Does Einstein Know Everything?

As people like Stephen Hawking and company have proven, the world's brainiacs might still be ignorant about God

A few weeks ago, a friend sent me an article in which Einstein was allegedly critical about whether or not God existed. It is probably a known fact that he is not too convinced of the Divine Existence and my friend was either goading me for a response or simply being cheeky. 

Whatever his intentions were, I thought long about how I should respond or whether I should just let the subject slide. I decided that standing up for God was an important part of being Christian.

So I drafted and then sent my reply to him, which I have reproduced below...

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While I’m not sure the purpose of sending this article to me but I suppose you’re looking for a response from me as to what I think about it. After all, if the world’s most renowned scientist thinks there is no God, then surely there mustn’t be.

Just as we admire Einstein for being such a smart person, we aren’t and shouldn’t necessarily be foolish enough to then suggest that everything he says, he thinks, he opines would be the truths of the world. He is, after all, a human being and as such, he is no less flawed and errant than you and I are.

Even so, perhaps you should take a look at the book written by George Sylvester Viereck, a fellow German who was an anti-war activist who detested the outbreak of the Second World War. Being German born and seen to be anti-war meant that he was viewed with distrust and as a result, he was jailed in America in 1942 on the suspicion that he was a German sympathiser and propagandist. Summarily he was accused of treason and because he wrote articles that were against war, he was then kicked out of the American Author’s League.

Viereck had known Einstein then and he wrote a book that covered an interview he did with him. In the book entitled, “Glimpses of the Great,” (Duckworth, 1930; pages 372-373), Viereck asked the scientist if he could, as a man, understand the nature of God. His response was lengthy but explorative and revealing (my emphasis in bold):

“Your question [about God] is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe.”

And Einstein is right. The issue about God or even His creations is often far beyond the ability of the human mind to understand but because of the human weakness – that inability to explain sufficiently or even scientifically – we have tended to take the liberal view that He, therefore, cannot possibly be explained. The liberalism of our education encourages us to compliment the powers of Nature in deference to the existence of God and if the debate gets too hot, the best thing to say is, “it’s too complex.”

Scientists are inclined to believe themselves because they are innately capable of technical discourses that subsume their ability to understand things beyond the mere minds of mere mortals. But the problem becomes significant when we begin to laud their talents and knowledgeability to the extent that we believe in everything they see, feel, believe or accept. Thereby we create gods unto our own mankind.

In Viereck’s interview, Einstein’s explanation of the complexity in understand God is actually quite admirable. He continues (my emphasis in bold, again):

“We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.

“That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvellously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.”

Einstein acknowledges the vast complexities involved in order that we understand God but herein lies the human problem – why do we have to understand anything and everything in order to believe in it? In Christian circles, we call it faith; or the willingness to trust without seeing.

We know there is a heaven though we don’t see it yet. We know to be good to strangers even if we have not met them yet. We know to act properly in public even though we have no idea what we will encounter then. Faith empowers Christians to believe in a God that most of us have not and will never see in our mortal lives and it is very often said that faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains. As Jesus was the One who said that, life has dealt us many truly occurring experiences that this is correct and provable as and when it occurs.

The evolution of scientific thinking over the centuries has shaped the thinking mind to only believe that they can see. The whole idea of proving a hypothesis is firmly based on this approach and ironically was used as the basis to disprove Darwinism. The fact is, in science, someone may postulate and conceive a hypothesis. This hypothesis is then tested using the claimed environment settings and parameters in order to replicate the phenomenon. The result can either be yes or no. There is no faith involved; just what one either sees or does not see. Simple but flawed because while this applies to life in this world, it does not explain the Creator Himself who is beyond the limited realms of science.

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But then, what is science if not knowledge that we know and not knowledge we do not know? Science is principally an extraction of the things around us, explained in words and proven mathematically or “scientifically” but we cannot divorce what is naturally inspired from the One who created that Nature in the first place. Science is only what we know, which is why it is never a constant but a socially-inspired paradigm first put forward by the great scientific philosopher, Thomas Kuhn. It was he who postulated that science is predicated by our limited expanse to understand. 

Unfortunately in this increasingly rebellious world we live in, liberalists cut to the chase and simply say that what can’t be proven by science cannot exist, which is where the irony all comes from. Science cannot even prove itself. Science is not stable because when a new paradigm exists, the old theories are simply banished.

Consider this Kuhnsian logic for a moment:

A long time ago, thalidomide was an accepted pain killing drug and was the darling of the medical industry until it could then be proven years later to be responsible for babies born without limbs. From thereon, it was banished from the medical vernacular. 

White bread was once upon a time the preferred choice until science decided that it was “too processed” and not “natural enough,” which is where wholemeal became the appropriate substitute. Today everyone says a healthy bread is a wholemeal BROWN bread.

But before we move on, the Kuhnsian Law of the Paradigm gets even more complicated. Here is an example:

Moons ago, everyone says eggs are great for health. Then decades later, they tell us it’s harmful and so we divorce the yolk from the egg white. But lo and behold, they now tell us that, after all the brouhaha, eggs are actually not too shabby. If you must, you could apply that to paracetamol, caffeine, chocolate and so on.

The point of this persuasion of thought is simple – science basically doesn’t have the wherewithal to explain everything. It cannot even if it tries for the next hundred odd years. It seeks to vainly disprove or prove God but it cannot because God is far beyond the reach of even the most advanced scientific reform. 

God chooses in His Own Time to reveal what He wants man to know. If He doesn’t, then that bit of science will stay locked forever.

Indeed there are many things in the Bible that Christians do not understand and you can go apeshit over it, trying to decipher, trying to analyse, trying to figure out how they work in logic. 

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Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood for example. Moses whose life was supposedly entangled with Thutmoses III and whose adopted mother, Hapshetsut, was only recently discovered mummified and you can read about it in Discovery News. Daniel who was the trusted advisor to Darius II. All these and many more seem to be taking forever for historians, archaeologists and even Christian scientists to “prove” scientifically.

But here’s the trick – devout Christians don’t need worldly proof for any of these. We know they exist because God says so. And what we read in the Bible, it is God’s inerrant Word. So, yes, Moses was and remains the stepbrother to Thutmoses III. Both were children who grew up together. And Hapshetsus was also Thutmoses III’s aunt and regent and it was she who picked Moses up from the reedy River Nile. Daniel did exist and was a loyal advisor to the all-conquering Darius II. And he did get thrown into the lions' den and survived. Noah’s Ark does exist and in fact, it has already been discovered on the slope of Mount Ararat. The parting of the sea did take place if only people would want to look because underneath that sea are wheels belonging to the chariots of the Pharaoh’s Egyptian army in pursuit that have been discovered but largely ignored by the leftist liberal mainstream media.

Now here’s some interesting irony for you:

The author who best biographed the late and irascible Steve Jobs had also written a book on the great Einstein. Called “Einstein and Faith” (appeared in Time magazine, April 5 2007, page 47), Isaacson said that the scientist was prone to denigrate disbelievers more than he would the faithful. In a correspondence, Einstein wrote:

“The fanatical atheists… are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains, which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who – in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium of the people’ – cannot bear the music of the spheres.”

Max Jammer in “Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology” (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002) added that though he did not subscribe to a personal God, he would never want to challenge those whose belief and faith are vested upon God simply because, “such a belief seems to me, preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook.”

Wise, if you ask me.

As a lasting point, might I recall Viereck in his interview of Einstein, in which he also asked the latter if he accepted the historical existence of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. His answer:

“Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.” 

I hope that by this point, you don't have any further articles to send to me, telling me that God does not exist.