Christian Essays

If you were able to ask a room full of people what certain words meant, you would find that there were many different understandings about each word you presented.
For example “cup”. As soon as the word is sounded, the imagination finds a definition. The “cup” you thought of might be floral and delicate, or white and ornate with a large handle, or plain, or solid, or a modern thing with a small handle. Or you might think of a beer mug, or a metal cup, or something made of pewter. There are thousands of different options.
When one listens to scientists talking about mysteries, they quite often use the word “God” to summarise the unknown. Stephen Hawking did this, and so did Einstein. In fact Einstein once said “God does not play dice with the universe”. Just what, exactly, did he mean when he used the word “God”?

Albert Einstein was born in 1879 of German Jewish parents. He was not brought up in the Jewish faith, but was instead sent to a nearby Catholic elementary school in Munich, and then to the local high school. He was described as a rather slow and dreamy student, who was bored with non-scientific subjects – not an outstanding prospect for someone who went on to be one of the most brilliant thinkers in recent history!
At age 11 he went through a religious phase, in which he ate no pork, and composed songs to God, which he sang to himself on the way to scjhool. From age 12 on he read popular books on science, taught himself algebra, geometry and calculus, and studied Immanuel Kant’s anti-theistic (anti-God) ‘Critique of Pure Reason’.
Concerning this time of life, Albert later wrote “Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true . . .”
Albert went on to achieve outstanding success in studies on light, theoretical physics, the size of atoms, Brownian motion and relativity. There has never been a dispute over his genius, but there has been debate over his spiritual views.
His understanding of God is an interesting subject. Despite the advantage of having access to the Bible from an early age, he chose rather to rely on his intellect for understanding. He wrote “I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts.”
By these words Albert made it clear that he did not believe in (a) a personal God, (b) a God who treated humans as a Father would his children, (c) A God who raises the dead. He considered those who believed these things to be either feeble-minded, or bound by fear, or arrogant.
It is thus clear that when Albert said the word “God” he was not referring to the God as depicted in the Bible, but to something like “rationality in the universe.” Albert’s definition of “God” was “a deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe . . .”
Compare this with the Bible definition of “God” : Father, Creator, Judge, Lawgiver and Saviour. As to his denial of life after death, Albert had to reject the life, miracles, words, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. There is no way the definition which Albert attaches to the word “God” can be harmonised with the definition which the Bible attaches to it. This, logically, leads us to the conclusion that, despite his intelligence and outstanding achievements, Einstein could not have found what the Bible calls a “saving faith”.
It is therefore incorrect for Christians, as they sometimes do, to claim that Einstein was a Christian, since the definition which he attached to the word “God” was at complete variance to that which the Bible uses. One cannot have it both ways.