interview published in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1988) edited by Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown, p. 208-209
Context: God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.
“It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain him.”
God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth (1989) YouTube video of the lecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBEIeRSLb8k
Context: It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead — I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction. Certainly it has given consolation, but consolation is not the right thing! Consolation is opium. It keeps you unaware of the reality, and life is flowing past you so quickly — seventy years will be gone soon. Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy, because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth. The very desire to find the truth disappears. But in the beginning it is bitter if all your belief systems are taken away from you. The fear and anxiety which you have been suppressing for millennia, which is there, very alive, will surface immediately. No God can destroy it, only the search for truth and the experience of truth — not a belief — is capable of healing all your wounds, of making you a whole being. And the whole person is the holy person to me.
Les grandes personnes ne comprennent jamais rien toutes seules, et c'est fatigant, pour les enfants, de toujours leur donner des explications.
Le Petit Prince (1943)
“You can't always explain everything you do to everybody, you know.”
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1986)
“Daddy always said you only explained things to the people that actually mattered.”
Source: All These Things I've Done
“For one thing, God didn't invent the circumcision, I did.”
Satan vs. God- Jackass Episodes]
“If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents.”
"Fra Lippo Lippi", line 217.
Men and Women (1855)
Source: The Poems of Robert Browning
“There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't.”
As quoted in John Von Neumann : The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence and Much More (1992) by Norman Macrae, p. 379
“A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.”
"Creation"
I'm a Born Liar (2003)
“The idiots always rose to the top and made policy.
It explained a lot of things.”
Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 22 (p. 200)
