The God Delusion翻譯：第一章第一節（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，美國天主教大學教授，牧師，福爾頓.J.錫恩博士似乎早前就印證了薩根的話中的最後一點。此公參與了1940愛因斯坦拒絕人格化上帝事件中對愛因斯坦的惡毒攻擊。錫恩嘲弄地問道是否有人願意為銀河係獻出自己的生命。他似乎覺得他反駁了愛因斯坦一下，而不是反駁了他自己，因為他又加了一句：“在他的宇宙宗教中隻有一個毛病：他用那個詞（老查注：這裏指的是“上帝這個詞”）時用了複數。（老查注：指的是愛因斯坦認為有多個上帝）”愛因斯坦的信仰當然並不好笑。然而，我希望物理學家們不要在愛因斯坦信仰的隱喻意義上使用上帝這個詞。物理學家們的隱喻和泛神論意義上的上帝和聖經裏的，牧師們的，阿訇們的，拉比們的以及人們日常語言中的那個幹涉人世，玩弄神跡，察查人心，懲罰罪惡，回應祈禱的上帝之間的差距有好幾光年。在我看來，故意混淆這兩者，是對智力的嚴重背叛行為。