Chapter 6: A“Firm Belief in aSuperior Mind”: Einstein on Religion
chapter 6: A “FIRM BELIEF IN A SUPERIOR MIND”: EINSTEIN ON RELIGION
WHAT IS RELIGION? For some people, it’s a boo word. It’s all about outdated superstitions that have no place in the modern world. For others, it’s what gives life meaning and purpose. Einstein uses the word religion in his own distinct way, which does not map easily onto what many people assume is its obvious meaning.[158] In this chapter, I will pay close and careful attention to Einstein’s use of the term and try to tease out what he means by it before going on to ask how his ideas can inform or enrich our own ideas about religious faith.
From the outset, we need to be clear that Einstein was not religious in the conventional sense of the word. Though his Jewish identity came to be increasingly important to him during the 1930s, Einstein never attended any religious services. Perhaps most important of all, there was no religious ceremony to mark his passing. Einstein asked to be cremated immediately after his death and for his ashes to be scattered on the waters of the Delaware River.
Yet Einstein talked a lot about God. In a lecture on Einstein’s intellectual achievements given at the Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule in Zürich in February 1979, Friedrich Dürrenmatt joked that “Einstein talked about God so much that I suspected he was a theologian in disguise.”[159] In his published works, Einstein repeatedly and explicitly refers to an “intelligence,” “mind,” or “force” that lies behind or beyond the universe and identifies this with God. “This firm belief . . . in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God.”[160]
Einstein was explicit, however, that he did not believe in a “personal God.” Although some read this to mean he did not believe in any kind of God,[161] Einstein was affirming his belief in some transcendent reality, which he was happy to designate “God,” while making it clear that he did not understand this God as “personal.” For Richard Dawkins, atheism is the belief that there is “nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe.”[162] Einstein is clearly not an atheist on the basis of this definition.
While Einstein’s God is impersonal, framed primarily in terms of the order and beauty of the universe, his concept of God cannot be reduced to a subjective feeling of awe. There is something beyond us that evokes a sense of awe, wonder, and mystery that Einstein sometimes describes as “cosmic religious feeling” and that he considered to be “the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.”[163]
At several points, Einstein specifically affirms his adherence to the concept of God associated with the seventeenth-century Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza —namely, an impersonal cosmic order. “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”[164] Einstein studied Spinoza during his period in Bern and began to refer to him explicitly from 1920 on.[165]
So what did Einstein find attractive in Spinoza’s notion of God? In a 1943 letter to Willy Aron, Einstein suggests that he was drawn to Spinoza because of their shared Jewish roots and culture.[166] Einstein is not, however, quite correct in stating that Spinoza held that God “reveals himself” in the order and structure of the universe. Spinoza did not think in terms of a self-revealing God but rather tended to equate God with the “orderly harmony” of the world, which human beings can discover but which does not disclose itself.
As we have seen, Einstein was not an atheist. So was he a humanist? Alex Michalos, an academic at the University of Northern British Columbia, wondered how a “relatively hard-headed humanist” such as Einstein could take religion so seriously while conceding that it captured “some very important aspect of Einstein’s own feelings and motives about his scientific work.”[167] I assume that Michalos is here picking up on the fact that Einstein became an adviser to the First Humanist Society of New York in 1929. In the twenty-first century, the term humanist has indeed come to be understood to mean something like “atheist,” “nonreligious,” or “secular.” However, this is not how the term was generally understood back in 1929, when, a year later, Charles Francis Potter, the founder of the First Humanist Society of New York, published the book Humanism: A New Religion in collaboration with his wife, Clara Cook Potter. This did not propose humanism as an alternative to religion but as a form of religion.
Such a “religious humanism” would have appealed to Einstein, as it echoed both his own positive views about religiosity and his more critical views of specific religious traditions, including Judaism and Christianity. Since then, more explicitly secular and atheist concepts of humanism have gained prominence in American and European public discourse so that the term humanism has come to mean a nonreligious, or even antireligious, worldview. This is not what the word meant at the time of the European Renaissance, and it was not what Einstein would have understood by the word in the 1920s and 1930s. Einstein often uses the term to refer to his concern for human freedom and well-being, particularly in the face of the rise of totalitarianism in Europe in the 1930s.
What Does Einstein Mean by Religion?
Einstein’s many statements about religion have encouraged a selectivity on the part of his readers, especially when they have polemical agendas to pursue. It is not difficult, through highly selective citation of those statements, to present Einstein in three quite different ways: as a traditional religious thinker, as an atheist who had no place for religion, or as someone who was so confused on the matter that he is not worth taking seriously.[168] In what follows, the main elements of his approach will be considered without trying to shoehorn him into somebody else’s categories.
The term religion is generally understood to mean something like “believing in the supernatural.” Yet scholars have long known that it is actually very difficult to define religion scientifically or culturally. For example, definitions of religion in terms of belief in gods or spiritual beings (such as Daniel Dennett’s simple and inaccurate assertion that “a religion without God or gods is like a vertebrate without a backbone”[169]) have to come to terms with the problem of Buddhism, which just doesn’t fit this description.[170] Many Eastern religions are actually philosophies of life, more akin to classical Stoicism than to what is normally understood by religion. In practice, many just assume that religion means what North Americans and Western Europeans think it means and are happy to leave it like that.
