Einstein: The Bible Is Pretty Childish

[Ten thumbs]

Humanity has always tried to make sense of our environment in the light of what is known of it at the time. Looking back the results may seem to be childish but that is an error. It is an understandable mistake so we can forgive Einstein for making it. If it were true then it can be predicted that in another thousand years or so (if we are still here), people will look back at Einstein's work and wonder at its childishness.

[drogulus]

Humanity has always tried to make sense of our environment in the light of what is known of it at the time. Looking back the results may seem to be childish but that is an error. It is an understandable mistake so we can forgive Einstein for making it. If it were true then it can be predicted that in another thousand years or so (if we are still here), people will look back at Einstein's work and wonder at its childishness.

    Ten thumbs, that's an interesting observation. The ancient philosophers who rejected the gods are not considered childish today after thousands of years. We are still in awe of Plato and Socrates for daring to say that we had to discover what was true and good by our own efforts regardless of what was reported of the gods opinions. I doubt that Einstein will seem any more dated for his rejection of the childish literalism of his day than Epicurus or Democritus seem to us.

[Bunny]

Ironic that you would say that, given that you treated Einstein as an authority in your preceding post.

All I was saying is that Einstein is not necessary a great authority on the topic just because he is the greatest physicist next to Newton, given that Newton had a contrary opinion (and Bunny, please check the reference in that Wikipedia link that I gave).

This does not imply that in turn Newton himself must be right because he was such an authority in science. He is right, but for other reasons.

I don't know what you have been reading, but if you understand the meaning and implications of the Wiki article, then it becomes extremely clear that Newton's view of the Bible was that it was imperfectly translated and transcribed by men, and therefore filled with error.  His Bible studies consisted of futile attempts to separate the "scientific truths" from the superstitious myths of the translators and transcribers that in his opinion permeated the book.  He didn't believe in the divinity of Christ nor did he believe in the participation of God in daily life.  In fact, one of the greatest implications of Newton's view of God would be the complete negation of the "power of prayer." A perfect God who has set in motion a perfect universe does not have to make any adjustments nor intercede in any events.  Newton's God is immutable, neither a loving nor punitive God open to prayer, never a participant in the lives of men.  In fact, everything in Newton's view of the universe will have been set in motion at the creation, so one might say he believed that all events were predestined.  To what purpose prayer, then?

Newton was well aware of the heretical nature of his beliefs, so he never made them public.  Had they been made public, it would have led to the loss of influence, and most importantly the loss of his lucrative position as the Warden of the Royal Mint -- a position that gave him an income estimated at £1,600 per annum then.  (That is the equivalent of more than £200 million nowadays.) 

So, do not use Newton as an example of someone who respected and revered the Bible, unless you consider the obsessive search for error within its pages as respectful esteem. 

[Bunny]

Funny, Islam a superstition? As John Paul II once said to a cheering stadium crowd of Muslims, "We all believe in the same God". Judaism a superstition? Hmm, let's see, didn't Christianity arise from there? Isn't Jesus Christ a Jew?

You mention only the religions that evolved from the same source -- the transforming religious experience of Abraham.  How about Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Shintoism, and the other great polytheistic religions -- do you consider those "true religions" or superstition?  If those are "false" religions, then you have just said that the majority of men believe in false religions.

[head-case]

You mention only the religions that evolved from the same source -- the transforming religious experience of Abraham.  How about Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Shintoism, and the other great polytheistic religions -- do you consider those "true religions" or superstition?  If those are "false" religions, then you have just said that the majority of men believe in false religions.

All true, what about Santa-ism.  I think belief in Santa Claus should count as a religion as well.

[Al Moritz]

I don't know what you have been reading, but if you understand the meaning and implications of the Wiki article, then it becomes extremely clear that Newton's view of the Bible was that it was imperfectly translated and transcribed by men, and therefore filled with error.  His Bible studies consisted of futile attempts to separate the "scientific truths" from the superstitious myths of the translators and transcribers that in his opinion permeated the book.  He didn't believe in the divinity of Christ nor did he believe in the participation of God in daily life.  In fact, one of the greatest implications of Newton's view of God would be the complete negation of the "power of prayer." A perfect God who has set in motion a perfect universe does not have to make any adjustments nor intercede in any events.  Newton's God is immutable, neither a loving nor punitive God open to prayer, never a participant in the lives of men.  In fact, everything in Newton's view of the universe will have been set in motion at the creation, so one might say he believed that all events were predestined.  To what purpose prayer, then?

