April 23, 2007VOL. 45, NO. 8Oakland, CA

COMMENTARY

Einstein provides valuable apologetic
for belief in God

Finding ways to bite back against malaria in Africa

Einstein provides valuable apologetic for belief in God

By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

A recent issue of TIME magazine carried a series of excerpts from the diaries of Albert Einstein that give us an insight into how he felt about God and religion. There is a lot of disagreement as to whether he was an atheist or a believer. These excerpts let him speak for himself.

What exactly did he believe about God and religion? Here are some of his comments:

Asked at a dinner party as to whether he was religious, he replied: “Yes, you can call it that. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”

He was Jewish, but his parents were agnostic about Judaism and sent him to a Catholic school as a boy. There he studied both the Catholic catechism and the Jewish scriptures with some enthusiasm.

Asked to what extent Christianity influenced his life, he answered: “As a child I received religious instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarean ... No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

Asked whether or not he believed in God:

“I am 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 towards God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws.”

At one point, he composed a personal creed. Here’s one of its tenets:

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder or stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle.

“To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”

As well, he was always harder on atheists than on believers in his criticisms: “What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility towards the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.”

Doctrinaire atheists, he suggested, are unconsciously and unhealthily reacting to their past:

“Fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after a hard struggle. They are creatures who – in their grudge against traditional religion as ‘the opium of the masses’ – cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

But, despite these insights, his faith was not traditional. He doubted that God was personal and he didn’t believe in personal immortality.

So where does he really land in terms of God and religion?

He didn’t get some things right, but then who does?

As Christians we believe that the first thing we need to affirm is that God is ineffable. God escapes our thought. That means that, while we can know God, we can’t imagine God, can’t conceptualize God, and can’t speak with any accuracy about God.

God is infinite being and that, by definition, is beyond the categories of our thought and imagination. Trying to imagine God is like trying to imagine the highest number possible, an impossibility because numbers have no limit, you can always count one more.

That God cannot be imagined with any accuracy is, in fact, a Christian dogma. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) taught dogmatically that any words we use about God are more inaccurate than accurate, suggesting that Einstein’s “feeling of utter humility towards the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos” is perhaps closer to the truth of faith than is the concept of God of his critics.

Personally, I find his insights healthy and refreshing - and a valuable apologetic for belief in God.

When the person who is perhaps the greatest scientific mind in history tells us that there is an unimaginable, benign, awe-inspiring, ordering presence beyond us that is under girding everything and that we should live in wonder and humility in the face of that, then the arguments of lesser minds that faith is naive and superstitious become considerably less compelling.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher, and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

Finding ways to bite back against malaria in Africa

By Lane Hartill

Every night, after a day bent in half weeding her peanut and pepper patch, Aminata Senesie pumps water, bathes her children, then puts them to bed. Then she gets in with them.

It’s a little crowded, but Aminata doesn’t mind. The 20-year-old mother of three can finally sleep peacefully. Jusu, her three-year-old, is on one side. And Sao and Jinnah – her 7-month-old twins – are on the other.

And all of them are under an insecticide-treated mosquito net, thanks to Catholic Relief Services. But unfortunately, this is something rare in Kailahun, a humid, crumbling province in Sierra Leone that its residents share with hoards of mosquitoes.

You can’t escape them in Sajilla, where Aminata lives. In this mining village near the Liberian border, mosquitoes are everywhere. They come out at night and invite themselves into the beds of couples and kids.

If you listen closely, between clicking insects and the crashing rain, you may hear the fleshy slaps of someone’s nocturnal battle with them. Mosquitoes, for many, are just a fact of life.

But for Aminata, it became too much. She couldn’t stomach seeing the bites on Jusu. “Jusu was always sick with malaria,” she says. “He would get very hot, become pale and refuse food. We would take him to the health post and spend a lot of money on medicine, but he would just get sick again.”

In fact, according to the World Health Organization, a poor family like Aminata’s living in a place like Kailahun may spend 25 percent or more of its annual income on prevention and treatment. What’s worse, fewer than 5 percent of kids in Sierra Leone under five years old sleep under treated bed nets.

Across the continent, millions don’t use them. That’s where Catholic Relief Services comes in, along with its donors – including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in Sierra Leone and other countries and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Each year, at least 300 million people contract serious cases of malaria worldwide, with more than 1 million people dying – the majority of them are young children in Africa. Africa Malaria Day, observed April 25 this year, highlights the commitment of African governments to roll back this debilitating disease. And from The Gambia to Ethiopia, CRS is helping to do its part.

In The Gambia, CRS is distributing free insecticide-treated bed nets and increasing malaria awareness. CRS’ five-year Global Fund program aims to decrease by 30 percent malaria-related sickness and deaths among pregnant women and children under five.

That’s good news for mothers such as Fatou Dibba, who has received a free bed net. “The net has made a big difference to me and my family,” she says. “Not even flies or cockroaches can come inside once the net is down.”

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, CRS is working with local partners and government agents in 25 underserved rural health zones to reduce the number of children and mothers falling sick and dying from common diseases, including malaria. With funding from USAID and the United Nations, CRS initiatives will impact more than 1 million people over five years.

CRS is also working with district and national health departments and the Diocese of Embu in Kenya to prevent deaths of children primarily from malaria, pneumonia and malnutrition.

As part of the USAID-funded child survival program, CRS has helped to upgrade health services at the district level in Embu. Health professionals are being trained to better manage cases of childhood malaria. In addition, community volunteers are teaching households to spot the danger signs of malaria, and families are gaining greater access to treated bed nets.

Across Africa, most people accept malaria as a fact of life. CRS aims to change this. A new initiative in Ethiopia helps community members – many of whom can’t read – take malaria prevention into their own hands.

An innovative manual shows community members how to work together to determine how malaria is spread and, more importantly, take action to stop its spread locally.

It’s CRS programs like these that help people like Aminata. But CRS also educates African medical professionals so they can help their own community members.

Take Nemah Ellie. She is a traditional birth attendant who works with expecting mothers in Sierra Leone. Nemah says the lack of information is a major part of the problem.

“People used to believe that malaria came from sucking too many oranges or eating too much palm oil,” she says. “Some people even believed that witchcraft caused children to die from malaria.”

Now Nemah, trained by CRS, instructs expecting mothers to take at least two doses of oral medication during their pregnancy. This helps clear the parasite from their bodies and helps their unborn children grow.

This education works. Just ask Aminata. “My children do not have the rash any longer from mosquito bites,” she says.

(Lane Hartill serves as CRS’ Regional Information Officer for West Africa.)

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