claim.”

I was happy to see Wright address these issues of history and interpretation head-on. No matter where Buddhism’s encounter with the West takes it, ignoring history doesn’t do anyone any good (I’ve tried to explore these issues myself here at 13.7 and elsewhere, including here and here).

But with those important caveats, Wright is then forceful in his main argument that “Buddhism’s diagnosis of the human predicament is fundamentally correct, and that its prescription is deeply valid and urgently important.”

To back up this claim, Wright leans heavily on evolutionary psychology, which he says, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “is the study of how the human brain was designed — by natural selection — to mislead us, even enslave us.” That misleading and enslaving, however, is all in the service of getting our genes into the next generation. As he writes:

“Don’t get me wrong: natural selection has its virtues, and I’d rather be created by it than not be created at all — which, so far as I can tell, are the two options this universe offers.”

These lines give you hint of Wright’s tone throughout the book. He is very funny and uses his own experiences to drive to the book’s questions. In particular, it was his first experience at a week-long meditation intensive two decades ago that launched his journey into Buddhism and “contemplative practice” (i.e. meditation). His accounts of time spent on “the cushion” are full of self-effacing humor and real insights.

Wright’s main point is that evolution hardwires us with intense emotions that are in fact delusions. (He has discussed this in an interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.) They developed as survival responses to the environments we evolved in and they were tuned to those environments. Now they just don’t make sense and need to be seen for what they are. As he puts it:

“These feelings — anxiety, despair, hatred, greed — … have elements of delusion, elements you’d be better off without. And if you think you would be better off, imagine how the whole world would be. After all, feelings like despair and hatred and greed can foster wars and atrocities. So if what I’m saying is true — if the basic sources of human suffering and human cruelty are indeed in large part the product of delusion — there is value in exposing this delusion to the light.”

According to Wright, Buddhism, at least its more contemplative side, offers specific insights into, and a path out of, these delusions. In particular, the direct experiences gained via contemplative practice can, he says, weaken the hold of these evolutionary once-needed delusions. In the process, Wright argues, we can all learn to wreak a little less havoc on ourselves and the rest of the world. As he puts it:

“There are other spiritual traditions that address the human predicament with insight and wisdom. But Buddhist meditation, along with its underlying philosophy, addresses that predicament in a strikingly direct and comprehensive way.”

That broad nonsectarian approach is an important part of Wright’s approach. Raised as a Southern Baptist, he left the church in his teens. But he doesn’t look back in anger. Perhaps that is why he isn’t arguing that people need to become a Buddhist to practice its truths. As he writes: “Asserting the validity of core Buddhist ideas doesn’t necessarily say anything, one way or the other, about other spiritual or philosophical traditions.” Later, he reminds us of the Dalai Lama’s admonition: “Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.”

Which takes me back to that whole meditation is boring (at least in the beginning) thing. One of the best parts of Wright’s book is its realism. No matter how many books you read on Buddhist insights into human beings, they won’t mean much unless you find yourself a regular practice. It’s the practice that counts. It’s the practice that slowly lets you see the delusion in our constant stream of desires and aversions. That is, after all, why they call it practice. Wright does an excellent job of unpacking this reality for his readers, demonstrating again and again how contemplative practice can lead to understanding and how understanding can lead to an important kind of freedom.

Why ‘Why Buddhism Is True’ Is True

Link: https://peacelilysite.com/2023/03/30/why-why-buddhism-is-true-is-true/

#ScienceandPhilosophyofMeditationandEnlightenment #MeditationandEnlightenment #Enlightenment

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/09/26/553712812/why-why-buddhism-is-true-is-true

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