Newton was well aware of the heretical nature of his beliefs, so he never made them public.  Had they been made public, it would have led to the loss of influence, and most importantly the loss of his lucrative position as the Warden of the Royal Mint -- a position that gave him an income estimated at £1,600 per annum then.  (That is the equivalent of more than £200 million nowadays.) 

So, do not use Newton as an example of someone who respected and revered the Bible, unless you consider the obsessive search for error within its pages as respectful esteem. 

Did I claim that Netwon's beliefs were "orthodox"? I don't think so.

[Al Moritz]

You mention only the religions that evolved from the same source -- the transforming religious experience of Abraham.  How about Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Shintoism, and the other great polytheistic religions -- do you consider those "true religions" or superstition?  If those are "false" religions, then you have just said that the majority of men believe in false religions.

My post was a response to M forever, who claimed that believers find only one religion "true" and all others "superstition". Did I claim that there is no superstitious religion? I don't think so.

I don't like to be constantly misread in discussions.

[Bunny]

Did I claim that Netwon's beliefs were "orthodox"? I don't think so.

You used Newton as an example of a scientist who venerated the Bible.  You must have a very strange notion about what veneration consists of to use Newton as such an example.

My post was a response to M forever, who claimed that believers find only one religion "true" and all others "superstition". Did I claim that there is no superstitious religion? I don't think so.

I don't like to be constantly misread in discussions.

In your case you find 3 religions to be "true" but the religions embraced by most of the world's populations (Taoism and Hinduism) are superstitioius?  Did you ever wonder if you might be the one on the wrong side of the argument?  Who are you to pass judgement on a billion Chinese, or close to a billion Indians?  Are so many men deluded and only monotheism is correct?  The same arguments can be used to defend any religious system.

[drogulus]

In your case you find 3 religions to be "true" but the religions embraced by most of the world's populations (Taoism and Hinduism) are superstitioius?  Did you ever wonder if you might be the one on the wrong side of the argument?  Who are you to pass judgement on a billion Chinese, or close to a billion Indians?  Are so many men deluded and only monotheism is correct?  The same arguments can be used to defend any religious system.

    All religions are true against no religion, all monotheisms are true against the nonmonotheists, and my religion is true against the other monos. I don't think there's enough humility in the world to make sense of this. The unity of monotheism is easy, as well as the superiority over the polys. But when you get to the Finals and it's Jew against Christian we have to go all metaphorical so that everything gets to somehow be true "in a way" and false where it needs to be. Ain't relativism grand? 

[M forever]

My post was a response to M forever, who claimed that believers find only one religion "true" and all others "superstition". Did I claim that there is no superstitious religion? I don't think so.

I don't like to be constantly misread in discussions.

If there is a god, that is probably one thing you have in common with him   0:)

I don't think Bunny misread you here though. I think we all understood that you replied to me, and she asked a new question. So, are those 3 monotheist religions OK because they come from the same source, but all of the others are superstitions? If not, which ones are (of the better known ones, I know we can't go through all of them)? Do you also pray to Horus and bring him sacrifices? If not, why?

[Xenophanes]

It doesn't matter what Newton or Einstein believed or not or what they were "right" and "wrong" about. We aren't talking about exchanging one "absolute and infallible" authority ("God" or any of his self-appointed spokespersons) for another, be it Newton or Einstein or anybody else. I find it interesting that you appear to be conditioned to need to have that kind of absolute authority. You can't understand "god" or "the universe" anyway. Einstein didn't either, although he may have understood it better than most people and I find it interesting that he kept that kind of curiosity and respectful distance to his object of study rather than trying to come up with some thinking or believe system to explain it all. These systems just reduce the miracle of the universe we live in to something small we can comprehend. Which is basically what he said. I think the "sense of wonder" and curiosity about the universe and the powers that appear to rule it is the true religious attitude, but it also means that we have to admit to ourselves that we simply are not able to understand it all. So any attempt to grasp the universe with a set of mythological stories and cultic beliefes really is childish in the literal sense of the world. Children need fairy tales and myths to make the world around them understandable. I think adults need fairy tales just as much as children (I know I do, I am very interested in mythology). But the difference is that a child believes in them literally and the mature adlut knows they are just artistic expressions of things which are beyond our understanding but which we can feel are there.

I agree.  Einstein is in no way an authority on religion and the quoted remarks about such subjects are platitudinous--whether one agrees or disagrees with them, they are still platitudes.  Nothing particularly original there.

