Einstein's Religion

"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 languages. The child knows someone must have written these 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. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contribution to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, not two separate things."

G.S. Viereck, Glimpses of the Great(Macauley, New York, 1930)

In April of 1929, Cardinal O'Connell, Archbishop of Boston, admonished the members of the New England Catholic Club of America not to read anything on relativity because it "befogged speculation producing universal doubt about God and his Creation... cloaking the ghastly apparition of atheism."

New York Times, 25 April 1929, p.60


Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogue in New York cabled Einstein simply, "Do you believe in God?"

Einstein replied: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."

So Einstein was, in fact, a deist. Not an atheist. Not even a "practical atheist" as so many atheists try to claim.

Einstein always fought the label of atheism and made a sharp distinction between his disbelief in a personal god and atheism:

"Speaking of the spirit that informs modern scientific investigations, I am of the opinion that all the finer speculations in the realm of science spring from a deep religious feeling, and that without such feeling they would not be fruitful. I also believe that, this kind of religiousness, which makes itself felt today in scientific investigations, is the only creative religious activity of our time. The art of today can hardly be looked upon at all as expressive of our religious instincts."

Einstein's theory of relativity was, as we now see in hindsight by biographical scholars, based on religious concepts. For example, in Spinoza's Ethics he declared, "God is immutable or all his attributes are immutable[like space]," and "an extended thing are God's attributes." In accordance with Spinoza, Einstein interpreted the term "endure" in the verse "the Heavens endure from everlasting to everlasting" in the sense of immutable existence.

What happened next? Einstein made what he called the "biggest blunder" of his career. In 1917 he modified the relativity field equation by introducing an additional term, the so-called "cosmological constant," in order to obtain a static unchanging universe. He essentially ruled out Big Bang 'spread' stating that the universe was somehow made and is stationary, excluding the orbits of galactic masses.

Steady expansion of the universe was only discovered in the late 1920's at the Mount Wilson Observatory. Nevertheless, Einstein was still kicking himself. Instead of trusting his gut instinct he tinkered with the formula to allow for religious ideas from his beloved Spinoza.

See what not trusting your instincts will do?