Abstract

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 comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise. Such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in Nature.

Albert Einstein

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 21 April 2006

Arnold Neumaier

A clever mathematician called Arnold Neumaier has a creepy website at http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~Eneum/. It is one of those websites by the strange people who are scientists and are also Christians. Reading sites like this give you an insight into the psychology of Christians, even clever ones. They are like pet dogs or cats when they come along rubbing against you, fawning around for attention. They are weak animals trying to ingratiate themselves with the big strong alpha animal that they consider leads the pride, or the pack. Christians like Neumaier do the same to the big animal they consider leads the pack, their imaginary alpha male in their heads. Christians are quite unashamedly creeps, creeping around their God, presumably because they think the God will reward them with his favours such as eternal life! Neumaier writes:

Science is the truth only in matters that can be objectified. In the spiritual world, where values, goals, authority and purpose are located, science has nothing to say. It is a poor life that is restricted to the scientific standard of truth, where you and I are nothing but a collection of atoms without meaning and purpose. Realizing the narrow-minded nature of science opens the gate to an understanding of God that complements the scientific truth and gives life, love and peace.

Though he admits that science is the truth in part, he speaks of another part that science cannot address, but yet which he and all Christians always know a lot about. Neumaier knows that “values, goals, authority and purpose” are located “in the spiritual world”, but as science has nothing to say about any spiritual world, how does this Christian, and all the rest of them know about it? Of course, they do not. They cannot say how. What they do is repeat a lot of the words written in that ancient confidence trick, the bible, and that is precisely what this clever man does, even casting the biblical words into his own to make them, presumably, sound better. What makes these people think the bible is so profound that it tells them some things that science cannot tell them?

The Great Scientists

Well, Neumaier is fond of citing scientists as being in favour of God, and says that much of what he writes is with an audience of scientists in mind, yet the great scientists who accept the Christian God are mainly from the pre-Enlightenment time when people were generally Christians, and were so because until then not to be meant being burnt at the stake, a compelling reason to be Christian, just as Moslem countries that apply the Sharia law will kill apostates from Islam still. More modern greats have a much less fawning attitude to God, much less fawning than Christians like Neumaier, at any rate:

I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of “humility”. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

Albert Einstein, cited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, The Human Side

Christians are shameless in lying about the beliefs of people who were quite obviously not Christians but that they want to adopt, and Einstein is among their main targets for adoption, though his writings were always along these lines. All great scientists and probably all scientists necessarily have this wonder at Nature that Einstein calls religious because that is the feeling it inspires. Christians see in this the work of God, but Einstein saw sufficient of wonder in Nature without having to invent an alpha male in the sky to be responsible for having made it. Nature is wonderful, full stop.

I don’t try to imagine a God. It suffices to stand in awe of the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.

Einstein, letter 1953

There was no invisible God and the notion of it was not even useful:

To assume the existence of an unperceivable being… does not facilitate understanding the orderliness we find in the perceivable world.

Einstein, letter to an Iowan student

There is no need at all to invent a male to take the credit for it. That is simply masculine hubris meant to give the male toffee and to intimidate women. Nature does not make things like an artificer, she gives birth to them like a mother. The sad cringers of the Christian world ought to be fawning up to the goddess, except that they cannot get the same vicarious thrill out of fawning to a woman in a society where men, through the Judaeo-Christian myth, still dominate. The truth about Einstein is that he had no regard for the trappings of organized religion or its illusion, the personal god:

In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests.

Albert Einstein

Einstein seems to have written to a woman Baptist pastor, who asked him his views on the afterlife and ethics, that he did “not believe in immortality of the individual”, and thought “ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it”. Much earlier in his life he had rejected the idea of a soul all together:

Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seems to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.

Einstein, cited by Dukas and Hoffman

A websearch for Professor “Arnold V Lesikar” and “Albert Einstein” should lead to many more such sentiments by Einstein collected by Professor Lesikar. Yet, because Einstein was apt to call Nature God, dishonest Christians are always trying to corral him for their dubious cause. The same goes for Stephen Hawking. He ended his bestselling book, A Brief History of Time saying that discovering the origin of the universe would be knowing the “mind of God”. It is a joke. It does not show that Hawking believes that God made the world. Yet only a week before Easter this year (2006) some woman sociologist wrote a letter about science and religion to The Observer in which she plainly thought Hawking did believe in God. She did not say whether she was a Christian, but to admit to being a sociologist is bad enough, for they are taught, or were, that to make a decision, even based on the evidence, is to be biased! So she was trying to do what they all try to do—perch on a fence, refusing to come to a conclusion.

