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The 40% personal God plus the deist estimate is the over 50% I was recalling. I had forgotten that SA had an article on it. It is a solid survey, and a solid number. I had forgotten that the question that got the 40% demanded not only a personal god but also an afterlife belief - indeed I do not recall the question and am now "in search of" that wording as well as the intro wording to the extent my memory allows for future tasks. :-) The NAS survey tells little except that of the about 300 folks that sent cards back out of the about 2500 in the membership, about 280 had no belief in God. A fairly pointless exercise until they get the participation a great deal higher. Einstein was no atheist. The excerpts below explain this better than I can (Quoted and paraphrased below from http://www.ctinquiry.org/publications/reflections_volume_1/torrance.htm) "In a recent book Max Jammer, Rector Emeritus of Bar Lan University in Jerusalem, a former colleague of Albert Einstein at Princeton, claims that Einstein's understanding of physics and his understanding of religion were profoundly bound together, for it seemed to Einstein that nature exhibited traces of God quite like "a natural theology." Indeed it is with the help of natural science that the thoughts of God may be tapped and grasped. 1 On the subject of Einstein and God Friedrich Dürrenmatt once said, "Einstein used to speak of God so often that I almost looked upon him as a disguised theologian." 2 I do not believe these references to God can be dismissed simply as a façon de parler, for God had a deep, if rather elusive, significance for Einstein which was not unimportant for his life and scientific activity. It indicated a deep-seated way of life and thought: "God" was not a theological mode of thought but rather the expression of a "lived faith" (eines gelebten Glaubens)." Einstein regularly read the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike (which he continued to do throughout his life - also he composed songs to the glory of God in his youth). (Later in life in a speech delivered in Berlin he said) "Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there. 5 (His marriage to the Greek Orthodox Mileva Maric left him using for the rest of his life terms such as "transcendent" and "incarnate" to speak of "the cosmic intelligence" which lay behind the universe of space and time. Per the 1929 Saturday Evening Post interview:, in 1929: "To what extent are you influenced by Christianity?" "As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene." "Have you read Emil Ludwig's book on Jesus?" "Emil Ludwig's Jesus is shallow. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot." "You accept the historical Jesus?" "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." 7 When the Rev. Andrew Blackwood handed him a magazine clipping about the interview published in the Saturday Evening Post, and asked him if it was accurate, he read it carefully and answered, "That is what I believe". 8 His feeling toward the Church is nicely expressed in the letter Einstein sent to an American Episcopal Bishop about the behaviour of the Church during the holocaust. Being a lover of freedom...I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom, but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. Only the church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special interest in the church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly. 9 However, in relation to petitionary prayer Einstein not infrequently reacted against "the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfilment of their wishes", for that implied for him, as we will note, a selfish "anthropomorphic" idea of God which he rejected. 10 On hearing a Yehudi Menuhin, the great violinist, give a recital at a concert on Beethoven, Bach and Brahms, by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bruno Walter, Einstein was so overwhelmed that he rushed across the stage into Menuhin's dressing room, and exclaimed, "Jetzt weiss ich, dass es einen Gott im Himmel gibt"—"Now I know that there is a God in heaven." 11 What does all this tell us about Einstein the scientist and "God"? That is a matter which calls for a more considered thought than is usually given. And so, in the rest of this lecture I would like to address myself to two questions: 1) What did "God" mean for Einstein himself, and 2) What did "God" imply for his mathematical and physical science? Early in his life Einstein came to refer to God as "cosmic intelligence" which he did not think of in a personal but in a "super-personal" way, for, as he learned from Spinoza, the term "personal" when applied to human beings cannot as such be applied to God. 12 Nevertheless he resorted to the Jewish-Christian way of speaking of God who reveals himself in an ineffable way as truth which is its own certainty. Spinoza held that "truth is its own standard". "Truth is the criterion of itself and of the false, as light reveals itself and darkness," so that "he who has a true idea, simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt concerning the truth of the thing perceived." 13 Hence once a thing is understood it goes on manifesting itself in the power of its own truth without having to provide for further proof. 14 Thus when God reveals himself to our minds, our understanding of him is carried forward by the intrinsic force of his truth as it continually impinges on our minds and presses for fuller realization within them. In this way Einstein thought of God as revealing himself in the wonderful harmony and rational beauty of the universe, which calls for a mode of non-conceptual intuitive response in humility, wonder and awe which he associated with science and art. It was particularly in relation to science itself, however, that Einstein felt and cultivated that sense of wonder and awe. Once when Ernest Gordon, Dean of Princeton University Chapel, was asked by a fellow Scot, the photographer Alan Richards, how he could explain Einstein's combination of great intellect with apparent simplicity, he said, "I think it was his sense of reverence." 15 That was very true: Einstein's religious and scientific instinct were one and the same, for behind both it was his reverent intuition for God, his unabated awe at the thoughts of "the Old One", that was predominent. Although Einstein was not himself a committed Jewish believer he would certainly have agreed with the call of Rabbi Shmuel Boteach today to restore God himself, rather than halacha, as the epicentre of Judaism. 16 Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. 17 That statement comes from his 1939 address to Princeton Theological Seminary, but far from being unique, it is reflected in statement after statement he made about science, religion, and God. Count Kessler once said to him, "Professor! I hear that you are deeply religious." Calmly and with great dignity, Einstein replied, "Yes, you can call it that. 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." 18 By way of the understanding he achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind towards the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious, in the highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life.19
