"Einstein's Biggest Idea"

One of the best and most widely acclaimed programs of the outstanding PBS series NOVA was the program they did on Albert Einstein called Einstein’s Big Idea. The program originally aired in the fall of 2005, and focused on Einstein’s famous “Theory of Special Relativity” and the equation that captured it: E=mc2. The program achieved the near impossible: It explained the Theory of Special Relativity in a way that even I could understand it! It went on to track Einstein’s genius to its lair by making the startling claim that Einstein, as no other mathematician or physicist before him had done, was able to recognize that fundamental elements of our universe, like space and time or mass and energy, are (if we move deeply enough into them) actually two facets of the same thing. Before Einstein we talked about space and time as though they were different things, now we talk about the “space/time continuum.” Before Einstein we talked about mass and energy as though they were separate and distinct, now we know that mass is merely one manifestation of energy (heat and light being two others). Einstein’s “Big Idea” forever changed the way we view our universe.

But as important as his “Big Idea” was, the Theory of Special Relativity was not his biggest idea. A new book about Einstein by Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe, Simon & Schuster 2007) provides a revealing glimpse into the life of this remarkable man. On balance, theology may have been Einstein’s biggest idea. Born a Jew, educated in Christian schools, Einstein’s life and thought always brushed the edges of the Mystery that is God. Though he never expressed his belief in images or language most Christians or Jews would recognize as “orthodox,” he nonetheless believed that the sheer immensity of the Mystery behind the universe demanded a theology.

Isaacson captures something of Einstein’s theology when he recounts how the mathematician responded to the question of how he would describe his belief about God. Einstein purportedly said:

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.

Granted, that’s a far cry from the Christian belief in an Incarnate God – very God of very God Who for us and for our salvation came down… is how one early creed put it. And as a Christian a fundamental of my faith is the belief that the Ultimate Mystery behind all things was once born among us as a baby “…with a head so small you could crush it one-handed,” as Frederick Buechner wrote.

But that said, in a culture where God has been whittled down to size – God is our copilot, our buddy, our confidant, our spiritual advisor, our financial guru, our cheerleader – give Einstein his due; his was a God with some SIZE.