Now whether you are a scientifically illiterate sociologist or a scientifically illiterate Christian, there is no excuse these days for publishing stuff that is plainly wrong. Admittedly, as Joe E Brown put it, no one is perfect, and everyone is allowed a peccadillo, but when there is so much free information of the internet, there is no excuse for getting things multiply wrong. Free reference databases like the Wikipedia offer excellent information on almost everything, certainly good enough to begin a more detailed search. One page there has a mass of quotations from Hawking that show he has no religious regard for God:

It’s important for scientists to explain their work, particularly in cosmology. This now answers many questions once asked of religion.

The Guardian (2005)

We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God.

We shouldn’t be surprised that conditions in the universe are suitable for life, but this is not evidence that the universe was designed to allow for life.

Einstein’s and Hawking’s views are atheistic. They are not averse to calling Nature, or the order in Nature, God, but they do not think that whatever it is that counts as God is worrying about fools attending mass every day or every week, or praying five times a day to Mecca, or moving backwards and forwards like an automaton in front of an ancient wall, or even thinking they are predestined to end up among the elect in heaven. A finite time in eternity is imperceptible, even to a God, so it ought not to be surprising that even if some infinitely vast, everlasting superbeing made the universe, he did it by kicking a grain of sand in the megaverse and remains unaware of it. The very idea, in short, of a personal god transcending time and space specially for each of us individually is absurd, yet our mathematician will continue to belief.

Conversion by Chance

Yet he claims he also began as an atheist. Remarkable then it is that he read an ancient book of myths called by Christians the Old Testament, and was miraculously cured of his atheistic virus. Someone intelligent with views held so precariously must be somewhat unbalanced. The revelation that came to him was that God was “the power that gives purpose to chance”. He does not, however, tell us at this point what are these chance events that have purpose, or how the purpose they have is known beforehand. It has to be known beforehand since anything that happens can be attributed to anything after the event. It is the art called pseudo-science. Science has to make an observation, in this case, that chance has a purpose, then invent a hypothesis to explain it. Neumaier has the hypothesis of God but his hypothesis is to account for something he imagines anyway. So he has an imaginary phenomenon and an imaginary explanation.

It turns out that chance with a purpose is any chance event that has a consequence, or a consequence for us humans at any rate—becomes meaningful, as he puts it. So, if a bolt of lightning hits a tree and knocks it down, that is a chance event, but a bolt of lightning that hits a tree with a man underneath it is suddenly an act of God. Then, the great mathematician decides that this God of purpose-behind-chance must be a person because only people have purposes, and Lo! the personal God appears, before your very eyes. The God with the personality then becomes masculine, but that is simply from the Christian tradition. “He” does not really have any sex—he is “neither male nor female”. The Christian mathematician does not notice that he has just ignored the Christian—and Jewish—tradition which certainly regards God as masculine. The alpha male could hardly be feminine, now could he? These fawning coprologues will say anything to justify their own cringing beliefs to themselves, and worse, will offer the same pile of incoherent crap to others to try to persuade them of the “truth”!

Amazingly, this man refers us to his page about chance and creation, introducing it with the citation from Paul in which he writes:

If any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know.

Like many of the passages cited from the bible as a maxim, it is one that Christians are incapable of applying fully to themselves. It warns people to avoid the error of personal conceit over anything for they could easily have completely the wrong end of the stick, or even the wrong stick. Christians are happy to think they might have the wrong end of the stick, in some minor way, and, naturally, turn to more bible readings, pastor lessons or masses to convince them of what they ought to know. They never consider that they might have the wrong stick in believing Christianity, especially as this bit oof advice is from the founder of Christianity. Yet this bit of wisdom is general. It is written by a Christian evangelist but it is common and garden wisdom, as much of the quotable bits of the bible are. Generally, Christians are convinced they have “The Truth”, and go about bragging about it, but everything they say is untrue. The truth about Christians is that they use the word “truth” to mean what they believe, and not what it primarily means which is something verifiable. Not one item of the basics of Christian belief is verifiable. All of it is based on a book of tall stories which have to be believed unquestioningly for anyone to call themselves Christians. Once you believe the tall stories in the bible, you will believe anything, and so it transpires. We end up with transparent liars like Tony Blair, the British PM, considered as a Christian to be a purveyor of “The Truth”.