It is an interesting exercise to try to figure out just what he did think about 'god' by putting together his utterances.

[M forever]

Why are they platitudes? As simple as they are, he pretty much hit the nails on the heads there. Especially when it comes to the "childish" part, there is more depth to it than it may appear at first. Like I said, children need fairy tales and mythology for their development, and our species needed fairy tales and mythology for its development, and adults can still enjoy them as artistic expressions of things that may be beyond the visible world, but the adult knows they are fairy tales, not absolute and eternal truths. I think people who are religious in the traditional sense are not fully grown up, so I think "childish" may be a harsh, but probably apt term.

[Ryan Howard]

    We can say that the universe is a very unlikely arrangement, considered from the point of view of someone living in it. But this special point of view disguises the fact that all universes are unlikely. What are the odds that you are standing on precisely this spot on the surface of the earth?

The point of the cosmic fine-tuning argument, if I understand it correctly, is that the universe has precisely the right characteristics to allow complex structure to evolve--whereas the majority of possible physical laws would permit only chaos or extreme simplicity--and that this quality is specified in advance by the laws of logic. If you've read The Blind Watchmaker you're familiar with how Dawkins defines the complexity of living organisms as being specified in advance by the laws of physics--there are an infinite number of ways a jumble of atoms could come together, but a group of atoms spontaneously coming together to form a living organism it would be so unlikely as to be considered miraculous. If such a thing were to happen we certainly wouldn't say, "well, that appears a very unlikely arrangement, but any arrangement of atoms would be unlikely..."

    In any case this is not a Panglossian universe for humans. It's extremely hostile to life, though it's very friendly to black holes. If maximizing the chances for higher life forms to evolve is the criterion then we are not in an ideal universe, though it's big enough and old enough so that just about all natural possibilities will be realized somewhere. The latter is certainly consistent with unintelligent nondesign.

Well, we certainly don't know if the universe is intended specifically for life, though it's hard to say because we don't know how common life may be elsewhere in the cosmos and still don't understand what the precise physical requirements are for life to come into being. And that's only assuming planetary life--it's possible life could take other forms we haven't imagined. (Check out this article on how electrically charged dust particles in space exhibit lifelike behavior.)

     What's really hard to imagine in any detail is how a generative intelligence can exist outside a basis for information processing and storage necessary to implement a design. Here's the part that I like: The ideal processing and storage medium is matter, which means any god would be dependant on precisely the kind of processes that are supposed to be created. If they aren't matter/energy then they must be just as good for the job! This is the problem of dualism in another form. Just as mind dualism causes for you to posit unknown mystery stuff to bridge the natural/supernatural divide, cosmological dualism means everything has to be done twice! And not just twice, of course, but an infinite series of times, as we keep trying to figure out how the creation process is itself created and so on and so on. The supposed regression stoppers of the apologists depend on massive information complexity being paradoxically simple. That won't do. You can say that gods don't do it like that, but that just raises the question of what way might be available for a god to use.

I understand the point, but it seems to me whatever approach one takes to the problem of the origin of the universe one is going to run into problems that can't be explained by the laws of physics. The idea of a universe and corresponding set of physical laws spontaneously coming into being from nothing, for instance, would seem equally impossible from a materialist perspective.

[drogulus]

The point of the cosmic fine-tuning argument, if I understand it correctly, is that the universe has precisely the right characteristics to allow complex structure to evolve--whereas the majority of possible physical laws would permit only chaos or extreme simplicity--and that this quality is specified in advance by the laws of logic. If you've read The Blind Watchmaker you're familiar with how Dawkins defines the complexity of living organisms as being specified in advance by the laws of physics--there are an infinite number of ways a jumble of atoms could come together, but a group of atoms spontaneously coming together to form a living organism it would be so unlikely as to be considered miraculous. If such a thing were to happen we certainly wouldn't say, "well, that appears a very unlikely arrangement, but any arrangement of atoms would be unlikely..."

Well, we certainly don't know if the universe is intended specifically for life, though it's hard to say because we don't know how common life may be elsewhere in the cosmos and still don't understand what the precise physical requirements are for life to come into being. And that's only assuming planetary life--it's possible life could take other forms we haven't imagined. (Check out this article on how electrically charged dust particles in space exhibit lifelike behavior.)

