Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
God
- Mother
Teresa: "We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and
restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass - grows
in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence...We need
silence to be able to touch souls."
- Albert Einstein, upon being asked if he believed in God by Rabbi Herbert
Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogue, New York, April 24, 1921, Einstein: The Life
and Times, Ronald W. Clark, page 502: "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."
- Einstein's speech, My Credo, to the German League of Human Rights,
Berlin, autumn 1932, Einstein: A Life in Science, Michael White and John Gribbin,
page 262: "Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us
appears here involuntary and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing the whys and the
wherefore. In our daily lives we only feel that man is here for the sake of others, for
those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own."
... "The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the
mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all
serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not
dead, then at least blind. 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 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."
- Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen
Dukas (Einstein's secretary) and Banesh Hoffman: "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."
- Einstein: A Life, Denis Brian, page 206: Coughlin [of the
Los Angeles tabloid Illustrated Daily News, in hot pursuit of asking Einstein a
provocative, headline-inducing question] found the right moment while tailing the car that
was speeding the couple [the Einsteins] north on the coast road to Pasadena. It had
stopped to let Einstein stroll over to a small headland known as Sunset Cliffs, where he
stood gazing at the sea and sky. Seizing the moment, Coughlin leaped from his car, the
question on his lips, followed by Spang, his camera at the ready. "Doctor,"
Coughlin said, "is there a God?" Einstein stared at the water's edge some twenty
feet below, then turned to his questioner. Coughlin later wrote: "There were tears in
his eyes, and he was sniffing. Spang shot the picture as Einstein was hustled away before
he could answer me. "Well," I said, "the way he reacted, he believes in
God. Did you ever see such an emotional face?" Spang was standing on the edge of the
headland, where the great scientist had stood. He looked down, then called me: "Come
over here." I looked down and there, caught against the base of the little cliff, was
a shark that must have been dead in the hot sun for several days. "Make anybody
cry," Spang said."
- Galileo, quoted by Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His
Scientific Biography: "I do not think it is necessary to
believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us
to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain
through them."
- Michael Shermer: "The first-cause and prime-mover argument,
brilliantly proffered by St. Thomas Aquinas in the fourteenth century (and brilliantly
refuted by David Hume in the eighteenth century), is easily turned aside with just one
more question: Who or what caused and moved God?"
- Lancelot Hogben, Mathematics, the Mirror of Civilisation: "Diderot
was staying at the Russian court, where his elegant flippancy was entertaining the
nobility. Fearing that the faith of her retainers was at stake, the Tsaritsa commissioned
Euler, the most distinguished mathematician of the time, to debate with Diderot in public.
Diderot was informed that a mathematician had established a proof of the existence of God.
He was summoned to court without being told the name of his opponent. Before the assembled
court, Euler accosted him with the following pronouncement, which was uttered with due
gravity: a + bn/n
= x, donc Dieu existe repondez! Algebra was Arabic to Diderot. Unfortunately
he did not realize that was the trouble. Had he realized that algebra is just a
language in which we describe the sizes of things in contrast to the ordinary
languages which we use to describe the sorts of things in the world, he
would have asked Euler to translate the first half of the sentence into French. Translated
freely into English, it may be rendered: "A number x can be got by first adding a
number a to a number b multiplied by itself a certain number of times,
and then dividing the whole by the number of b's multiplied together. So God
exists after all. What have you got to say now?" If Diderot had asked Euler to
illustrate the first part of his remark for the clearer understanding of the Russian
court, Euler might have replied that x is 3 when a is1 and b is
2 and n is 3.... Euler's troubles would have begun when the court wanted to know
how the second part of the sentence follows from the first part. Like many of us, Diderot
had stagefright when confronted with a sentence in size language. He left the court
abruptly amid the titters of the assembly ... and promptly returned to France."
- Edgar Cayce: A fifty-year-old woman in 1941 asked Cayce,
"How may I know when the will to a course of action is justifiable, or when I am
forcing my own personal will?" "By the listening within--there is the
answer," Cayce said in reading 2174-3. "For the answer to every problem . . . is
ever within--the answering within to that real desire, that real purpose which motivates
activity in the individual." What Cayce wanted her to listen to was that famous
"still small voice within" ... Listen to that voice, is Cayce's advice. It will
affirm our actions if they are properly motivated, because "each soul knows
within when it is in an at-onement."
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