On WAMC’s Vox Pop show, callers periodically ask if I’ve seen evidence among the stars of a Creator. I always dodge such questions, directed my way for over 30 years. They arise because many, when searching for the Big Picture in this huge confusing universe, think astronomers may have a heightened perspective of what’s going on.
Now in the midst of a pandemic I’m less inclined to be cagey about this stuff, even though I’d never raise this topic with my national readers of Astronomy magazine or the Old Farmers Almanac. But here where I live, among my friends and neighbors in the mid-Hudson Valley — sure, why not?
I’ll first dispense with coyness, steel up my courage at disappointing my longstanding atheist readers, and merely briefly say, yes, to me there is not the slightest doubt that God is real.
But that’s not today’s topic. We are instead interested in the beliefs of geniuses, which is where things get interesting. Let’s select four: Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Isaac Newton. What did they believe?
Hawking is especially easy for me, since he and I had the same literary agent for decades, and thus I heard countless firsthand stories. Moreover, right up to his death in 2018, Hawking was a vociferous atheist. In numerous venues and in print, he came right out and declared, “there is no God.” (Many nowadays write god with a small g, but I’m a traditionalist and, moreover, feel that if we capitalize Newark, then the reputed designer of hummingbirds similarly deserves the upper case.)
Where were we? Hawking. His declarations about the nonexistence of the Deity reached their maximum when physicists discovered the Higgs Boson at Cern. He somehow concluded that finding the ironically dubbed “God particle” constituted proof that God needn’t exist.
Of course, the very definition of God is all over the map, a key point we’ll confront when considering Einstein. The entire animal kingdom keeps eating its fellow citizens. If a baby chipmunk is devoured by a cat, does that mean there’s no loving God? The whole thing is fuzzy and speculative.
Einstein found the Hebrew God impossible to accept, along with the Bible in general when it said women are inferior and slavery is fine and homosexuality should be punished by death, and all. Still, some use Einstein’s famous put-down of quantum theory when he’d said “God does not play dice” as evidence that he did believe. But he specifically did not subscribe to a personal God, and said so repeatedly in letters to friends. But he also spoke contemptuously of atheists. Einstein even wrote that if he had to choose, he’d pick Believers over atheists because the latter group generally failed to see the grandeur and order in Nature. And that indeed was Einstein’s idea of God — as a grand intelligence and order organized by mathematical and physics principles and not ruled by mere randomness or chaos.
Einstein also, interestingly, harbored a disbelief in free will. Meaning, everything unfolds on its own within a deterministic universe, leaving no room for personal choice. Einstein said this made him forgiving of others’ mistakes, and kept him from feeling angry at people. He liked to quote Arthur Schopenhauer, who’d say, “A man can do as he wills, but he cannot will as he wills.” Meaning, you can decide to go out for Chinese food tonight, and then act on it, but the decision to do so popped into your head on its own; you did not make that decision happen, nor would you even know how to do that. So where, then, is free will?
Let’s move on, or, rather, keep stepping backward — a full century to a famous quantum theory originator, Werner Heisenberg. His cosmic view didn’t involve God but rather consciousness itself, which he saw as synonymous with the universe. By believing consciousness or awareness to be eternal and indivisible, Heisenberg regarded life as deathless and perfect. He didn’t use the term solipsism, but essentially saw no distinction between “me” and “other,” internal or external, or nature versus the individual He liked to say that “the word consciousness is always singular, of which the plural is unknown.”
Believing this, he alone of our geniuses was most in sync with the ancient Eastern school of Advaita Vedanta, which saw everything as One. No need for reincarnation, because no individuals exist to be reborn. Experience — awareness — is unending.
This is also the gist of Biocentrism, my three books written with the noted medical researcher Robert Lanza. That consciousness and the universe are correlative, as a single eternal entity that can be proved through physics must be hitting a chord, since numerous foreign editions are selling well around the world.
Our final genius is of course Isaac Newton. Possible owing to the 17th century influences in which he lived, he expressed no doubt in the reality of a personal God “whose existence cannot be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation,” as attributed in an 1850 biography. Newton also, to rebut the countless Armageddon prophesies that were then making the rounds, stated that the world would end no earlier than 2060.
So we have at least 40 more years to keep debating these things.
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