I understand the point, but it seems to me whatever approach one takes to the problem of the origin of the universe one is going to run into problems that can't be explained by the laws of physics. The idea of a universe and corresponding set of physical laws spontaneously coming into being from nothing, for instance, would seem equally impossible from a materialist perspective.

     Ryan Howard, I'd like to respond to the fine tuning argument by expanding it. What is meant by fine tuning? Does it mean that the universe is one of a number of possible ones, and only this one produces life? Or does it mean that this one, unlike the others, is unusually hospitable to life?

     In the first case, are we dealing with what might be called natural possibility, possibility conceived of as constrained by natural law as it's known to us? In that sense there's no fine tuning because alternatives are not to be considered. That is, one of the alternatives, and perhaps the best one, is that there are none. I think this is the best choice for a default position provided it's not thought of as absolute. There are no worries there, as no scientist functions as an absolutist anyway, so we will get multiverses till the cows come home. Victor Stenger argues in his books (I've only read one of them) that empty spacetime sets the parameters for how matter behaves and the laws just are (how matter-energy behaves seen from a "no privileged position" standpoint you need to do physics). This is attractive because it doesn't require any regressions to stop. For logical and metaphysical possibility we can let everyone have fun. Until possibilities are admitted into nature by new discoveries they are speculations, and the example of string theory shows that not all interesting mathematical models are instantiated.

     So the second alternative is taken care of by the same process of elimination as the first, but lets consider it anyway, because we have nothing better to do. Unusual Hospitality can be seen as what a creator intends. It can't have a nonteleological meaning since blind processes don't have intentions. They aren't trying to maximize anything.

     So let's go the roulette wheel. To consider this we have to look at possibilities from the bettors perspective, and then the ball. What's the chance that your number will come up if you're a betting on a particular outcome? Not good; the house makes its money on that. So from that perspective most of the options are losers. From the balls perspective, though, everywhere it lands is a sure thing once it's there. And conscious, intelligent balls are apt to confuse the 2 perspectives and come up with a hybrid position that says something like "I'm certainly here (ball), and the odds that I'm anywhere (house/bettor) are too high to calculate, so someone just as teleological as me must have intended it". We are reading our own intentionality back into nature. This bias makes it hard to think clearly about Hospitality. We should consider our existence as exactly as likely/unlikely as our position, yet we don't spend much time worrying about why we aren't at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Why isn't this the great metaphysical puzzle?

     So why are frogs so likely that nobody even bothers to question why they're here? Or rocks, what about them? Aren't they unlikely, too. Doesn't their existence prove that they were designed? What are the odds?

     And what about the odds of nonexistence? Don't you think our nonexistent selves should be very suspicious of a nonuniverse that just happened not to exist? What are the odds of that? The point of this is to show just how uncertain we should be about what lesson to draw from this kind of thinking. To say that a creator intends something may be comforting, but the same question about odds of intention can be asked as odds of existence. From a natural perspective intentionality is a feature of living things, and the intelligent ones are so concerned with the detection of intentionality in everything around them (for good survival reasons) that we will always see more of it than is actually there (so much so that a universe that seems to be incredibly hostile to life is seen as hospitable just because we're here). So while we will continue to admit the logical and metaphysical possibility that existence exhibits intentionality from the start, nothing so far shows us anything other than the natural understanding that it emerges with life.

    To sum up, I consider creation ex nihilo and its evil stepsister god-creation to be the same (the second one just has some fancy Hospitality features that don't affect anything but make us happy), answers that reflect the ball wondering what the roulette wheel Intended. They are both out-of-nothing solutions which assume that time before time is a meaningful concept, which would be required for the question to make any sense at all. Why do we grant this assumption? The other dimensions are not accorded this treatment. Was there length before spacetime? Would anyone be offended if I said the concept made no sense?

     

[Ryan Howard]

     Ryan Howard, I'd like to respond to the fine tuning argument by expanding it. What is meant by fine tuning? Does it mean that the universe is one of a number of possible ones, and only this one produces life? Or does it mean that this one, unlike the others, is unusually hospitable to life?

The first theory is correct, from what I understand--if the constants of the universe were slightly different, they would make life entirely impossible, not simply produce different degrees of hospitality/inhospitality to life.

    Victor Stenger argues in his books (I've only read one of them) that empty spacetime sets the parameters for how matter behaves and the laws just are (how matter-energy behaves seen from a "no privileged position" standpoint you need to do physics). This is attractive because it doesn't require any regressions to stop.

