Einstein Was a Cute Kid

Okay, so first of all, this is one of the oddest framings of the problem of evil I’ve seen thus far.  I’ll refrain from ranting about the incorrect assertions and broad generalizations about the nature of heat and light, because that’s not the point I’m trying to make.

More importantly, Einstein never said anything of the sort, or at least none of his biographers felt compelled to mention it.  Einstein was more apt to say things like this:

"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

So what we have is a Christian organization with the best of intentions presenting its video sales pitch, yet inadvertently (I hope) tainting it with the spirit of error.  The closest approximation to anything said in this video would have originally come from St. Augustine of Hippo, who posited that evil was in fact the absence of good.  But mention Augustine of Hippo to the man on the street, and you’ve immediately lost him to childhood nostalgia:

No, it’s better to misattribute this concept to someone who is irrefutably intelligent by popular consensus… someone like Albert Einstein.

And that’s exactly what people have done ever since Einstein’s theory of general relativity began altering our perception of the world around us.  Evangelists for all sorts of causes, from Christianity to Buddhism to astrology, have misattributed quotes and concepts to Einstein in an attempt to imbue them with greater credibility.


The thing is, it’s a nice story even without involving the late revolutionary theoretical physicist (who, incidentally, seems to have been either a deist or pantheist).  Everyone likes it when the student confounds the teacher, and everyone roots for religion to topple the ivory tower of science (as if the two were irreconcilably opposed).  Surely it’s not too flimsy to stand in its own?


At any rate, theodicy is a pretty neat concept.  Good black-coffee-and-quiet-room reading.  Let’s come together and forge new explanations and understandings of the nature of evil, shall we?  You go ahead and get started.  I’ll be over here playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.