Einstein’s God

When asked if he was religious Einstein answered: “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, 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, in fact, religious.”

As a child, Einstein had gone through an ecstatic religious phase, then rebelled against it. For the next three decades, he tended not to pronounce much on the topic. But around the time he turned 50, he began to articulate more clearly---in various essays, interviews, and letters---his deepening appreciation of his Jewish heritage and, somewhat separately, his belief in God, albeit a rather impersonal, deistic concept of God.

More quotes from Albert Einstein about his religion:

The highest satisfaction of a scientific person is to come to the realization that God Himself could not have arranged these connections any other way than that which does exist, any more than it would have been in His power to make four a prime number.

As I 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.

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.

I am not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. 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 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 the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.

I am a determinist. I do not believe in free will. Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine. In that respect I am not a Jew.

Every one 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.

The cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.

Einstein never felt the urge to denigrate those who believe in God; instead, he tended to denigrate atheists. “What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos,” he explained.

In fact, Einstein tended to be more critical of the debunkers, who seemed to lack humility or a sense of awe, than of the faithful. He said the fanatical atheists  are creatures who “in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’---cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

He wrote to a Brooklyn minister: “The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.”

Source: Einstein. His Life and Universe (2007) by Walter Isaacson.