William Hermanns (1895-1990), German sociologist, professor of languages and literature, who after taking refuge in the United States, fleeing Nazi persecution, was invited to be a researcher and lecturer at Harvard University; he was one of the people who visited Einstein during his period of study at Princeton University, during the 1930s. Professor Hermanns interviewed Einstein in Germany before World War II and in the United States after the War. They explored the nature of the cosmic man but often discussed the horrors of the Holocaust and the implications of the atom bomb. From this contact and the contacts that Einstein maintained with Rabindranath Tagore, famous poet, musician, scholar and Hindu artist, William Hermanns wrote the book, Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man.
Asked by Hermanns about God, Einstein replied: "I cannot accept any concept based on the authority of the Church, about God. As long as I remember, I have resentments about mass indoctrination. I do not believe in fear of life, in fear of death, in blind faith. I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him, I would be lying. I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. God's universe is not governed by positive thinking, but by immutable laws."
For Einstein: "God is a mystery. But an understandable mystery. I have nothing to say, only to admire when I observe the laws of nature. There are no laws without a legislator, but I don't know what that legislator looks like."
When asked about free will, Einstein replies: "For how can there be free will in a world governed by immutable divine laws?" What can be understood with this statement is that free will is under divine jurisdiction!
Huberto Rohden (1893-1981), who lived with Einstein at Princeton University in the years 1945 and 1946, also wrote a book about this mystic scientist.
When asked if Rohden admitted a personal God, he replied: "If by personal do you mean an individual God, limited, finite, it is clear that I do not admit such a pseudo god, because it would be the radical denial of the true God, who has no limitation in time and space".
On the concept of free will, Rohden adds: "No human being is entirely free, because full freedom is omnipotence. Only the Universal Reality, the Divinity, the Creator is entirely free. In God, freedom is the very necessity; God is necessarily free, but the creature can only be partially free. This partial freedom, however, is sufficient to make man responsible for his acts freely practised".
Free will, therefore, is not, so to speak, an area exempt from divine jurisdiction, whatever good or evil man does in this "exempt zone" or in this "neutral field" of his freedom, it is he who does at his own risk, and it is no longer God who does it. Through free will, man has creative power, and this is what his likeness to God consists of.
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