Einstein’s Idea Of Religion

In a long life, Einstein spoke and wrote on a vast range of topics, and practically every paragraph has been dissected to discover its meaning today, or to bolster our own particular beliefs. One of his interesting sayings is that the most beautiful experience one may enjoy is a ‘sense of mystery’. Inevitably this has led to the suggestion that Einstein was in some way a mystic. (I define mysticism as the search for conscious awareness of, or communion or unity with, the divine through direct experience.) Einstein’s religious views have been a matter of considerable controversy. Max Jammer, the well-known Jewish historian and philosopher of science, wrote a thoughtful book, Einstein and Religion, concluding that for Einstein ‘religion’ was definitely not ‘atheism’. Einstein himself said that: ‘You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling’. Yet in his bestselling and much-publicised atheist polemic, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, who takes most of his Einstein quotes from Jammer, categorises Einstein as ‘atheistic’. Einstein, in fact, spoke and wrote of God extremely frequently; for example his most famous way of criticising the random nature of quantum mechanics was to say ‘God does not play dice’. He described himself as ‘an intensely religious man’, but also, equally interestingly, as ‘a deeply religious non-believer’. A crucial point is that Einstein stated categorically that he did not believe in a personal God, of the kind assumed by most practising religious people. He had not always been this way. Though brought up in a very liberal Jewish household, at the age of six he became fervently religious, obeying all the religious prescriptions. However, when he was 12, he read various scientific texts and came to believe that much in the Jewish bible could not be true. This was a crucial period in his life, in which he became an intense freethinker, first over religious matters, later over orthodox scientific beliefs. Einstein detested the idea of a personal God who rewarded or punished his creatures, or exercised his will by interfering in events. He felt such an idea was intrinsically connected with human selfishness, merely ‘a reflection of human frailty’. Einstein’s God was a much more lofty idea. However, for Christian fundamentalists on one flank, and for Dawkins on the diametrically opposite flank, anything but a personal God was no God at all, and Einstein could be vilified or saluted as an atheist. So what was Einstein’s religion? He called it ‘cosmic religion’ and it was a sense of awe at ‘the nobility and marvellous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought’. He believed that throughout history the greatest religious geniuses have followed cosmic religion, and that exploring this order in the laws of science was the motivation for the most celebrated scientists such as Newton and Kepler. Without this feeling of confidence in order and simplicity, science, he felt, degenerated into uninspired empiricism. Einstein felt closest to the nineteenth century Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who also rejected the idea of a personal God. Like Einstein, some considered Spinoza intensely religious while others judged him an atheist. Spinoza’s firmest belief was in a universal determinism; all events, including the actions of human beings, followed a precise law of cause and effect. There was no free will, and thus no justification for punishment of offenders. Einstein broadly followed Spinoza in these beliefs. As is well known, as well as realism, he was a strong believer in determinism; one of his main arguments against quantum mechanics was that it respected neither. Spinoza’s belief in the unity of nature was paralleled in Einstein’s long search for a unified field theory. Einstein’s view of traditional religion was somewhat ambivalent. He detested any idea of indoctrination or fundamentalism, but admitted that conventional religions had a role in setting ethical standards. Dawkins would disagree, considering that ‘the cause of all this misery, mayhem, violence, terror and ignorance is religion itself ’. Einstein also venerated the founders of the major religions, especially Jesus and Buddha; Dawkins might be more sceptical. Einstein even found the elements of cosmic religion in the Psalms and the Proverbs of the bible, and particularly in Buddhism. An interesting question is whether Einstein’s beliefs, like those of Spinoza, were pantheistic, in the sense of actual worship of Nature, giving it the status of God. At times Einstein seemed close to accepting this label, but he was clear that God was to be found in the laws of the Universe, not in Nature itself. Jammer suggests that Einstein’s theology may be called a naturalistic theology, in which one searches for God by study of the Universe. So at last we reach the question: Could Einstein be considered a mystic? Awe about the Universe might lead to some direct spiritual experience of ‘God’, however ‘God’ might be defined. However Einstein explicitly rejected such ideas, saying: ‘Mysticism is the only reproach that people cannot level against my theory’. Whatever his feeling of wonder about the Universe, his exploration into its laws was always entirely rational. He believed that scientific knowledge could not be obtained through direct supernatural perception, and incidentally considered any idea of personal immortality or the suggestion of any contact with the dead ridiculous. I started off by suggesting that many things may be read into Einstein’s words, but mysticism is certainly one thing that may be ruled out.