Easter Thursday
And ELOHIM said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the skies, to separate between the day and the night, and they will be for signs, and for appointed times, and for dates and years, and they will be for lights in the expanse of the skies, to make light upon the land. And it was thus. And ELOHIM made the two large lights--the large light for rule of the day, and the small light for rule of the night--and the stars. And ELOHIM gave them in the expanse of the skies, to make light upon the land, and to rule in the day and in the night, and to separate between the light and the darkness. And ELOHIM saw that it was good. And it was evening and it was morning, a fourth day. (Genesis 1:14-19, TEB)
Religion begins with stories to explain what we see and do not understand but feel called to explain anyway - - why? for assurance, and/or perhaps fearfully. Although the so-called "P story" of Genesis One, the great seven-day Creation story, is more than that - - a latter-day post-exile story to help call back to Yahwism those who had strayed into naive Canaanite paganism while the intelligentsia were away in Babylon, it is still and all a basic story to explain what is, and how and why it came to be, as a basis for Faith.
Faith being not what we know, but (Hebrews 11:1f) what we believe based on what we see and can hold with confidence.
That's my background starter for this early morning, Thursday, 9 April 2026, while it is yet dark.
Even at ninety years of age I'm not settled into, as Steve Jobs had it, dogma which is the result of other people's thinking, but rather called by that motto, proverb, slogan, Seek The Truth, Come Whence It May, Cost What It Will, to do my own thinking. Which is not based on what the P-writer and earlier J-writer and others looked up and saw, but on what I myself look up and see. Which, my developing explanation for myself, twenty-five hundred and three thousand years from now, may seem as simplistic to them as the old Israelite stories can seem to one who loves the JWST deep images into the Universe and who watches a human crew circle and photograph the far side of the Lesser Light.
Linda has a watch that would have astounded Dick Tracy eighty years ago. Maybe by then, three thousand years, if humans still exist, we will have surpassed Captain Kirk's story of saying, "Ahead, warp speed ten," and will be enjoying intergalactic travel for summer vacation.
Although "summer vacation" may by then be as forgotten as "phone booth."
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In my Seeking I someTimes like to read about what others have thought and said, written. Especially after Easter and during Easter Week, the thoughts on television of physicists and astronomers. Why them? Because the programs were aired, and because they, Einstein and Michio Kaku for example, are other than Abram remembering to take his household God along when he left Ur for Haran.
Jesus has people who are not of this flock. Somewhere around here - - my study office den has gotten so jammed up with decades of Stuff that I can hardly find anything anymore - - somewhere in this room abides Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god with his wisdom and his ability to help things turn out well. I'll have to find him and put him out prominently, it's not good or safe to store him away unseen and unheeded.
So, I'm contemplating what, on television the evening of Easter Day, Kaku said he believes, and what he said Einstein believed. Not so much what cosmologist, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking said and wrote, that there's no Creating God. But Michio Kaku and Einstein, that it's all too ordered to be random, there are laws that must have come from an ordering intelligence but who is not the personal God that humans describe to explain our life experience, what we see around us; but intelligence more transcendent than the P-writer's ELOHIM who ultimately becomes so deeply involved in human life as to become one of us.
Seeking, worrying myself half to death with contemplating, I begin with these two images, which I've often published here in +Time.
The "you are here" that despairs of humans who would destroy other nations of humans on such a tiny and perhaps unique and not insignificant planet,
\and the JWST image of deep space coming back from where some, current estimates, two trillion other galaxies move and have their beings.
Seeking, I have to keep looking and thinking
This blogpost has been moving around in my mind since last Sunday afternoon and evening of Easter Day. I kept putting it off watching our Iran War with despair and thinking In a world this bizarre, what the hell's the use of thinking or writing, just as well to remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. But here it is, rambling incoherently as usual. And as for relevance, I couldn't care less who else admires or doesn't admire Kaku, Einstein, Hawking.
T90
Michio Kaku (born 24 January 1947) is an American theoretical physicist, science communicator, futurologist, and writer of popular science. He is a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. Kaku is the author of several books about physics and related topics and has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film. He is also a regular contributor to his own blog, as well as other popular media outlets. For his efforts to bridge science and science fiction, he is a 2021 Sir Arthur Clarke Lifetime Achievement Awardee.[1]
His books Physics of the Impossible (2008), Physics of the Future (2011), The Future of the Mind (2014), and The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything (2021) became New York Times best sellers. Kaku has hosted several television specials for the BBC, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the Science Channel.
He generally adheres to a deistic, Einstein-like view of a "God of harmony and beauty" rather than a personal deity. He believes the universe is governed by, and created by, a "universal intelligence" or a "mathematician," citing the elegant mathematical rules in 11-dimensional hyperspace as evidence.
Key aspects of Kaku's view on God include:
- The "God of Spinoza": Kaku often quotes Einstein, supporting a God that embodies the order and beauty of the universe, not a personal God who intervenes in human affairs.
- Intelligent Design via Physics: He has stated that the universe is governed by rules that imply a "universal intelligence," rather than chance.
- Not Testable or Falsifiable: Kaku maintains that the existence of God is not testable, reproducible, or falsifiable, placing it outside the realm of "normal" science.
- "Cosmic Music": Kaku describes the mind of God as "cosmic music" resonance, a mathematical framework connecting string field theory to a cosmic creator.
Note: While some online sources have sensationalized his views as finding absolute proof, he clarifies that his view of a creator is a philosophical or metaphysical conclusion rather than a scientific experiment.
More from Kaku. "I’ve always wondered what Einstein thought about God. My curiosity led to a range of strong opinions from one of history’s greatest thinkers. Here we go. Einstein rejected the personal God. But there’s more. He called belief in an afterlife “ridiculous egotism.” What does that even mean? Einstein wasn’t religious. He didn’t pray. Or follow ritual. He didn’t believe in a God who intervened in our affairs, answered prayers, or kept score. He was absolutely clear on this. “I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation,” he wrote, “whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.”
It’s a direct rejection of almost every mainstream religious tradition.
But it’s not the end of it.
There’s more.
Einstein wasn’t an atheist. Not even close. He found militant atheism just as intellectually arrogant as fundamentalist religion. “I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist,” he wrote, “whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.”