Distilled Wisdom: Einstein & God

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Representational image: Public domain.
If there is a detector created by evolution, we know that whatever it detects, must exist.

I am sorry I have been silent such a long time, but I am sure you will understand that I had to develop a safe strategy to survive the virus. Because of my age and clinical records, I had to be totally isolated for well over a year and, in order to cope with this, I decided to publish a few books–two for children (one of poems and the other is a book of short stories) and a serious book on poems about paintings, plus my Magnus Opus, the collected poems of my last 60+ years. As you can imagine, I survived everything; I was too busy to worry about COVID.

Living like a monk has its advantages: I had a lot of time to think and, as a result, I realised that I had been an ass most of my life. Why? Like most people interested in causality, I started my thinking–almost 80 years ago–from philosophy. Now, philosophy, of course, is very useful, especially when sufficient facts are not known. But now that we know the science behind things, we can start with a much more solid base.

However, that has not been the case for Einstein (1870–1955) who, despite being an agnostic, decided that he knew something about God; he hypothesised that God does not play with dice. What he meant was that if God exists, he surely would have organised nature on a good, solid, causal basis. I doubt he would have considered probabilities to be the work of the Devil but he, Einstein, was quite sure that no decent God would have built nature on a probabilistic rather than a causal basis. And, if you, dear reader, are getting a bit confused, you are in good company; little by little the fog will dissipate. (And please ignore the way in which causation is discussed in other contexts, like cosmology and elementary particles theory).



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