Up@dawn 2.0

Saturday, May 24, 2025

Superman with a Plan

Deists' vision of a god who's left the building was decidedly not Einstein's god...

"...pantheism is often confused with more traditional creeds that accept some kind of Creator. The easiest mistake to make is to conflate pantheism with Deism. Deism rose to prominence during the Age of Enlightenment as a kind of comforting compromise that made Christian faith compatible with the more critical modern mentality. Easily mocked ideas like miracles, divine revelation, and the literal truth of the Bible were dismissed in deference to the discoveries of science. But the basic belief persisted that a Creator God fashioned our universe with a purpose and a plan. From the Deist perspective, the orderly laws of physical existence and the miraculous organization of living beings provided incontrovertible evidence for God’s existence and His goodness.134 You don’t hear the word Deism much these days, but the idea lives on among its intellectual descendants: creationism and intelligent design.

Although Einstein was often accused of atheism, it doesn’t seem like anyone thought of him as a Deist during his own lifetime. But over the last couple of decades, this has become the dominant narrative defining his spirituality. One biographer has suggested that Einstein “settled into a deism” in later life and embraced a “middle-age deistic faith.”135 Time magazine, celebrating Einstein as its “Person of the Century,” hailed him as “a philosopher with faith both in science and in the beauty of God’s handiwork.”136 And Einstein has even been (mis)quoted as saying, “I believe in God; I have a very deep faith.… There’s a spirit manifest in the laws of the universe… and to me that explains my faith in a Creator and a faith in God.”"

"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/0l7smwE

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