>I have heard so much garbage about Einstein's beliefs ...
I agree that I stretched things a bit too far in using the term "mystical
revelation" to describe how Einstein arrived at his theories. However,
Einstein, like many creative people in science, the arts, and religion,
experienced flashes of creative insight, which occur by some process other
than logical reasoning. Einstein remarked about its not just being a
matter of reasoning from sensory or instrument data to the theory, but that
there was this process we are only partly consciously aware of by which
theories get nominated. It's only once they've been nominated that they can
be compared against the data.
My use of terminology was non-standard, but many mystics do consider
creative insight in science to be something akin to mystical revelation in
religion. Some psychologists have speculated that similar neurological
processes are at work.
Einstein emphatically did not believe in a personal God. I did not mean to
imply that he did, although I can see that I could have been interpreted
that way.
The God of Laskey's wager is a personal one because I experienced him as
speaking directly to me. However, the God I would nominate for the public
prototype need not be personal. It seems as if we might nominate two
different public prototypes, one personal and the other non-personal. I
would suggest that they might co-exist in society for some time, and
perhaps forever, like the different observationally equivalent theories of
quantum mechanics the physicists keep getting into arguments over.
Kathy