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior Spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. The deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning Power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God. 20
You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own . . . .His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. 21
While at one point he refers to his believing in a pantheistic' Spinoza ("By God", Spinoza wrote at the very beginning of his Ethica, "I mean a being absolutely infinite-that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality". Proposition XV of the Ethica stated: "Whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived." 25) God. 22 , when asked about this later he says
"Do you believe in the God of Spinoza?" Einstein replied as follows:
I can't answer with a simple yes or no. 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 different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement 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. We see a universe marvellously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things. 26
Einstein held that the main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lay in "the concept of a personal God" for that was to think of God in an anthropomorphic way, and to project into him figurative images and human psychological notions of personality, which give rise, he held, to religious practices of worship and notions of providence shaped in accordance with human selfish desires. That did not mean that Einstein thought of God merely in some impersonal way, for, as we have noted, he thought of relation to God in a sublime superpersonal way which he confessed he was unable to grasp or express and before which he stood in unbounded awe and wonder. Hence he felt it deeply when Cardinal O'Connell of Boston charged him with being an atheist. 31 When a newspaperman once accosted him in California with the question, "Doctor is there a God?", Einstein turned away with tears in his eyes. 32
What, then, did Einstein mean by claiming to believe in Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, the intellectual love of God, the highest happiness that man can know? He was approving of Spinoza's idea that to be rational is to love God and to love God is to be rational, so that for one to engage in science is to think the thoughts of God after him. With Spinoza, however, that involved the outright identification of God with nature, a causally concatenated whole, whereas, as we have seen, with Einstein the Verständlichkeit of God was so exalted that it could not be reduced to the logico-causal intelligibilities of nature. A transcendent relation had to be taken into account.
Here let me refer to a very interesting letter, recorded by Helen Dukas, which Einstein wrote to a child who asked him whether scientists prayed.
I have tried to respond to your question as simply as I could. Here is my answer. Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural Being. However, it must be admitted that our actual knowledge of these laws is only imperfect and fragmentary, so that, actually the belief in the existence of basic all-embracing laws in nature also rests on a sort of faith. All the same this faith has been largely justified so far by the success of scientific research. But, on the other hand, 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, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. 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. 33
Early in his career Einstein's studies of Newton and Kepler convinced him that there is no logical path to knowledge of the laws of nature, for there is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles. 34 This was greatly reinforced by his study of James Clerk Maxwell. 35 It is the extra-logical problem, he held, that is essential, namely, the ontological reference of thought to reality. 36 Within the preestablished harmony of the universe, "ideas come from God"–they are revealed to the mind tuned into the master plan of the universe, and are apprehended through intuition resting on sympathetic understanding of experience. "He has to persist in his helpless attitude towards the separate results of empirical research, until principles which he can make the basis of deductive reasoning have revealed themselves to him." 37 "The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those elementary universal laws from which the cosmos can be built up by deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them...There is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles; that is what Leibnitz described so happily as a 'preestablished harmony.'" 39
Einstein used to speak of this non-logical, intuitive way of reaching knowledge, as "tapping into God's thoughts". 40 "The deeper one penetrates into nature's secrets, the greater becomes one's respect for God." 41 Once when drawing out the implications of relativity theory in an amusing way which he hoped was in tune with the thoughts of God, he said "I cannot possibly know whether the good Lord does not laugh at it and has led me up the garden path"! 42 I think of that in connection with the fact that the equations of relativity theory predict their own limits, and thus direct us back to a zero point in the expansion of the universe from what is commonly known as "the black hole", which, as Henry Margenau held, implied the principle of creatio ex nihilo. 43 Einstein pointed out that "one must not conclude that the beginning must mean a singularity in the mathematical sense." Then he added: "This consideration does, however, not alter the fact that the 'beginning of the world' really constitutes a beginning." 44 Such a beginning, a creatio ex nihilo, was of course an idea which was ruled out by Spinoza's Deus sive Natura notion of God as an infinite, eternal self-creating substance, and of his conception of the universe as non-contingent and completely necessary in its identification with God.
