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By Root 583 0

for the first time anywhere.29 In the first letter, dated June 14, 1945, sent from the USS Bougainville in the Pacific Ocean, Raner recounts a conversation he had on the ship with a Jesuit-educated Catholic officer who claimed that Einstein converted from atheism to theism when he was confronted by a Jesuit priest with three irrefutable syllogisms. “The syllogisms were: A design demands a designer; the universe is a design; therefore there must have been a designer.” Raner countered the Catholic by noting that cosmology and evolutionary theory adequately explain most apparent design in the world, “but even if there was a ‘designer,’ that would give only a re-arranger, not a creator; and again assuming a designer, you are back where you started by being forced to admit a designer of the designer etc. etc. Same as the account of the earth resting on an elephant’s back—elephant standing on a giant turtle; turtle on turtle on turtle, etc.”

At this point in his life Einstein was world famous and routinely received hundreds of such letters, many from prominent scholars and scientists, so for him to write a lowly ensign aboard a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean reveals how much this story got his goat. On July 2, 1945, Einstein fired back:

I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. Your counter-arguments seem to me very correct and could hardly be better formulated. It is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere—childish analogies. We have to admire in humility and beautiful harmony of the structure of this world—as far as we can grasp it. And that is all.

Four years later, in 1949, Raner wrote Einstein again, asking for clarification: “Some people might interpret (your letter) to mean that to a Jesuit priest, anyone not a Roman Catholic is an atheist, and that you are in fact an orthodox Jew, or a Deist, or something else. Did you mean to leave room for such an interpretation, or are you from the viewpoint of the dictionary an atheist; i.e., ‘one who disbelieves in the existence of a God, or a Supreme Being’?” Einstein responded on September 28, 1949:

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.

Has there ever been a prominent figure who was so clear about what he believes as Einstein, and yet so egregiously misunderstood? This is yet another example of belief blindness.

The Natural and the Supernatural

Science operates in the natural, not the supernatural. In fact, there is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. There is just the natural, the normal, and mysteries we have yet to explain by natural causes. Invoking such words as supernatural and paranormal just provides a linguistic placeholder until we find natural and normal causes, or we do not find them and discontinue the search out of lack of interest. This is what usually happens in science. Mysteries once thought to be supernatural or paranormal happenings—such as astronomical or meteorological events—are incorporated into science once their causes are understood. For example, when cosmologists reference “dark energy” and “dark matter” to the so-called missing energy and mass needed to explain the structure and motion of galaxies and galaxy clusters, they do not intend these descriptors to be causal explanations. Dark energy and dark matter are merely cognitive conveniences until the actual sources of the energy and matter are discovered. When theists, creationists, and intelligent design theorists invoke miracles