Lurie Redux…Now With Einsteinian Proofs!

Last updated on: March 19, 2012 at 7:25 pm by Jeffrey L. Falick

Lurie Redux…Now With Einsteinian Proofs! 2012-03-19T19:25:00-05:00 Jeffrey L. Falick

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I have twice addressed Rabbi Alan Lurie’s HuffPost articles and their assertions about God. You can find my posts here and here.

Lurie has recently written another post there called “Why the Universe Obviously Has a Creator (and Why Some Atheists Refuse to Even Consider It).” I’m not going to bother with it here. Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution is True has already addressed it very adequately on his blog and HuffPost.

But I do want to address one thing that Lurie wrote in a post addressing Coyne’s critique:

Some of the greatest scientists were mystics and deep believers in a Creator: Copernicus, Maimonides, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, Mendel, Einstein and Planck, just to name some giants.

First of all, Maimonides was not in any sense a scientist, certainly not any more than any other medieval physician. Secondly, Newton also believed in alchemy so what the hell does that mean? Finally, and this was the most irritating part, Albert Einstein was NOT a believer. This is simply a lie. And the one who said it was a lie was Einstein:

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.

–Albert Einstein, letter to an atheist (1954), quoted in “Albert Einstein: The Human Side,” edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffman

That’s just one of dozens of similar comments that he made.

So, Rabbi Lurie, may I respectfully suggest that while you are free to make any wild claim or assertion about the “real” God that you like, you are not entitled to make such claims and assertions about actual people when they are so obviously untrue. Please, please, PLEASE stop using Albert Einstein to justify your faith.

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