This thread does not intellectually choose sides. I’m interested if there are any others here who have experienced what Albert Einstein called it the “cosmic religious feeling.”
Religion in society or within Plato’s Cave has always had the purpose of consolation and morality. However, there are and always have been, a minority who have felt their own nothingness in the presence of a lawful larger whole we call universe. A person intuites the smallness of their own thoughts in the presence of lawful infinity and the possibility of consciously becoming aware of their responsibility to it. Einstein considered the cosmic religious feeling to be of the highest sphere of human capabilities. How many are aware of it and prefer to argue over societal details.
Here is what Einstein wrote on this in a 1930 article
People argue intellectually with a conditioned mind and Einstein is referring to feeling quality through higher emotion. But how do we communicate the cosmic religious feeling through words and the intellect? It is the domain of art which apparently is no longer valued in modern times. How then is a person able to feel universal will that governs our universe?The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.
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.
Has anyone here experienced the cosmic religious feeling? What does it feel like to experience your nothingness and insignificance in the presence of the needs of a larger whole which dwarfs us? Does it help you to experience the wholeness of life without the egoistic need for descending into dualistic arguments to try to feel “meaning?”I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue.
What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries.
Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.