Pater Omnipotentem
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own – a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature. – Albert Einstein, column for The New York Times, Nov. 9, 1930 (reprinted in The New York Times obituary, April 19, 1955)
Three separate points, each of them worth considerable thought:
- God is not a tinpot Hitler, our worst authoritarian impulses writ large. (Nor, by the way, is he a purveyor of cheap parlor tricks, limited in power to what we can imagine.)
- Our souls don’t survive our death. As Einstein wrote elsewhere, there isn’t any such thing as a soul, separate from the body. We’re smart enough to figure out the implication: this is the only life we’re ever going to get, so we’d better make the most of it.
- The best scripture is written in our understanding of nature. Though our understanding (and therefore the truth of our current scripture) is dim and partial, we keep getting better at it.
Not a bad credo. Einstein’s god is a true rex tremendae majestatis, a god cujus regni non erit finis.