Albert Einstein, the theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, was born today in 1879, in Ulm, Germany. Describing himself as an agnostic rather than an atheist, he said he was ‘a deeply religious nonbeliever’. In a letter he wrote to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, a year before he died, Einstein’s thoughts on religion are essentially negative:
‘The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.’ Albert Einstein
Today in 2018, one of the heirs of Einstein, the English physicist and author Stephen Hawking died. (He is seen above in a zero gravity flight he made in 2007.) Hawking lived with motor neurone disease for all of his adult life, but made some astonishing discoveries in theoretical physics, expanding human understanding of black holes and the origins of the universe. Like Einstein, he also made some strikingly critical observations about religious belief towards the end of his life, but despite that, Westminster Abbey welcomed his ashes with open arms for burial under the floor of the nave.
‘I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.’ Stephen Hawking
The first instalment of the New English Bible (the New Testament) was published today in 1961. It was the first completely new translation of the Bible into contemporary English since 1611, and started a landslide of English Bible translations. Things did not go well for the new translation in one of its earliest and most eye-catching reviews:
‘We are entitled to expect from a panel chosen from among the most distinguished scholars of our day at least a work of dignified mediocrity. When we find that we are offered something far below that modest level, something which astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial, and the pedantic, we ask in alarm: “What is happening to the English language?”’ TS Eliot, on the publication of the New English Bible
Karl Marx died today in 1883. Among his many other influences, he spread the criticism of religion as the social manipulation and pacification of the working class by the establishment. ‘The opium of the people’… that was his catchphrase.
Image: NASA