His beliefs:
"Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way. There in lies the weakness of positivists and professional atheists."

Even showing it is religious:
"I have no better expression than 'religious' for this confidence in the rational nature of reality and in it being accessible, to some degree, to human reason. When this feeling is missing, science degenerates into mindless empiricism."

Being and losing positivism:
"At that time my mode of thinking was much nearer positivism than it was later on. M departure from positivism came only when I worked out the general theory of relativity."

Einstein also contributed to physics in many ways with his opposition to QM. Many scientists tried to answer his complains and had to work harder to tidy up the theory. The EPR paradox is one great example which led to Bell's inequality.

Most would disagree with the idea that Einstein didn't contribute to physics by opposing QM. Many of the movers and shakers of QM's development put a lot of emphasis on proving out the finer points of the theory specifically because determinism stalwart holdouts like Einstein were opposed to the idea.

It should be noted that Einstein recanted his "God does not play dice" assertion later on, when it became clear that QM really was correct, which is why he spent the end of his life trying to unify QM and GTR.

- He didn't discover the Special and General Theories of Relativity; he formulated them. Small point, but important.

- He didn't discover the photoelectric effect; he gave it a theoretical explanation in 1905 that wasn't fully accepted for long afterwards.

Quath:

Einstein fought QM because he refused to admit probability into physical science; not necessarily because of religious motivations. Also, Einstein did not 'use' logical positivism to dispel the idea of absolute time. With STR he postulated that the ether was not needed and the elimination of absolute time merely follows from STR.

He really didn't advance physics at all in opposing QM.

Finally, he didn't abandon logical positivism around the time of general relativity (1915.) He never was a positivist. He claimed in 1905 that energy is quantized and in 1909 that light will become to be seen as both a light and a wave. These are not positions that the prototypical positivist would have held.

Malen: Einstein made the conceptual advancements needed for the development of the general theory, and Hilbert almost beat him to the punch with the math.

David: Of course Einstein has his flaws, as do we all. But the fact remains that he accomplished great things scientifically and stood up for worthy causes morally. If we demand that someone be absolutely perfect before we get around to celebrating them, we'll be waiting a long time. I think it's possible for the good a person does to outweigh the bad.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with Einstein being either a theist or an atheist; it is simply that he does not deserve the universally heroic pedestal on which he has been so uncritically placed.

~David D.G.

I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limied minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the of the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.

So Einstein makes the same fallacy as many Creationists do when they use the analogy about finding a watch on a beach and saying there must be a designer. Einstein thought the universe looked designed and he wanted to understand it. He did not believe in a personal god, but he seemed to believed in some kind of Creator.

This is what made him reject Quantum Mechanics because it shoed an non-deterministic universe where events happened by chance. This went against his religious belief that the universe was must appear designed. He wanted to believe in an objective classical reality. So he fought QM and lost the battle (but he did further science a lot in his battles).

He also went against his earlier philosophy of logical positivism in which you only talk about what can be observed. He used this philosophy to dispel the idea of absolute time since it could not be observed. When he formulated general relativity, he abandoned logical positivism.

So Einstein was a great scientist, but he is also human. He fell away from an objective look at the universe to determine what it is and tried to discover what he wanted it to be. This is a great lesson for all scientists. The goal is to learn, not assert.

Any way on Christianity being responsible for science... no. The Greeks get to what we consider science first.

The reason it doesn't result in an industrial revolution? Social factors. Mainly slavery, low population densities and a lack of certain critical tech that could set off a boom.