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"Einstein Believed in God!"

“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.” (Albert Einstein, in a letter March 24, 1954; from Albert Einstein the Human Side, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, eds., Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 43.)

“My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.” (Albert Einstein in a letter to M. Berkowitz, October 25, 1950; Einstein Archive 59-215; from Alice Calaprice, ed., The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 216.)

“I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.” (Albert Einstein, replying to a letter in 1954 or 1955; from Albert Einstein the Human Side, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, eds., Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 39.)

Einstein was, from perhaps the age of twelve onward, a definite nontheist who did not believe in the kind of God who concerns himself with individual human lives. He did not believe in an anthropomorphic God, and in fact considered such a notion naïve; he did not believe in a prayer-answering God or in a moral law-giving God, believing that morality was of the utmost importance but was a strictly human matter. He repeated on many occasions that he did not believe in a personal God; that he is sometimes cited as a believer in God is probably attributable to three things: His own possibly lamentable tendency to use the word "God" metaphorically (as when he said, in reference to quantum mechanics, that God did not play dice with the universe, or when he said, in reference to the character of physical law, that the Lord was subtle but not malicious); his own statements that he believed in the God of Spinoza, a God who revealed himself "in the orderly harmony of what exists" (and not in any concern for individual human beings); and the desire of some believers to claim Einstein as one of their own.

To be fair, Einstein was not a militant atheist; his attitude was humility in the face of the vast universe in which we live. In fact, Einstein was, in his way, deeply religious, if to have a deep sense of wonder at and profound appreciation for the orderliness of nature and for the human capacity to comprehend even a little of it is to be religious, and he was, in his way, deeply spiritual, if to see the universe as a marvelous structure and to hold ethics and consideration for one's fellows in the highest regard is to be spiritual. And, also to be fair, Einstein's belief or nonbelief in a personal God hardly establishes as fact either the existence or the nonexistence of that God. Einstein, like the rest of us, could be mistaken, on occasion. But Einstein cannot properly be counted by those theists whose God is one to whom it makes sense to pray, or whose God is one who cares about human morality, or whose God is one who presides over an afterlife (as far as I know, Einstein didn't believe in an afterlife at all), as one of their number. Whatever mystical feeling he might have had; whatever sense of awe he might have felt when contemplating the order and comprehensibility of the world around us; whatever importance he might have attached to ethics; he most certainly was no theist of that sort. He most certainly did not believe in a personal God.

See here for more Einstein quotes on religious belief.

(© 2007 by Keith Brian Johnson)

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