The Sociopath’s Test of Reality

Blair is, of course, a sociopath, and that is the trouble with Christianity—it trains people to be sociopaths. If you think that God will put the truth into your mouth automatically, as the Christian God explained in the gospels, then you can lie without a blush or a quaver. Christians become so convinced that whatever they say is true that they can lie themselves blue, and do! This particular sociopath even speaks of putting knowledge to the test of reality, something that is a necessary part of science, but which is anathema to any sort of belief. As an example he takes Luther, saying that his views on salvation were tested but his views on the Jews were not, and so his views on salvation were right but his views on the Jews were wrong.

His expertise on salvation was checked for reliability through his own agonizing and relieving experience with the underlying conflict; his views on the Jews never underwent such a purifying process and hence don’t reflect the truth but the social context in which he lived.

Arnold Neumaier

Though this man is a scientist of sorts, he seems to think that checking for reliability is nothing more than agonizing. It is a good job that even simple people expect checking reliability to be something more than that. If aerospace engineers sat agonizing about whether they had the configuration of an aircraft right or not, and nothing more, then soon no one would fly anywhere because the aeroplanes would start to fall out of the sky. This sort of naïvete is typical of Christian lunatics who want us to think God will do everything for us if we simply pray harder and longer, and cross a few grubby pastors’ hands with silver. It is reminiscent of Hawking’s humorous point about the hypocrisy of some Christians:

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

Likewise, reliability is tested in practice, not by any amount of agonizing. And how does Neumaier know how much agonizing Luther did about the Jews? Perhaps he felt he had done enough, since the Christian bible paints the Jews as perfidious deicides.

Now we have another quotation from the bible:

The lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof is of Yehouah.

Proverbs 16:33

Presumably, this is biblical verification of Neumaier’s belief derived originally from his own atheistic musings. It is an ancient idea that God, or the gods, worked through lots. It is also a false idea that has led to much misery in the world. Trial by ordeal is a manifestation of the same principle. God will arrange by controlling chance whether someone is guilty or innocent. The Urim and Thummim will decide what should be done when decisions were needed. So, if God decides the chance fall of the dice, why not get rid of expensive courts of law and return to the use of lottery as of old? In wanting to restore God’s control of chance, the great mathematician sounds more like a cracked pot. Comically, he now cites Paul again:

Prove all things. Hold fast that which is good.

1 Thessalonians 5:21

It is comical because this is exactly what science does, and what Christians refuse to do. Evangelicals, since the time of Darwin, have had a concerted campaign against science, and it continues today more viciously than it ever did, supported by the vast amounts of wealth that Christian phlianthropists put into publicizing Christianity, and the vast wealth of many Christian churches and their endowed departments in US universities. Great universities try to teach established knowledge in their science departments while paid lackeys of the churches undermine modern knowledge and teach superstition in others. It is farcical. Yet here is one of, regretably still many, scientific fifth columnists helping to turn the clock back.

Neumaier finds that his God is using chance in a way that the Evangelical Christians cannot see. Chance is godless—atheistic. Scientists, who are themselves all too often sensible enough to be godless and atheistic, use chance to explain change, the Evangelicals think, and so set themselves against it. Neumaier thinks they are wrong, and, of course, if God is almighty, then he must be right and the Evangelicals, as usual, are treating God as if he were a village idiot. The idiots are the Christians who cannot understand and so ignore science, but Neumaier as a mathematician expert in stochastic processes and the minimization of free energy is not that idiotic, and indeed can teach his fellow Christians in the dunces’ seats something useful:

Nature tends towards optimality as long as the boundary conditions are constant, and this explains to the satisfaction of most biologists why life is so well adapted—each ecological niche is forced by the second law to be populated by individuals where most of them are nearly optimal with respect to critical and constant boundary conditions. And when the boundary conditions change there is scope for development, just as when pressure or temperature change in a geological context. This fits the observed biological data very well, and it also makes sense when considering God’s creation from an engineering point of view… The way protein molecules fold into their biologically active state is determined by the same mechanism: different possible conformers compete for survival, and the law of large numbers guarantees that most of the molecules will be in the shape corresponding to the smallest energy—forcing the shape to be in a well-defined form that allows the molecule to be used as a biological machine.