"God does not play dice". (QM was seen as a way to get answers, but of no help in the quest to get a rigorous scientific description of the intrinsic orderliness of nature at its micro-physical as well as at every other level of reality. Einstein once wrote of his objections to the then current form of quantum theory that his view of the matter "does not represent a blind-man's buff with the idea of reality". 46 - causing Max Born to accuse him of being a hardline determinist - causing Wolfgang Pauli to show, writing to Born in Edinburgh from Princeton, 47 that Einstein was not a determinist but a realist, with the conviction that, in line with Clerk Maxwellian field theory and general relativity theory, nature is governed by profound levels of intelligible connection that cannot be expressed in the crude terms of classical causality and traditional mathematics. He was convinced that the deeper forms of intelligibility being brought to light in relativity and quantum theory cannot be understood in terms of the classical notions of causality–they required what he called Übercausalität–supercausality. And this called for "an entirely new kind of mathematical thinking", not least in unified field theory–that was a kind of mathematics he did not even know, but which someone must find. 48 )..(..while in the logical sense belief in order in the universe is neither verifiable nor falsifiable, it remains the most persistent of all scientific convictions, for without it there could be no science at all; hence we do not believe that there is or could be anything that can ultimately count against it. God is faithful, and does not let us down; he is always trustworthy).
(1) Einstein never gave any attention to the problem of evil–evil is ultimately irrational and inexplicable, an abysmal mystery, as St Paul called it. There is no reason why to evil. (2) As far as I know, Einstein showed no interest in redemption–either in the biblical significance of atonement, or in the Jewish celebration of Yom Kippur. Yet it is only from God who does not play dice, who does not wear his heart on his sleeve, and who is deep but not devious, that we may be given an understanding of the ultimate reason for the created universe, and of his redemptive purpose for a world that has gone astray. It may be interesting to note that another Jewish scientist, Ilya Prigogine, who is not a believer, yet not a determinist like Spinoza who had no place in his thought for "time", has actually spoken of time as "redeemable". 58
Notes for Einstein and God
Max Jammer, Einstein und Die Religion, Konstantz, 1995.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Albert Einstein, Z ürich, 1979, p.12, cited by Max Jammer, op. cit. p. 54: "Einstein pflegte so oft von Gott zu sprechen, dass ich beinahe vermute, er sei ein verkappter Theologe gewesen."
While in his religious years he tried to dissuade his parents from eating pork, it is related of a later occasion that when he and some friends were entering a restaurant, an Orthodox Jew asked whether the food was strictly kosher, Einstein replied, "Only an ox eats strictly kosher"! Denis Brian, Einstein, A Life, New York, 1996, p.128. But Einstein was never disrespectful of the beliefs and habits of his orthodox friends.
Cf. Abraham Pais, 'Subtle is the Lord...', Oxford, 1982, p. 319. Cf. also Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, New York, 1954; "The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition." See also Max Jammer, op.cit. p. 48f.
Cited in Brian, op. cit., p. 234.
Ibid., p. 12.
George Sylvester Viereck, "What Life Means to Einstein", The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929.
Brian, op. cit., p. 277f.
Reported in The Evening News, Baltimore, April 13, 1979.
See his 1939 address to Princeton Theological Seminary, Ideas and Opinions, p.46.
This is also recounted by Brian, op. cit., p. 193.
Cf. Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza, revised edition, Harmondsworth, 1962, p. 49: "It is a general principle in Spinoza's philosophy, which he constantly repeats to prevent misunderstandings, that no term when applied to God can possibly bear the meaning which it has when applied to human beings."
