Q&A: Popper, Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon
Popper, Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon
Question
Hello and have a good week!
I recently happened to read excerpts from an article by Popper, cited by Prof. Benjamin Fine in his book The Poverty of Unbelief (has the Rabbi read it?), and because I saw that they are similar to the Rabbi’s conclusion in his great book Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon, I thought I would post them here for the Rabbi’s consideration (even though the semantics of “rationality” and “mystical” are not as the Rabbi defines them).
“His intuition [the scientist’s] is his mystical ability to penetrate into the nature of things, and is no more than a logical inference, and it is this that makes him a great scientist… Creativity is a completely non-rational trait; it is a mystical trait.”
By the way, in that book Fine brings a letter from Einstein against Kant’s approach (in response to David Hume), and Einstein writes explicitly that the answer to Hume is to assume that there is a cause—God—that created an order of reason and lawfulness (as the Rabbi says).
And in general, there are many fundamental things in the book that correspond very closely to what the Rabbi wrote in his Two Wagons.
I only came to make that remark.
Answer
Thank you for this. As for Einstein, that is interesting, because the impression one gets from his writings is that he did not believe in a personal God but rather in a kind of pantheism (like Spinoza). In any case, as I wrote in my book God Plays Dice, there is no special value in clarifying what Einstein thought unless he had arguments. Otherwise, that is an argument about the person rather than about the matter itself.
Discussion on Answer
It seems to me that Einstein believed in pantheism precisely in order to solve problems like these for himself. On the other hand, he didn’t want to believe in an additional cause, so he inserted it into the system itself. That, after all, is the logic of pantheism.
Einstein said explicitly that he was not a pantheist.
It seems he was a deist or an agnostic..
Indeed, I completely agree that there is no point in knowing what the “greats” thought, only whether the arguments hold water.
In any case, since it was interesting I mentioned it in passing. I should note that I didn’t look at the passage itself just now, and I wrote this from memory. So it’s possible I wasn’t precise.