I haven't read Stenger...does he argue that empty spacetime always existed? I would guess that the questions "how did the laws of physics come into being?" and "why are the laws of physics precisely the way they are?" are really part of a single question which, if answerable by science (and I don't know if they are), might be answerable with a single theory.

     So let's go the roulette wheel. To consider this we have to look at possibilities from the bettors perspective, and then the ball. What's the chance that your number will come up if you're a betting on a particular outcome? Not good; the house makes its money on that. So from that perspective most of the options are losers. From the balls perspective, though, everywhere it lands is a sure thing once it's there. And conscious, intelligent balls are apt to confuse the 2 perspectives and come up with a hybrid position that says something like "I'm certainly here (ball), and the odds that I'm anywhere (house/bettor) are too high to calculate, so someone just as teleological as me must have intended it".

But like I said before, the odds of a life-supporting universe are logically specified in advance. To extend the analogy of the ball in the roulette wheel, if only a single number (or perhaps a very small set of numbers) resulted in a life-supporting universe while all others produced only chaotic or highly simple universes, and the ball happened to land on the life supporting number(s), that would be a remarkable fact. Just how depends upon how narrow the constraints for the existence of life really are, a fact on which there is not yet consensus.

     So why are frogs so likely that nobody even bothers to question why they're here? Or rocks, what about them? Aren't they unlikely, too. Doesn't their existence prove that they were designed? What are the odds?

Frogs are unlikely, just like all living things (we're talking about the improbability of all life, not just humans). Rocks aren't unlikely because (to go back to Dawkins' analogy) any jumble of atoms could be called a rock. Living organisms are unlikely because of the high specificity of conditions needed to produce them.

     And what about the odds of nonexistence? Don't you think our nonexistent selves should be very suspicious of a nonuniverse that just happened not to exist? What are the odds of that?

Given that the majority of possible universes would not produce life, the odds of being like us capable of asking such questions not existing would be vastly higher than the odds of us existing, so there would be nothing remarkable about nonexistence.

In any case, if the fine-tuning argument holds up to scrutiny, I don't know whether the hypothesis of an intelligent designer is correct, since the danger of this idea is that it proceeds by analogy, much like Paley's watchmaker argument--just as Paley believed the specified complexity and orderliness of living organisms pointed to a designer, we are taking evidence of specified orderliness in the cosmos as evidence of an intelligent orderer. (Hume, of course, argued against Paley's idea long before evolution was understood--one could equally say, he argued, that the universe operates like a living organism, but we wouldn't conclude that it started life as a fetus in a cosmic womb.) In any case, the fact that the universe allows for life does strike me as a fact in need of explanation, even if we don't know what the explanation is.

[Xenophanes]

    Ten thumbs, that's an interesting observation. The ancient philosophers who rejected the gods are not considered childish today after thousands of years. We are still in awe of Plato and Socrates for daring to say that we had to discover what was true and good by our own efforts regardless of what was reported of the gods opinions. I doubt that Einstein will seem any more dated for his rejection of the childish literalism of his day than Epicurus or Democritus seem to us.

One wonders what you would mean by implying Socrates and Plato rejected the gods. They rejected some views about the gods but they had their own views about them, though it's not always so easy to decide precisely what they meant. Aristotle, too, had his gods.  Even Epicurus admitted some sort of gods.

On the other hand, historians of religion take all sorts of religious views and practices seriously enough as part of human experience.  Einstein was not expert in religion.

[M forever]

On the other hand, historians of religion take all sorts of religious views and practices seriously enough as part of human experience.  Einstein was not expert in religion.

I think Einstein also realized that religions are an important part of human cultural development and traditions - but not more. Like all sorts of mythology and fairy tales. My impression is that what he spoke against was the literal interpretation of these myths and fairy tales.

As far as what is really "beyond" the scientifically describable world, there are no "experts in religions" other than the people who study these cultural phenomena - as exactly that, cultural phenomena. It's not like when you read a lot of religious texts, you know more about "god" than someone who doesn't. Because we all *don't know for sure*. Studying all these forms of mythology does not tell you one thing about "god" and "the universe". They are all forms of human expression. Reading a lot of religious texts makes no one a real "expert". Because it is not something you can understand by reading about it in books.

