In my early days of white-knuckle sobriety, I heard a guy in a 12-step meeting rattle off what he said was a quote from Albert Einstein, “Is the universe friendly?” It didn’t sound like Einstein to me, although, to be fair, the only Einstein quote I recognized was E=mc2. I liked the guy. He struck me as one of those guys who maybe dropped out of high school and made up for it later, reading the Big Book and the self-help manuals that were going around in the 1990s with a real thirst for knowledge.
Plus he had a lot of street smarts. You’ve got to respect a guy like that. And I really liked the quote. Is the universe friendly?
In fact I’ve been thinking about it ever since. At some point I finally decided, yes, according to the evidence available to me, it probably is. But the God of my understanding, to slightly misquote the 3rd Step of AA, is probably closest to another famous Einstein quote:
“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”
Full disclosure: I don’t pretend to be a deep thinker: I’m quoting here from Wikipedia, not some philosophical treatise. (Links and ellipsis are Wikipedia’s.) But how do I get from Einstein’s God to a friendly universe?
Well, I don’t want to go down a philosophical rabbit hole here, but I’ve come to believe God is present in all creation, a belief associated with something called panentheism — which is a combination of Greek word roots meaning all-in-God. (It’s not the same thing as pantheism, I need to add, which flat-out equates God with the universe. The distinction is important because panentheism is compatible with Christian theology, especially in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, in ways that pantheism is not.) I first came across the idea in an Orthodox space, as a matter of fact.
When Debi was writing training manuals for the Alaska Domestic Violence Network. I’d tag along with her when she’d fly in to roll out a new curriculum. While Debi was presenting, I’d go sightseeing. And I got fascinated with the blend of Russian Orthodox and Alaska Native spirituality I encountered in museums and bookstores around Anchorage. I wrote up what I learned (archived HERE), under the title “Alaskan Liturgical Hymns, Our Lady of Sitka and the ‘Presence of the Holy’ in Cross-town Traffic” for The Sleepy Weasel, our campus literary magazine back in Springfield.
So is the universe friendly? I doubt the question would have ever occurred to Father Zossima in Dovstovesky’s Brothers Karamazov, whom I quoted in the Sleepy Weasel: “the Word is for all: all creation, all creatures, every leaf, are striving towards the Lord, glorify the Lord, weep to Christ, and unknown to them, accomplish this.”
But, to make a long story short, after reading about the Russian Orthodox missionaries in Alaska and deciding it makes sense to believe the God of my understanding is present in all of God’s creation, I decided, yes, all creatures strive to glorify the Lord, each in their own way, and in some sense I can’t quite define, that means the universe is friendly.
But did Einstein really say what I heard around the 12-step tables?
The saying is often attributed to him. A quick Google search will confirm that. But Einstein is credited with saying a lot of things! It’s kind of like the famous quote from Abraham Lincoln. Or was it Aristotle? Not everything you read on the internet is necessarily true.
Turns out in this case it isn’t.
According to Wikiquote’s page on Albert Einstein, the quote is “misattributed” but common: “Multiple variants of this quote can be found,” and one of them is “repeated in a number of books from the 1980s and 90s.” For the record, Wikiquote adds:
And the idea that the most important question we can ask is “Is the universe friendly?” dates back much earlier than the attribution to Einstein, for example in Emil Carl Wilm’s 1912 book The Problem of Religion he includes the following footnote on p. 114: ‘A friend proposed to the late F. W. H. Myers the following question: “What is the thing which above all others you would like to know? If you could ask the Sphinx one question, and only one, what would the question be?” After a moment’s silence Myers replied: “I think it would be this: Is the universe friendly?”‘ [Links in the original.]
So, there. Now we know. A contributor to the social media Q&A website Quora, answered the same question. “No, he did not.” He added:
However, Einstein did famously say, “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.” This might be taken to suggest that Einstein believed something along the lines that the nature of reality is in its depths “friendly” to our attempts to understand it. In a related passage, he wrote, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility … The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.” [Ellipsis in the original.]
Actually, Einstein had a pretty nuanced attitude toward religion. He rejected the anthropomorphic God of the Hebrew Bible and Christianity. (He was raised in a secular Jewish family, but attended Catholic elementary schools in Munich.) After he won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921, he became something of a scientific rock star. And a quotable rock star who didn’t mind talking to the press at that! Nor did he mind talking about religion.
Wikipedia has a remarkable page headed “Religious and philosophical views of Albert Einstein.” It’s like an old-fashioned commonplace book, a collection of quotes and comments in no particular order. But with 105 footnotes. It’s like a gold mine if you’re looking for quotes. Here are a couple that I’d put in my commonplace book, if I kept one:
- [Einstein] refused the chance aspect of quantum theory, famously telling Niels Bohr: “God does not play dice with the universe.” In letters sent to physicist Max Born, Einstein revealed his belief in causal relationships: “You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I firmly believe, but I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to find. Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice game, although I am well aware that some of our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility.” [Links in the original.]
- “A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man’s actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God’s eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death. It is therefore easy to see why the churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees.”
- He told William Hermanns [German poet, friend of Einstein’s and author of Einstein and the Poet–In search of the Cosmic Man] in an interview that “God is a mystery. But a comprehensible mystery. I have nothing but awe when I observe the laws of nature. There are not laws without a lawgiver, but how does this lawgiver look? Certainly not like a man magnified.” He added with a smile “some centuries ago I would have been burned or hanged. Nonetheless, I would have been in good company.”
But my favorite of all is a letter Einstein wrote to a sixth-grade girl in 1936, shortly after he came to American and Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study. She asked him if scientists pray; his answer:
“Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural being. However, it must be admitted that our actual knowledge of these laws is only imperfect and fragmentary, so that, actually, the belief in the existence of basic all-embracing laws in nature also rests on a sort of faith. All the same this faith has been largely justified so far by the success of scientific research. But, on the other hand, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.”
I don’t have anything to add to that.
[Uplinked Dec. 6, 2024]
Ordinary Time 