Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer told The Daily Caller in a recent interview that he doesn’t believe in God in the traditional sense. But while he doesn’t describe himself as an atheist, the popular commentator said that he has a “complicated notion of the deity.”
“There was once a philosopher who said, ‘I don’t believe in God, but I fear him greatly.’ That’s about where I am,” he told the outlet. “I’ve had a fairly difficult and complicated notion of the deity.”
Krauthammer added that Albert Einstein’s concept of God most resonates with him. He said that Einstein’s idea was “a recognition and an awe before the mystery of the order and beauty of the universe, which would imply that there is something very mysterious and very awesome — awe-inspiring — about the universe.”
This is certainly very different from the theological views expressed by mainstream faith groups, which generally have specific and codified interpretations of both God and creation.
Krauthammer drove home the point that he believes life’s complexities are vast and that he is ill-equipped to definitively know what’s out there.
“I feel the way that I think Newton once said. I feel like a snail on the side of a great ocean and the idea that I can understand a notion like God or humans can as if we’re expecting a snail to understand the motion of the tides through calculus and physics,” he said.
Krauthammer added, “That’s not possible. So I see the same kind of intellectual gap in the capacity of humans to understand in any deep sense about theology of God as for a snail to figure out how the tides work.”