Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. The Waste Books. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 2000.
His concept of the devine however was quite different and much more abstract than the Rabbis, Priests and Imams of the time. Albert Einstein, was a religious Jew, but his view of God was that of Spinoza (See Quotation 631763) who had been excommunicated by the Jews. Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims. Spinoza did not believe in a kins of anthropromorphic God who fabricated the earth and the stars. He saw God in the devine nature of the earth and the heavens and the mathematical rules that govern everything. It was this abstraction that was Spinoza's God which made sense to Einstein. Got was in the order, physical laws and mathematics of the universe. Modern scientists who are religious have no difficulty with the probablsitic nature of much of the physics that governs the univrese. It was God who created or more abstractly, was the mathematical and physical laws that in turn allowed the universe to be created from nothing.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. He is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures.
