I do ask, however, if God does not exist, why are you so preoccupied with Him? Are you angry at a phantom? Are you afraid if He’s real, He will be an accountable authority figure in your life? Are you contemptuous of the opiated masses?

One thing the atheist and the Christian have in common: they both believe God is unknowable.

A. The atheist believes God is unknowable because they deny His existence;
B. The Christian believes God is unknowable because He is so unimaginably higher than his own lower-life-form senses could perceive.

Isaiah 55: 8-11

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,’
says the LORD.
‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.

“For as the rain comes down, and the snow
from heaven,
And do not return there,
But water the earth,
And make it bring forth and bud,
That it may give seed to the sower
And bread to the eater,
So shall My word be that goes forth from
My mouth;
It shall not return to Me void,
But it shall accomplish what I please,
And it shall prosper
in the thing for which I sent it.”

You are an impressive human. You have advanced degrees, a high profile, and two impressive careers: physics and fiction. You wrote a best selling novel about Einstein.

Remembering Einstein’s acceptance speech for a Nobel Prize, he lamented, “We have won the war, but not the peace.” He said, “Politics is harder than science.” I believe this is because he was serious about the Sword of Damocles that is the nuclear bomb.

Perhaps so many simple masses believe in God is because you scientists, having acquired tenured security and fame, have absolutely dropped the ball. What have you scientists done, since Hiroshima and Nagasake, to prevent an encore?

I live in New Mexico. Los Alamos is a death dealing town.

What discipline, exactly, do you think will prevent a nuclear war?

I don’t see you physicists caring much.
Novelists? What does “Mr. g” contribute to the cause?
Medicine? Perhaps. After the fact, for already injured casualties.

The root of war is the root of evil in individual human hearts. It’s hard for a poor child to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. That is why children are so vulnerable in famine, war and pestilence. (How many children died in the recent Sudanese warfare…do you know or care?) Similarly, is nigh impossible for an individual to clean out his own heart of hate, greed, pride, envy, fear. All that rotten stuff.

In your salon, do you worldly wise raconteurs ever return to this global geopolitical powder keg and talk practical preventive measures?

It is nigh impossible for an individual lower life form human to clean his own heart of hate, greed, pride, envy, fear… but it is Christ’s forte.

That is why we supposedly opiated masses love Him. Only from a clean heart can effective peacemaking flow. And I for sure can’t clean my own. Can you?

Yours truly,

Patricia smith

In the Wall Street Journal’s review of “Mr. g” a copy of William Blake’s Ancient of Days was printed.

I think this is a pictorial misquote of William Blake. As the book itself has not yet been released, I do not know if this posthumous libel has actually occurred. But in case it has, I object on behalf of William Blake.

Blake too, aspired to reconcile physics and metaphysics.

But although Blake hated Isaac Newton’s mechanistic view of creation, he did have a value system (Values are unscientific. A strictly objective worldview would not be able to prize life over death – on any basis other than the viewers subjective fear of death.)

Consider, The Chimney Sweeper and Blake’s concern for child labor. Consider Fearful Symmetry and Blake’s awe of acting law. Consider Auguries of Innocence and consider Blake’s acknowledgement of a universal field “reality.”

Yes, he did address the dynamism of opposites in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but this was by way of a philosophical antimony: the simulataneous consideration of two competing truths. But Blake’s focus was always life.

What do you think motivated his Songs of Innocence and Experience.

On Blake’s deathbed he heard angels singing.

So I hope that Mr. Lightman did not misquote Blake pictorially.

And I hope he sobers up…he might learn that winsome Mr. g is his personal straw man.

The real Mr. g may be closer to:

“Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
in the forest of the night.
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame Thy fearful symmetry?”