Einstein versus the Atheists

Since I first got into this fight, I have noticed that the God-hating faction don't actually want Christians to be reasonable or accommodating. They want to make them into mirror-images of themselves – dogmatic, intolerant, rigid and filled with spiteful scorn for their opponents. I decline, and what do I get in return? Concessions? No, bigger, deeper buckets of slime than if I had been some sort of Elmer Gantry.

 

So they seldom if ever notice any of my mollifying points. No, I am not a Bible literalist. No, the Bible is not a Christian Koran and is not the unmediated word of God, but requires careful interpretation. Yes, I accept that religious believers have done terrible things in the name of God, and only ask in return that Atheists accept that Atheists have done terrible things  in the name of their various utopian, Godless faiths.

 

Finally, I concede that reason and science cannot take any informed person further than agnosticism – a reasonable recognition that we simply do not know enough to know if there is a God or not.

 

I say, to the dismay of some believers and the bafflement of almost all the Godless, that belief in God is a choice. I choose to believe, for reasons I have often given and will happily give again, most fundamentally that I wish to live in an ordered and purposeful universe, rather than to exist in a meaningless, random and pointless chaos in which my life and actions  have no meaning beyond their immediate and observable effects.   But I add that belief that there is no God is, equally, a choice.

 

 

Thoughtful atheists recognise this. But the new breed, of enraged and furious anti-theists, do not. As in the case of the absurd Mr 'Bunker', they deny that there is a choice (always the mark of a totalitarian , which is also the mark of someone who hasn't really grown up –  an autocrat is, in many ways, just an enormous and lethal spoiled child, with armies at his command, and dungeons and torture chambers and concentration camps at his disposal).

 

So when I mentioned Einstein in passing yesterday, I did so to reinforce this position. I did not say (for I know it is not the case) that Albert Einstein was a religious believer.  That is an entirely separate question. I know perfectly well that I could never persuade someone who didn't *want* to believe in God to do so. I'm not interested in trying. And I recognise that there is a large, further step after that, in the adoption of the Christian faith trather than any other. There is no point at all in debating that with someone who is an atheist .

 

That is why I fight on ground where reason and facts can be deployed, and insist that belief in God, or belief in No God is and probably always will be a matter of choice. Atheists might be right. I concede it. I might be right. They won't concede it. Why this inequality? Is there any justification for the Atheist certainty, that theirs is the default position of truth and reason? No. If there were, Einstein would presumably have discovered it.

 

I am very interested as to why the other side so very much want their belief to be considered obligatory. But it also makes me very suspicious of them.

 

But if Albert Einstein was not a religious believer (and he wasn't), was he then an atheist or an anti-theist? I do not think so. Read the following:

 

"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly."

(Dukas and Hoffman 'Albert Einstein, the Human Side' Princeton UP, 1981 p.43)

 

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."

(Cable reply to Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein's (Institutional Synagogue in New York) question to Einstein, "Do you believe in God?". )

 

"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views."

(Quoted by Prinz Hubertus zu Lowenstein, Towards the Further Shore: An Autobiography (Victor Gollancz, London, 1968), p. 156.)

 

 

 

"I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. 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 arrangements of the books, but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."

(G. S. Viereck, Glimpses of the Great (Macauley, New York, 1930), quoted by D. Brian, Einstein: A Life , p. 186. )

 

I think that's pretty clear, in showing what Einstein *wasn't*, though less clear in showing what he *was*. Though of course if anyone knows - and can show -  that these quotations are false or misrepresented, then I shall of course have to withdraw.  If Albert Einstein could see that, why is Mr 'Bunker' so stuck? What special knowledge does he possess, which Albert Einstein did not, which makes it 'impossible' as he repeatedly says , for him to believe in any kind of deity ( 'or gods' as he so childishly adds on every occasion).

 

There remains a sort of belief among the less well-educated atheists that 'science' is incompatible with religious belief. I don't think Albert Einstein thought it was.  The Revd Dr John Polkinghorne, former Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge, certainly doesn't. And as I think John Lennox says, it is quite funny that atheists, who get very exercised over Christians who believe in the Virgin Birth of Christ , seem quite happy to believe in the Virgin Birth of the Universe, out of nothing at all, by nothing at all.

 

Please get it straight, Oh Godless ones. You have no more right to be dogmatic than I do – that's all I'm saying. Once that's accepted, we can have the real argument about why they are so frantically, angrily anxious that there should be no God. I have my theories about that. That really, really makes them cross, because deep down they know perfectly well that it is the whole point.