Every once in a while, some sciencey YouTuber posts a video about a new scientific discovery that casts doubt on Einstein’s theory of relativity. I’ve no idea whether any of these have validity, but instead I want to ask whether scientific progress has refuted his view of God – that is to say his theology rather than his relativity.
Although Einstein liked to play around with theological language in his conversation (“God does not play dice with the Universe” etc), he was not a theist. As Wikipedia states:
Albert Einstein stated “I believe in Spinoza’s God”. He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naïve.
I’m not sure how closely his views actually aligned with Spinoza’s, but:
According to Spinoza, God is the natural world. Spinoza concludes that God is the substance comprising the universe; that God exists in itself, not outside of the universe; and that the universe exists as it does from necessity, not because of a divine theological reason or will.
It’s hard to see how this view differs from saying that the Universe is simply a brute fact, but even if one calls it pantheism, or in more modern thought “panpsychism,” it seems that God is both the cause and the effect of scientific laws. If “he does not concern himself with fates and actions of human beings,” we must suppose that the apparently complicated elements of the Universe, such as living things, are just as fortuitously emergent from those laws as gravity.
The logic of the position that God does not will or purpose as a conscious Being is that something like Darwinian evolution operates through the chance interactions of the laws that exist (God being those laws, like some vast differential equation). If God just is the cosmos, than teleology is out of the window.
From the very outset this sounds incoherent to me. What is it that initiates change in this cosmic god, especially in the early days when Einstein believed in a static, eternal universe? And when Einstein came to accept the Big Bang, how does he explain his God’s coming into existence? For many decades these have not been interesting questions to a scientific establishment wedded to atheist materialism.
Now, however, the demise of the New Atheism has seen us headed quite a way down the road to a softer view of reality. In particular, as Intelligent Design proponents have noted, their sustained critique of Neodarwinism has been winning wider and more open agreement. Design, apparent at every level from the DNA code to the balance of the biosphere, and from Precambrian to modern times, can no longer be adequately explained by Darwinian mechanisms, and there still aren’t any plausible naturalistic alternatives. More and more biologists (and others) are being outspoken in their insistence on the reality of teleology, and no materialistic explanations of teleology get off the ground.
That, of course, is before we address the big mysteries such as the origin of cosmic fine-tuning, the origin of life, and the origin of human consciousness, plus all the other levels of “bespoke tailoring” in cosmology, chemistry and so on that writers like Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards in Privileged Planet, and Michael Denton in a whole series of books, have explored.
My point is that from the purely scientific viewpoint, leaving out entirely the human concerns of religion that Einstein saw as naive, at every level the cosmos looks to be carefully crafted for life (which need not exclude other purposes, of course). And living things themselves show every appearance of careful craftsmanship too, as even the atheists admit, both for their own success, and in their sum for the long-term success of a vibrant biosphere over 3 billion years. With the empirical failure of Darwinian evolution and its epicycles, these constantly repeated biological successes lack adequate explanation. That is even more the case when we consider so many optimized systems (when evolution was supposed to be a tinkerer), widespread convergence (when evolution was supposed to be arbitrary), novel genes in every newly sequenced genome (when evolution predicted only step-wise changes), and the ridiculous levels of complexity evidenced as the requirement for every life-form, even in Darwin’s warm little pond.
For all this, Einstein’s God has absolutely no explanatory power whatsoever. And neither does Spinoza’s God, for the only reply he would seem to have to the cry that “Everything in creation screams out reason and will,” would be, “It just has to be that way from necessity.” And I suppose it is conceivable that the world in all its glory simply is a brute fact, which is no more explicable by being Spinoza’s God than by being the atheists’ all-possible Multiverse, or any other theory. A brute fact is just a brute fact, but only brute beasts accept them passively.
The rising star of explanations amongst backsliding materialists is panpsychism, the belief that every part of the universe has a little bit of consciousness that coalesces into the greater purposes we see. And that sounds as clever as Einstein’s impersonal deity until you ask the question of why these atomic or subatomic mindlets should ever choose to combine into grand and clever plans like the vocal repertoire of a songbird, the interdependence of ecosystems or the sexual life of the camel (which is stranger than everyone thinks). Modern though it is, panpsychism makes no more sense than Democritus’s explanations of atoms coming together by chance. You can’t make a wit from two half-wits.
So in my view, the case for the biblical God has never been stronger, not least because that belief has survived the rise and fall of its strongest opponent, naturalistic materialism. Never have we been able to say with such certainty, from observing the natural world, that there is a God “from whom all life,/ And all true gladness springs,/ Whose love and care shine everywhere/ Among earth’s common things.” We see care, and not merely differential equations, everywhere we look – even, paradoxically, in the way living things deal with adversity. And from observing that care in any and every particular instance (Jesus chose the lily of the field and the common sparrow), it is a very small step to dismissing Albert Einstein’s unbelief “in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings” as hopelessly naive.
Perhaps he just spent too much time doing maths instead of playing Bach on his violin.
