NOT long ago, I heard a Christian quote the following words of Einstein during a religious debate against atheists:
“In the view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.” †
It would seem then, at first glance, that Einstein was probably of a religious disposition. This view is supported by the following often repeated Einstein quotes:
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” †
“Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.“ †
“I, in any case, am convinced [God] does not play dice.” †
“The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not.” †
“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.” †
Despite being born into a Jewish family, one might even speculate that Einstein identified with Christianity, given his response when an interviewer asked him about Jesus:
Interviewer: “You accept the historical existence of Jesus?” Einstein: “Unquestionably. No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life. How different, for instance, is the impression which we receive from an account of legendary heroes of antiquity like Theseus. Theseus and other heroes of his type lack the authentic vitality of Jesus.” †
With seemingly conclusive quotes such as these, how could we ever doubt Einstein’s religious disposition? Well, just take a look at the following quotes sometimes referenced by atheists to prove that Einstein was one of them:
“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” †
“I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.”†
“To assume the existence of an unperceivable being … does not facilitate understanding the orderliness we find in the perceivable world.” †
“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.” †
“I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual who survives his physical death.” †
If you get the feeling that Einstein may have contradicted himself, I can’t entirely blame you. But what did he really believe? The answer emerges in a few other quotations that allow us to make sense of his seemingly conflicting religious and anti-religious attitudes:
“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man…. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive” †
“I have found no better expression than “religious” for confidence in the rational nature of reality, insofar as it is accessible to human reason. Whenever this feeling is absent, science degenerates into uninspired empiricism.” †
“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.” †
“The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image-a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being. For this reason, people of our type see in morality a purely human matter, albeit the most important in the human sphere.”†
“…Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.” †
“I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.” † (note: some question the word for word accuracy of the above quote, which comes from an interview with Einstein)
Einstein’s attitudes toward religion illustrate how cautious we must be when claiming that we understand another person’s opinion. Beliefs are sometimes complex, subtle, vague, or ambiguously articulated, and of course they can change dramatically with time. In this case, it is only after reading a great many quotes that we get a good feeling for what Einstein truly believed. By incautiously or unscrupulously quoting Einstein without proper context, as many have done before, we could easily have made him sound like a Jew, Christian, Atheist, Agnostic, Theist or Pantheist, but none of these labels seems to fully capture the subtlety of his thoughts. Oh yeah, and by the way, when Einstein said:
“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute–and it’s longer than an hour. That’s relativity.” †
he was only kidding!
Sources: quotationspage.com einsteinandreligion.com freerepublic.com The Yale Book of Quotations the guardian new scientist barefootsworld.net Albert Einstein, the Human Side
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