dubiousmerchant reblogged your quote: You can’t just say there’s a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children…
I love Stephen Fry. And I wish he’d given more space to the things we don’t understand. Because without those—those mysteries—we wouldn’t have learned anything. Without God, without that very childish and human urge to prove our elders wrong and say “Ha!”, there is no invention, no ingenuity.
Einstein always believed in God. He knew what he didn’t know, which was a LOT. That’s what God is, has always been, and always will be. So pardon me, thinkers, for believing in something bigger and more than any of us will ever be. I still believe on Superman, too.
You’re right, kind of. Einstein’s “God,” though, is radically different from the traditional theistic notion of the word.
For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God’s existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the world was comprehensible, that it followed laws, was worthy of awe.
— TIME
Here are a few things Einstein has said about believing in God:
“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.”
“I’m absolutely not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. […] We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”
“I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”
“My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality.”
And, finally:
“The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion.
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms — it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”
I can see little difference between your words, Einstein’s, and those, again, of Stephen Fry:
The wonder of nature must be taken in its totality. And it is a wonderful thing, it is absolutely marvelous. And the idea that an ‘atheist’—or ‘humanist’ if you want to put it that way—doesn’t marvel and wonder at reality, at the way things are, is nonsensical.
I think we’re all talking about mystery here. We’re all enthralled with the amazing, inconceivable secrets of life, of the universe. We’re all in agreement that there is indeed something bigger and more than any of us will ever be — or ever come close to understanding.
But to name this mystery ‘God?’ This is no God any theist will recognize. God is not essential to humility and awe.
