Einstein A Go Go

Week Thirty – seven: Sunday 10 – Saturday 16 June

A friend, lovable, reliable Larry, had been down visiting from Scotland. He also had a Catholic upbringing, and the conversation turned to God and religion at one point. Not, I hope, because we are hung up and forever damned by our inculcation from birth till rebellious teen hood. No, while there are some shackles of Catholicism we may never shake free of - are there many/any Catholic reared men who can masturbate with a complete lack of guilt? - this conversation revolved around a newspaper article.

The newspaper article revolved around excerpts from the diaries of Albert Einstein, giving an insight into how he felt about God and religion. These are some of the things he had to say.

Asked at a dinner party (don't know if that is relevant) whether he was religious, he replied: "Yes, you can call it that. 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 we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious."

On another occasion, asked whether or not he believed in God, he said: "I am not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved in the question is too vast for our limited minds...That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being towards God. We see the universe marvellously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws."

He composed a personal creed at one point, its main tenet being: "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder or stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."

He gave atheists a harder time than he gave believers, on the basis that: "What separates me from most so-called-atheists is a feeling of utter humility towards the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos."

So say all of us. Amen.