I heard that Einstein said that he believed in spinoza's God, the reasonhe said this because of the following statement he made "I see God as the way he shows himself in the laws of nature, the universe doesn't have to obey these laws, it doesn't have to have laws or it could have completely random laws" <-- could someone explain this to me please?

So the universe doesn't have to behave this way?

Meaning gravity doesn't have to exist, heat doesn't have to cause particles to vibrate, time doesn't have to move in a straight line, is it things like that?

 

Could the universe just as easily had gravity as a force that pushed? could particles just as easily vibrated to cause coldness? Could time just randomly start and stop at different points rather than going from becoming to?

Are there any investigations that point towards why the universe would be behaving this way ?

We know that gravity is mass, but do we have any idea why the mass of an object would cause an increase in the gravitational pull as compared to smaller mass?

This might seem like a weird and stupid question but I've been stuck on it for some time now

"We know that gravity is mass, but do we have any idea why the mass of an object would cause an increase in the gravitational pull as compared to smaller mass?"

 

An answer to that is that mass induces a curvature of space, and that the greater the mass the greater the curvature.

I've seen the explanation of how gravity works, like this solar system on a blanket, the sun would cause the biggest dip in the blanket balancing in space, the earth would be pulled into the dip, but we don't know exactly why mass would have the effect on this dip?

would the dip just as easily be able to have a force that instead of looking like it dips actually turn into a rise in the blanket,.so that the planets roll outwards away from the sun?

I think Einstein is meaning that no matter how clever we get in phrasing the laws of physics, or writing them in an economical form, we will always be left with at least one equation or principle at the end. Even if we just have one equation, or maybe say that the laws of the universe are derived from one underlying principle, we can always ask, "Why that equation?" or "Why that principle?" In other words, "it didn't have to be that way" is asking why shouldn't it have been some other principle or equation. In some sense that final equation is God because it creates all things, all things are ruled by it, and all things come from it.

There is an inherent logic to the universe. That is why humans can construct mathematical equations to represent physical behavior. It underlies all the so-called laws of physics. This logic, I think, represents Einstein's "God".

God is the actions of the universe?