The Tinkerman God

It is all quite sensibly expressed science, but what then?

The possibilities of life are built in into the delicate mixture of deterministic and stochastic laws of nature. Which possibilities are realized are determined by the creativity of God, combined with the properties of the environment that carries out the plans of God through self-organization processes governed by the second law of thermodynamics.

There is no good reason at all why God should be introduced here. Science can see no reason why natural processes should not do the whole job through environmental influence and Nature’s laws like the second law of thermodynamics. Christians can think that God made the laws, if they wish, but laws made by any designer who is not only intelligent but almighty and omniscient ought not to need constant tinkering with, yet this tinkerman God is what all Christians believe in. If God were not a tinkerman, he would be on the heavenly beach or on the heavenly golf course, and prayers would be unanswered. They are unanswered, but the force of Christian conviction makes them think every fortune is an answered prayer, or God’s grace, while every misfortune or unanswered prayer is their own fault, or the Devil’s. Christians like to imagine God sweating with the labour of checking out how all the souls are getting on, answering all the prayers, and adjusting the Natural machine constantly with His heavenly spanner. How intelligent men can believe all this nonsense is beyond comprehension, but it is nothing to do with God, angels or spirituality at all, and everything to do with dependent psychological states.

How else to explain that Neumaier thinks not only is there necessarily a purpose in life but it is “what matters most in our everyday life”. It is curious how these people, the Christians, who were taught by their own God, when He appeared in human form, that they must be humble to be saved, for the last are first and the first last, are the most insufferably arrogant of human beings, while staying convinced they will indeed be saved. Here is a man who tells us what matters most to us, and not just when we think about religious matters but in our daily lives. He does the usual thing of all Christians and projects his own obsessions, his own personal guilt on to the rest of the human race. No one, in their daily lives could care less about any conjectured purpose that it might have. Daily lives are to be lived not to be spent agonizing, as this man must do, over why he is trying to compute minimization routines or solve nonlinear differential equations—if these are typical of his daily duties. All that agonizing cannot help him solve the equations since it is dividing the time he could be devoting to them, and he would most likely be better off keeping his agonizing for church and getting on with living during the day time hours. As for the rest of us, let us do the same.

Anyway, so as to be able to cite scientists who were also believers, as they do, this Christian now turns to Newton and Maxwell as the greatest scientists of former times, because the greatest scientists of modern times were atheists. Newton and Maxwell, brought up as Christians and given no sensible alternatives in the society they were brought up in, considered science to be for the glory of God, and naturally, if God is seen as the architect of the world, his edifice must testify to His imaginative glory. The point is that God is superfluous to science. As Hawking said:

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn’t prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.

Der Spiegel (1988)

Science works by being skeptical about anything that has not been tested and shown to be so under such and such conditions. Neumaier thinks he sees a gap for God in chance, but God remains unnecessary to science. God is Neumaier’s crutch for whatever psychological problem he has, but has no role in science at all. How can the construct of a guilty mind influence the reality of the world?

Neumaier did not get on with his Christian parents, leaving home at sixteen, but plainly the field had been ploughed by the Christian plough, and when he began to feel guilty about his parents and his problematic marriage, Neumaier gradually found his way back to the caring parent in his imagination called God the Father. Yet, he shows himself that God is unnecessary, and offers feeble arguments to show that, for him, He is. Why cannot an intelligent man see what he is doing? Why indeed does he not arrange a course of “50 minute hours” with a good psychiatrist to find out just what it is that makes him want to roll over and show his belly to an imaginary alpha male in his head? It would do him more good than writing a load of contradictory religious coprolalia.

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