Jul 7, 2023 (Medium.com)
Who actually was Albert Einstein?
Albert Einstein (1879–1955), the iconic physicist, forever altered our comprehension of the universe. His groundbreaking theory of relativity, unveiled in 1915, redefined gravity as the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy, supplanting Newtonian physics. Einstein’s genius transcended scientific realms, as he ardently championed civil rights, pacifism, and nuclear disarmament. A Nobel laureate for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, Einstein’s legacy endures as a monumental force, forever etching his name among the greatest scientific minds in history.
Scientist’s don’t usually believe in God. It’s estimated that over 48% of scientists are admitted atheists and the vast majority are still thinking through their positions on God.
Who (or what) is God?
Regardless of the highly debated and incredibly subjective nature of this question, the definition of God in this work will be a self-defined conceptual understanding of what we do and don’t know. A cause for knowledge and the lack thereof. Aka, everything.
Who was Einstein’s God?
When asked, Einstein was quoted saying
“I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist… 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”.
Who is Spinoza’s God? Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher who, simply put, described god as an infinite mass with infinite attributes, each of which being expressed throughout all of time. Basically, everything is a part of God.
To my understanding, Einstein believed in a God who crafted the universe because of the harmonious and logical way in which it was crafted.
Everything is perfect. It’s exactly how it should be. Nothing is out of place. There are no glitches, cracks, or broken parts. The universe is the way it should be.
This understanding goes both ways, which is why in this article I’d like to introduce a slightly different approach to facing God.
A New Religion
Instead of seeing the proof of God in what we can understand and in the “harmony of what exists” why not see it as the opposite. Entropy. Chaos. This slightly different but similar understanding of the universe leads us to the fundamental axiom of this new religion:
God is everything we don’t know.
Every breath you take where you continue to survive, that’s God. When you turn your lights off and fear what’s in the darkness before going to sleep, that’s God. When you take a risk into the unknown, that’s God.
This understanding of God is both logically tenable and morally beneficial as the existence of anything outside of the scope of our knowledge is, well, outside the scope of our knowledge. God eludes us as everything we don’t know. Every action we take starts an infinite chain of events stemming from that choice. When we do something good, it branches off into infinity, but we will never see the impact. This is God. All the good things that the people before you have done, That’s God.
This understanding forces us to generate a set of morals that will be beneficial both now and into the unforeseeable future.
We as people are naturally afraid of what we don’t know. This is a test of God. We are asked to face our fears and dive into the unknown and we are nearly always rewarded for doing so. By facing God, we discover and accrue more knowledge.
Faith is in and of itself the act of believing in that which you can’t see. God is therefore not just one thing, but everything that we can’t see. Forever eluding our knowledge.
I think I’ve hammered this point pretty heavily but I’d like to conclude with this. Einstein viewed God as the crafter of the universe because of the way it was structured. This idea suggests viewing God instead as the crafter of the universe because of everything we don’t understand about it. It is in letting go of our sense of control as people that we transcend that which limits us. By finding faith in what we can’t see, understand, or control, we free ourselves from the shackles of time itself.
As Aristotle once said,
The more you know, the more you know you don’t know
It is this principle that drives me to believe that as we become more intelligent, the axioms I have and will create may become a more understandable and applicable form of belief in God or ‘religion’ in the future.
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. Please leave as much scrutiny and criticism of this idea as possible in the comments. The more criticism the better. Have a wonderful day everyone.
“I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist… 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”.
AI Consultant and Researcher, Quant Fund Founder, and Forbes 100 Most Influential People of 2024.