The God Delusion翻译：第一章第一节（7）

Amusingly, Sagan's last point was foreshadowed by the Reverend Dr Fulton J. Sheen, a professor at the Catholic University of America, as part of a fierce attack upon Einstein's 1940 disavowal of a personal God. Sheen sarcastically asked whether anyone would be prepared to lay down his life for the Milky Way. He seemed to think he was making a point against Einstein, rather than* for him, for he added: 'There is only one fault with his cosmical religion: he put an extra letter in the word - the letter "s".' There is nothing comical about Einstein's beliefs. Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.
有意思的是，美国天主教大学教授，牧师，福尔顿.J.锡恩博士似乎早前就印证了萨根的话中的最后一点。此公参与了1940爱因斯坦拒绝人格化上帝事件中对爱因斯坦的恶毒攻击。锡恩嘲弄地问道是否有人愿意为银河系献出自己的生命。他似乎觉得他反驳了爱因斯坦一下，而不是反驳了他自己，因为他又加了一句：“在他的宇宙宗教中只有一个毛病：他用那个词（老查注：这里指的是“上帝这个词”）时用了复数。（老查注：指的是爱因斯坦认为有多个上帝）”爱因斯坦的信仰当然并不好笑。然而，我希望物理学家们不要在爱因斯坦信仰的隐喻意义上使用上帝这个词。物理学家们的隐喻和泛神论意义上的上帝和圣经里的，牧师们的，阿訇们的，拉比们的以及人们日常语言中的那个干涉人世，玩弄神迹，察查人心，惩罚罪恶，回应祈祷的上帝之间的差距有好几光年。在我看来，故意混淆这两者，是对智力的严重背叛行为。