{"id":2553,"date":"2012-10-08T14:22:42","date_gmt":"2012-10-08T18:22:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/peterenns\/?p=2553"},"modified":"2012-10-08T14:22:42","modified_gmt":"2012-10-08T18:22:42","slug":"einstein-god-is-good-at-math-but-the-bible-is-pretty-childish-and-what-i-would-say-to-him-about-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/peterenns\/2012\/10\/einstein-god-is-good-at-math-but-the-bible-is-pretty-childish-and-what-i-would-say-to-him-about-that\/","title":{"rendered":"Einstein: God is Good at Math, but the Bible is “Pretty Childish” (and what I would say to him about that)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>In yesterday\u2019s Atlantic, a story appeared about a letter Albert Einstein wrote<\/a>, now up for auction, wherein he expressed himself on his religious beliefs. To\u00a0summarize: God as a super mind behind the\u00a0universe, thumbs up; the Bible, well\u2026 not so much.<\/p>\n

The bidding started at $3,000,000 (or roughly what Alex Rodriguez makes hitting .133 in an average postseason, but I digress).<\/p>\n

The author of the article, Rebecca J. Rosen, offers the following as a key passage:<\/p>\n

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses<\/strong>, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish<\/strong>. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Translation: The Bible was written a long time ago in a pre-scientific era and so talks about the world in a way that we today cannot accept as anything but legends. You can interpret the Bible as creatively and subtly as you want, and the problem won\u2019t go away, mainly because your \u201cinterpretations\u201d leave the texts far behind.<\/p>\n

Einstein felt that all religion made a caricature of God by placing upon God \u201cchildish analogies\u201d of human culture, such as God as father (or king, or shepherd, or anything else). Even the word \u201cGod\u201d is a problem, as we saw above. Rosen explains:<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not, however, because Einstein rejected the notion of God, but because he took the idea of God very seriously<\/strong>, elevating it\u00a0above\u00a0a religious conception to a mathematical one. To Einstein, the elegance of the phsyics [sic] guiding the universe were God\u2019s handiwork, the mark not of a humanlike being that maintains control over the world, but of a divine beauty in nature\u2019s laws.<\/em><\/p>\n

Another way of putting it is that\u00a0the\u00a0Bible can\u2019t actually \u201ccontain\u201d God; it simply gives us that which reflects ancient ways of thinking and knowing<\/a>. Or to put it in Freudian language (as Einstein did), our God-talk is intellectual \u201cprops\u201d and \u201crationalization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Einstein expresses what God is like as follows:<\/p>\n

Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.<\/em><\/p>\n

If Einstein were alive and sitting here next to me, this is what I\u2019d say:<\/p>\n

\u201cAl (if I may), thanks for sharing your thoughts with me, and may I say you speak perfect accent without the slightest\"\"<\/a> hint of English (haha). No, but seriously, you put your finger on\u00a0something\u00a0that is\u00a0unquestionably\u00a0true: the Bible reflects how ancient cultures thought. And yes, God is not fully contained in a book.<\/p>\n

But let me push back a bit with a paradox that gets at the heart of at least Christianity (and probably Judaism, but I\u2019ll let you handle that for yourself). We believe that your\u00a0\u00fcber\u00a0<\/strong>math geek God, the great mind that makes the universe run, the \u2018force\u2019 as you call it that lies behind the comprehensible world, also subjected himself to human weakness, which is the thing you\u00a0have\u00a0such a problem with.<\/p>\n

Yes, God-talk and Bible are an \u201cexpression and product of human weaknesses,\u201d as you put it, but maybe this is a paradox God likes to humble all of us\u2013even people like you who have figured out that gravity bends light or time slows down the faster you go.<\/p>\n

And, by the way, when you call God a \u2018force\u2019 who is really good at math, maybe for God<\/em> that is also a \u2018childish analogy\u2019 God is cutting you some slack over, but we can talk about that next time.\u201d<\/p>\n

At this point I\u00a0fantasize\u00a0that Einstein would sit there agape, wondering how he could have missed such a profound yet obvious problem with his own theory (that God wouldn\u2019t possibly be caught dead mingling with people). He would then beg me to stay and speak with him longer, hanging on my every word like Philip\u2019s Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8).<\/p>\n

But I digress, again.\u00a0The larger point here is this: maybe it\u2019s not an either\/or.<\/p>\n

As dumb as it sounds, maybe God can be that way out there incomprehensible force or whatever and still\u00a0participate\u00a0in human weakness<\/a>. Maybe God likes it that way. Maybe the childish stories of the Bible show that. Maybe.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t solve everything, but at least it\u2019s a place to start. If anything, at least in my private world, I would have schooled Einstein.<\/p>\n

[By the way, if anyone is looking for a good\u00a0biography\u00a0of Einstein, a read Walter Isaacson\u2019s\u00a0Einstein: His Life and Universe<\/a>\"\"\u00a0a couple fo years ago and learned much about Einstein the man.]
\n<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In yesterday\u2019s Atlantic, a story appeared about a letter Albert Einstein wrote, now up for auction, wherein he expressed himself on his religious beliefs. To\u00a0summarize: God as a super mind behind the\u00a0universe, thumbs up; the Bible, well\u2026 not so much. The bidding started at $3,000,000 (or roughly what Alex Rodriguez makes hitting .133 in an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":2554,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[218,116,118,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-albert-einstein","category-bible","category-bible-as-story","category-god"],"yoast_head":"\nEinstein: God is Good at Math, but the Bible is "Pretty Childish" (and what I would say to him about that)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In yesterday's Atlantic, a story appeared about a letter Albert Einstein wrote, now up for auction, wherein he expressed himself on his religious beliefs.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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