The Twenty-fourth Day of Lent

As a physicist, Albert Einstein devoted his life to discovering a single unifying principle that would account for and explain everything in the Universe. Ironically, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth-century passed on feeling that he had failed. Currently, string theorists are discovering that Einstein was on the right path and came much closer to discovering “reality” than he realized.

In metaphysics, the singular unifying principle is identified with a variety of labels, perhaps the most common to Western civilization being “God”. As Dad often comments, Einstein felt that the most counterproductive notion posited by theology and religion was that of an anthropomorphistic deity; i.e. the old man sitting on his throne in heaven. The natural sciences, such as physics, don’t place a value judgment on positive, negative or neutral charges. All are required. Here, a metaphysical application to understanding God would do well by recognizing that ours is not the task of judging, but of recognizing the value of each to the whole.

The most extreme example I can think of to illustrate what I’m trying to say is Adolph Hitler. To be sure, Hitler was evil incarnate, but was just as surely a child of God as you or I. Science has brought us to the brink of stem cells, cloning, etc, but even as life is formed in the petri dish there is still no accounting for or explaining the life force that results. I like to think that we are on the threshhold of a new understanding of ourselves and the world around us when we are finally able to comprehend and accept that there is nothing that is not God, that there is no life force that has spontaneously generated itself. Each and every one of us is God manifest on Earth, making our contribution to the collective experience. When the first atomic explosion occurred, another physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer was reminded of a line from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. At that moment humankind was launched into a new dimension where a holistic understanding of God can no longer be that of the good guy in a white hat.