The Chief Works of Benedict De Spinoza, Vol. II, Ethica, Proposition XLIII, translated and edited by R.H.M. Elwes, London, 1889, p. 114; De Intellectus Emendatione, pp. 12-19. Cf. Hampshire, Spinoza, p. 99f.
Tractatus de intellectus emendatione, ed. Elwes, p. 19.
Alan Windsor Richards, Einstein as I Knew Him, Princeton, 1979.
Rabbi Shmuel Boteach, The Jewish Chronicle, 26.10.96.
Ideas and Opinions, p. 46.
Cited by Brian, op. cit. p. 161.
Out of My Later Years, New York, 1950, p. 32; and Ideas And Opinions, p. 49.
Cited by Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Einstein, New York, 1948, Mentor soft cover edition, 1963, p. 109.
Ideas and Opinions, p. 40.
Einstein, The World as I See It, London, 1955, p. 131.
Ideas and Opinions, p. 44f. In his reference to Buddha Einstein may have had Ben Gurion in mind or even David Bohm! Cf. the discussion, reported by Max Jammer, which Einstein once had with Rabindranath Tagore about his book The Religion of Man, when Einstein said: "I am more religious than you are!" Op. cit. p. 43.
Brian, op. cit. p. 127.
See the translation by Elwes, London, pp. 45 and 51.
Brian, op. cit. p. 186.
Spinoza's Correspondence, letter LXXXIII-see Spinoza's Works, Vol. II, p. 299.
A Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza's Works, vol. I, p.9.
Letter XXIII (LXXV), The Chief Works of Spinoza, Vol. II, p. 303.
John Reuchlin, De Verbo Mirifico, 1552, 2.7, p. 129. Cf. my essay "The Hermeneutics of John Reuchlin, 1455-1522", Church, Word and Spirit: Historical and Theological Essays in Honor of Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Edited by J.E. Bradley and R.A. Muller, Grand Rapids, 1987, pp. 107-121.
Cf. Jammer, op. cit. p.54; and Albert Einstein–The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann, Princeton University Press, 1979, p.132.
Brian, op. cit. p. 206.
Dukas and Hoffmann, op. cit. p. 32f. My attention has been drawn to this passage by Mark Koonz, formerly of Princeton Theological Seminary.
Einstein, The World as I See It, p. 125f.
See The Evolution of Physics, from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta, by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, New York, 1938, pp. 125ff; and "Maxwell's Influence on the Development of the Conception of Physical Reality", by Einstein, reproduced in my edition of James Clerk Maxwell, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, Edinburgh, 1982, pp. 29-32.
Ibid. p. 174.
Ibid. p. 128; and see the essay on "Physics and Reality", Out of My Later Years., pp. 60ff.
The World as I See It, p. 125f.
Brian, op. cit. pp. 61 and 173.
. p. 129.
. p. 67.
Henry Margenau, Thomas and the Physics of 1958, Milwaukee, 1958, pp.
See Jammer, op. cit., pp. 102f. and 115.
A. Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity, Princeton, 1953, p. 129.
Baruch Spinoza, Ethica, proposition XXIX: In rerum natura nullum datur contingens, sed omnia ex necessitate divinae naturae determinata sunt ad certo modo existendum et operandum. English translationd by Andrew Boyle, Everyman's Library, vol. 481, London, 1959, p. 23. See also Jammer, op. cit. p. 38f.
Irene Born, The Born-Einstein Correspondence, London, 1971, p. 180f.
Ibid. pp. 217-218 and 322-224.
Brian, op. cit., p. 370.
Einstein, Out of My Later Years, pp. 30,60.
Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, p. 49; cf. also p. 40.
Thus Brian, op. cit. p. 127.
See Pais, op. cit., frontispiece.
"Geometry and Experience", the 1921 lecture to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Ideas and Opinions, p. 233.
Brian, op. cit. p. 370.
"Über den Gegenwärtigen Stand der Feld-Theorie", Festschrift zum 70 Geburtstag von Prof. Dr A. Stodola, Zürich, 1929, pp. 126-132.
Ibid., p. 126: "Wir wollen nicht nur wissen wie de Natur is (und wie ihre Vorgänge ablaufen), sondern wir wollen...wissen warum die Natur so and nicht anders ist."
Ibid., p. 127.
"The Rediscovery of Time", Zygon, Journal of Religion and Science, December, 1984, Vol. 19, No. 4, p. 444, with reference to T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton".
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