Einstein and God

I have someone on my Facebook that likes to post quotes from atheists or quotes that question the existence of God. I don't know why. I don't know if he tries to bait people into an argument or if he just likes to be a stinker. Last week, he posted a quote from Albert Einstein that said, "I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my compression, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls." A little debate did ensue and I did a quick Google search on Albert Einstein and religion and found an interesting article on TIME.com

What I found interesting is that, despite the fact that my friend was trying to push an atheistic agenda, Albert Einstein was not an atheist. He did believe in God. Einstein stated, "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."

The thing is, he did not believe in God as Christianity or Judism teaches. He didn't believe that God gave people free will. He believed that everything had order and people do what they do because it's ordered by God. This makes sense when you consider that he was a physicist and for him order probably reigned. It probably didn't make sense that humans would have free-will and go around all "willy-nilly" when he is used to looking at the world in an ordered fashion.

We believe, of course, that God loves us so much that we do have free-will. We have the capacity to love him or deny Him. We can make our own choices and because of this we have to face the repercussions of our choices. I hope and pray that my Facebook friend realizes the repercussions instead of flippantly saying, "See ya in Hell!"