popsi:
1. The existence of G-d is not a scientific question. It is not a mathematical question either. It is a question about fact. There is an old rule – לא ראינו אינו ראיה. Not having found something does not mean it does not exist. It just means you have not found it. There is the old joke about the fellow looking at night frantically on a street corner for something. His friend sees him searching the ground there for something and offers to help. He stated he lost a 20 dollar bill. The friend asked him where he was when he lost it. He responded that he was across the street. So he asked why he doesn’t look there. He responded that there is a street light here, not there. Not finding does not indicate fact. Science can find a lot. But it does not know everything.
2. There are other factors in the “success” of a society other than the perception of morality. We can easily get into existential morality, which refers to the absolute, or the relative morality meaning that we consider it to be. The latter allows Islam to lay claim to morality. My protest to that is that it has no real deity or higher power as a source for anything. It is an ideology, not a religion. So it is a purely animal instinct based religion, and its form of “morality” is only a borrowed word. Furthermore, true success of society is its ability to remain intact for long times. There have been empires throughout history that lasted a good many years. But they imploded, died out, or were conquered. We can look with a narrow scope at what science tells us. It did not tell us that the WTC would be downed in a single day.
3. Mostly in agreement. I doubt that he was busy with opinions about Judaism or Jews.
4. I am not an apologist for Einstein. He was severely undereducated about certain things, hence his opinions about them do not impress me. I did not see any quotes from him that were offensive, just ignorant. Not worse than I would expect to hear from someone who never learned anything about true Yiddishkeit. It is reported that he did spend bits of time in his youth learning Chumash and Talmud. I do not know what experience he had with that learning. It was during the part of his life when he was known as “slow”. In today’s yeshivos, he would have been remanded to a class where little teaching of much substance occurs, or things would be simplified to where no thinking was expected or demanded. For someone capable of far more deep thinking, this might well have been a painful experience, and his finding these studies uncomfortable makes sense. It is speculative, but we do not know much more about that.