The Planet You Inherit by Larry L. Rasmussen

Author:Larry L. Rasmussen [Rasmussen, Larry L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE UNCONTAINED GOD

October 1, 2020

Dear Martín Theo,

I’ve been reading Einstein. I’m surprised to hear so much God-talk since I had physicists pegged as agnostics and atheists. Another stereotype to drop.

Einstein rejected a personal God of rewards and punishments who intervened in life, and he had little time for rituals and authorities (including authorities of most any kind). He did align with Spinoza’s God, which means he was forever attracted to the awe-inspiring beauty, rationality, and unity of nature’s laws.

Einstein’s cited often for what he said over and over: “God does not play dice with the universe.” Things aren’t random. Chance doesn’t rule. And he always deflected the charge that he was an atheist: “There are people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.”

Einstein tapped into one of the great religious traditions—mysticism. Sometimes he identified it as such. Mystery, he said, was “the cradle of all true art and science,” and a person “to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.” For him, being religious meant sensing something beyond, “something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly.” In that sense of religion as mystery, he defined himself as “a devoutly religious man.”

To say “that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp” is to hint at an uncontained God. When we acknowledge there is something our minds cannot grasp, we realize God reaches us only on the slant. God arrives obliquely.

When he spoke at Union Seminary in 1940, Einstein said that science could be pursued only by people who aspired to understand the objective truth of material reality. The “source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion.” Yet it was Einstein’s conclusion that made front-page news the next day: “The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

Why do I bring up Einstein? I’m not altogether sure, other than I’m fascinated with his God, his physics, and his metaphysics.

Look at subatomic, atomic, and molecular structure. Well, you can’t look—atoms and molecules are so tiny they make itsy-bitsy seem obese.

But the beauty of science and technology is that they extend our senses.

They let me know that when I drink a glass of water, as I’m doing right now, a trillion trillion water molecules slide down my throat. And your next breath takes in a billion trillion molecules of air. The number of molecules in your body is roughly one followed by twenty-eight zeros. That’s a million times the number of stars in the visible universe!

So little and unimaginably numerous! That’s the substructure of everything everywhere and everywhen. “As little, so big,” from the atom to the Milky Way and immensities beyond.

Why not put “as little, so big” on your backpack? Your friends might think “little” and “big”

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