But - whatever "force" or "principle" shaped our universe left its "fingerprints" all over it. Studying our world in detail and trying to figure out and understand the forces which govern it is a much more "religious" activity than preaching stories about miracle men and divine interventions one has read in old fairy tale books. These books were written by people who thought the earth was a disc sitting on the back of giant turtles or similar and that diseases were caused by evil spirits, in other words, they had absofuckinglutely no clue about what really is the nature of "god's" or whoever's creation. And they had just as little a clue about the origin of the universe and the nature of the forces behind it. They just imagined it as an all-powerful being in the skies, and since they were so  childishly and immaturely anthropocentric in their thinking, they simpy could not imagine that force to be anything other than something just like themselves, only somehow more powerful, but at the same time, just as willful and influenceable like themselves. That is basically what Einstein pointed out when he said the Bible and the idea of that kind of god whose motivations and emotional mechanisms were all too obviously human were childish.

[Iconito]

If there is a god, that is probably one thing you have in common with him   0:)

Beautiful 

[Xenophanes]

I think Einstein also realized that religions are an important part of human cultural development and traditions - but not more. Like all sorts of mythology and fairy tales. My impression is that what he spoke against was the literal interpretation of these myths and fairy tales.

As far as what is really "beyond" the scientifically describable world, there are no "experts in religions" other than the people who study these cultural phenomena - as exactly that, cultural phenomena. It's not like when you read a lot of religious texts, you know more about "god" than someone who doesn't. Because we all *don't know for sure*. Studying all these forms of mythology does not tell you one thing about "god" and "the universe". They are all forms of human expression. Reading a lot of religious texts makes no one a real "expert". Because it is not something you can understand by reading about it in books.

But - whatever "force" or "principle" shaped our universe left its "fingerprints" all over it. Studying our world in detail and trying to figure out and understand the forces which govern it is a much more "religious" activity than preaching stories about miracle men and divine interventions one has read in old fairy tale books. These books were written by people who thought the earth was a disc sitting on the back of giant turtles or similar and that diseases were caused by evil spirits, in other words, they had absofuckinglutely no clue about what really is the nature of "god's" or whoever's creation. And they had just as little a clue about the origin of the universe and the nature of the forces behind it. They just imagined it as an all-powerful being in the skies, and since they were so  childishly and immaturely anthropocentric in their thinking, they simpy could not imagine that force to be anything other than something just like themselves, only somehow more powerful, but at the same time, just as willful and influenceable like themselves. That is basically what Einstein pointed out when he said the Bible and the idea of that kind of god whose motivations and emotional mechanisms were all too obviously human were childish.

You illustrate my point.  To give much useful meaning to Einstein's gnomic utterances on the gods and religion, you have to limit them and apply them to more particular things such as certain conceptions of God, not just general things like "the Bible."  You also seem to like at creation stories as attempts to do science (which actually didn't exist when many of them were developed), rather than looking at them in their cultural, political, and historical contexts.

He didn't get much beyond the presocratic philosophers, who tended to be more incisive in their criticism and suggestive in their views.

http://www.uky.edu/~jjord0/Thales.htm

Wheelwright has a very approachable book on the Presocratics with texts and commentary.

You also have your own take on what religion is or should be about, and of course, your remarks have value, but hardly comprehensive.  There are so many different aspects of religion, and this is really implicit in your own insight  that "They are all forms of human expression." 

[head-case]

It never ceases to amaze me that anyone would find anything interesting in these nonsense discussions.  It is all nicely summed up in Voltaire's remark, "If god didn't exist man would have to invent him."  This is self evident since all primative people who were denied the revelation of the "true" god invented their own god.  It is only a small step to conclude that all of the gods are invented.  If you want to define the laws of physics as god, that's fine.  But there is simply no evidence at all in the world that a god exists that is at all interested in whether we commit "sins" or worship him.  It is pure human vanity, to think we are the purpose of the universe.

You illustrate my point.  To give much useful meaning to Einstein's gnomic utterances on the gods and religion, you have to limit them and apply them to more particular things such as certain conceptions of God, not just general things like "the Bible."  You also seem to like at creation stories as attempts to do science (which actually didn't exist when many of them were developed), rather than looking at them in their cultural, political, and historical contexts.

He didn't get much beyond the presocratic philosophers, who tended to be more incisive in their criticism and suggestive in their views.

http://www.uky.edu/~jjord0/Thales.htm

Wheelwright has a very approachable book on the Presocratics with texts and commentary.

You also have your own take on what religion is or should be about, and of course, your remarks have value, but hardly comprehensive.  There are so many different aspects of religion, and this is really implicit in your own insight  that "They are all forms of human expression."