The New Gospel

God does not play Dice.

What I am really interested in is knowing whether God could have created the world in a different way.  In other words, whether the requirement of logical simplicity admits a margin of freedom.

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 a different question whether belief in a personal God should be contested … I myself would never engage in such a task.  For such a belief seems to me preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook of life, and I wonder whether one can ever successfully render to the majority of mankind a more sublime means in order to satisfy its metaphysical needs.

To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.  But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal.  For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress.

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated.  I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.  If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

For me the cognitive basis [of loving your enemy] is the trust in an unrestricted causality: “I cannot hate him, because he must do what he does.” 

This conviction of determinism [which Einstein held to be true] is a perpetual breeder of tolerance, for it does not allow us to take ourselves too seriously. 

A human being is a part of the universe, a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.  In this sense [only] I am religious.  To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages.  This child knows that someone must have written these books.  It does not know how … The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books, but doesn’t know what it is.  

If one considers … only “dimensionless” constants [including the speed of light properly unitized] … that occur in the basic equations of physics … I would like to state a proposition that at present cannot be based upon anything more than a faith in simplicity, i.e., intelligibility, of nature: there are no arbitrary constants of this kind.  That is to say, nature is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that within these laws only rationally, completely determined constants occur.

One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike — yet it is the most precious thing we have.

I see a pattern.  But my imagination cannot picture the maker of that pattern.  I see the clock.  But I cannot envisage the clockmaker.  The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions.  How can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?