Do you believe in God?
I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.
Some of us might be more definite in our beliefs. But the key that Albert Einstein here acknowledged, and that we all must acknowledge, is that our individual – and even communal – beliefs must be understood with proper humility.
Earlier in his life, Mr. Einstein was quoted:
Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.
This insight seems far more spiritual and far more catholic than anything the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has produced in the past two years.