Diogenes' Dog said:
I too can quote Einstein, but the reason you require it, is unknown to me.
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
- Albert Einstein, 24 March 1954 letter
The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image-a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being.
- Albert Einstein, 20 December 1939 letter
"I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."
- Albert Einstein, "The World as I See It"
I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.
- Albert Einstein, 2 July 1945 letter to Guy H. Raner Jr
http://en.thinkexist.com/quotes/albert_einstein/
Diogenes' Dog said:
BTW, what's this nonsense you're spouting about theories?
I think you are very confused about what a theory is... You could do worse than look up Karl Popper on falsification or Kuhn or Feyerabend on how science progresses. No scientific theory or hypothesis is "provable" or even "verifiable" - they can only be disproved - it's part of the definition. A theory is not a law, it's a more or less useful conceptual model.
not I, perhaps we were educated differently, me objectively, you subjectively
THEORY
1. A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.
2. The branch of a science or art consisting of its explanatory statements, accepted principles, and methods of analysis, as opposed to practice
In science, a theory is a proposed description, explanation, or model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise verified through empirical observation. It follows from this that for scientists "theory" and "fact" do not necessarily stand in opposition. For example, it is a fact that an apple dropped on earth has been observed to fall towards the center of the planet, and the theory which explains why the apple behaves so is the current theory of gravitation.
A theory does not mean an unsubstantiated guess or hunch, as it often does in other contexts. a theory is a logically self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of a related set of natural or social phenomena. It originates from and/or is supported by experimental evidence (see scientific method). In this sense, a theory is a systematic and formalized expression of all previous observations that is predictive, logical and testable. In principle, scientific theories are always tentative, and subject to corrections or inclusion in a yet wider theory. Commonly, a large number of more specific hypotheses may be logically bound together by just one or two theories. As a general rule for use of the term, theories tend to deal with much broader sets of universals than do hypotheses, which ordinarily deal with much more specific sets of phenomena or specific applications of a theory.
HYPOTHESIS
1. A tentative explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation.
2. Something taken to be true for the purpose of argument or investigation; an assumption.
a tentative explanation for a phenomenon, used as a basis for further investigation
a supposition made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.
3. The antecedent of a conditional statement.
a hypothesis must contain nothing which is at variance with known facts or principles:
it should not postulate conditions which cannot be verified empirically.
a hypothesis is not genuinely scientific if it is destined always to remain a hypothesis : it must be of such a nature as to be either proved or disproved by comparison with observed facts