From a supplementary information box in Chapter 13 – Design or Happenstance? © 2020 by Emory Lynn.
Einstein sometimes spoke metaphorically of God as he did in the famous quotation above. Many Jews and Christians were (and many still are) fond of including Einstein among the believers in Yahweh. Einstein expressed his frustration with this in the first quotation below. He did not believe in a personal God. He was religious only in the sense that he had a deep spiritual feeling for the workings of nature. Here are quotations that clearly describe Einstein’s “spirituality”:
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.3
I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. 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. The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.4
In 1954, a year before Einstein’s death, he wrote a letter to German Jewish philosopher Erik Gutkind explaining his thinking about God and biblical Judaism. The “God Letter,” handwritten in German on Princeton University letterhead, was sold at auction in 2018 for $2.9 million. Here is an excerpt translated to English5:
The word God for me is nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. … 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.
Notes:
3. From a letter Einstein wrote to Italian immigrant Joseph Dispentiere, dated March 24, 1954. It is included in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman (Princeton University Press, 1981), p 43.
4. From a letter Einstein wrote to Hans Muehsam, March 30, 1954; The Expanded Quotable Einstein, edited by Alice Calaprice, (Princeton University Press, 2000), p 218.
5. German to English translation by Joan Stambaugh.
