Einstein would not have backed the Christian view of miracles as something wholly outside nature

BOB Granville (Write Back, March 3) has read my argument as implying all elite scientists have to be atheists. This is not a view I hold, or argued for.

There are many great scientists who have held all sorts of theological beliefs, from the conventional to the odd.

I do not dispute Einstein said that either nothing is miraculous or everything is and tended to believe the latter.

But Bob makes a mistake if he thinks Einstein would support the Christian view of miracles as something supernatural and wholly outside nature.

Einstein argued for natural explanations of all phenomena and despised supernatural explanations.

His view was that nature alone was miraculous enough and was subject to laws which he spent his life elucidating. This is what he meant by getting “to know God’s thoughts”.

He did say, “God does not play dice” and was famously proved to be wrong by the analysis of John Bell (late of Queen’s University Belfast) and the experiments of Alain Aspect in the 1980s.

I do not “disrespect” Heisenberg by pointing out that he could be guilty of mystification. The scientific approach is to “take no one’s word for it” (“Nullius in Verba” is the motto of the Royal Society) and to subject everything to experiment and argument: atoms do exist and have been imaged by STM microscopes and other methods.

I am sorry if mentioning this “baffled you with technical jargon”. Look up the YouTube videos of STM images of silicon crystal surfaces and atoms diffusing if you still doubt the facts.

NICK CANNING Coleraine, Co Londonderry