In clarifying what Einstein means by the term religion, I shall simply disregard what we think he ought to mean and concentrate on teasing out his own distinctive views. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued that you should work out the meaning of a word by the way it is used. I will therefore offer a short synopsis of Einstein’s use of the terms religion and religious and see where this leads us.[171] There are four main points that need to be made.
First, Einstein repeatedly refused to believe in a “personal God.” This, as we noted earlier, is entirely consistent with his stated belief in Spinoza’s conception of a God who is disclosed in the orderly harmony of what exists. Einstein here affirms belief in a specifically impersonal conception of God: “We followers of Spinoza see our God in the wonderful order and lawfulness of all that exists.”[172] Einstein suggests that belief in a personal God is the “main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and science.” Why? Because the “doctrine of a personal God interfering in events” is not consistent with the “ordered regularity” of natural processes.[173] According to Einstein, God does not break the laws of nature.
Einstein expresses another concern about the idea of a personal God —namely, that it represents an “anthropomorphic conception of God,” that is, a human construction of God that is simply a projection of aspects of human identity, which Einstein holds to be forbidden within Judaism on the basis of his reading of Exodus 20:4 (“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below”).[174] But I wonder: Might Einstein have confused two distinct ideas here? After all, it is possible to hold a personal understanding of God without relying on anthropomorphic assumptions.
This concern helps us understand Einstein’s hostility towards individual religions, which he tended to see as introducing ideas that were distortions of his own view of what religion ought to be like. He was particularly critical of the Christian Bible for its use of stories. How could the mystery of the universe be conveyed in this way? Einstein expressed this concern in a number of places, including the famous “God letter” of 1954, which speaks of the Bible as “a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends.” (This letter, written to the German philosopher Eric Gutkind shortly before Einstein’s death, was auctioned for a record amount at Christie’s in New York in December 2018.)[175] Yet such criticisms of Christianity and Judaism are part of a complex picture, and it is important to try to work out what Einstein’s broader vision of religion is all about.
Second, Einstein sees religion as a response to something that ultimately lies beyond nature rather than a feeling of awe that arises in response to the vastness of the natural world. In his correspondence with Karl Eddi, Einstein remarked that, despite his own misgivings about the idea, a belief in a personal God was still “preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook of life.”[176] Religion is a recognition of this “transcendental” outlook, which Einstein often describes in terms of a force, mind, or reason that transcends both nature itself and the human capacity to grasp the natural world fully. “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.”[177]
Einstein is sometimes presented as offering a purely subjective experience of awe at the immensity of the universe, without affirming any transcendent foundation for such an experience.[178] There are indeed passages in which he speaks of the importance of such feelings of awe without tethering this to a transcendent referent, such as God. Yet these must be set alongside other passages in which Einstein specifically affirms a transcendent basis for such feelings or emotions —as, for example, in his statement of his “firm belief in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience,” noted earlier. Einstein’s point is that this subjective response to the universe is not improperly invented by the observer but is properly grounded in something that lies beyond the observer.
Third, Einstein’s view of God is not to be identified with that of Spinoza, particularly the latter’s pantheism. Yes, there are continuities between Einstein and Spinoza, but there are also significant divergences. In an article in the New York Times in April 1929, Einstein declared that he was “fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism,” while making it clear that he didn’t think he could call himself a pantheist. Yet perhaps more notably, Spinoza stressed the importance of understanding our world and saw this rational comprehension of the universe as eliminating any sense of mystery in the face of nature. Such an attitude, he believed, would be eliminated once the intelligibility of the world had been grasped.[179]
Einstein, however, took a different view, constantly emphasizing the limits of our grasp of the rationality of the universe and the importance of a sense of mystery and wonder in the face of its vastness. Although he was not a mystic in any meaningful sense of the term,[180] Einstein was clear that a sense of “the mysterious” was the source of all true art and science, just as an “experience of mysteriousness” lay at the heart of religion. “What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly. . . . This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”[181] Where Spinoza saw the intelligibility of nature as confirmation of the competence of human reason, Einstein saw it as something that remained mysterious and puzzling. “I am imbued with the consciousness of the inability of the human mind to understand deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as ‘laws of nature.’”[182]
Fourth, Einstein’s understanding of religion does not involve devotional practice or rituals. We have no record of Einstein ever participating in any Jewish worship. For many people, a religion involves or even requires participation in such observances. But not, it would seem, for Einstein. In explaining what he thought was so significant about Judaism, Einstein identified three key themes: “The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice, and the desire for personal independence —these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.”[183] There is no reference here to any aspect of Jewish religious practice. Furthermore, Einstein objected to forms of religious education that focused on religious ceremonies or rituals rather than on ethical values.
So how can we make sense of these four broad characteristics of Einstein’s view of religion as well as the multiple scattered references to religion throughout his writings? My own view is that Einstein’s general concept of religion, especially his notion of a “cosmic religious feeling” that is not tethered to any “anthropomorphic conception of God,” is best understood as a philosophy of religion —that is to say, a set of ideas concerning a transcendent basis to the universe and the question of how we can know and represent it adequately without losing sight of its wonder and mystery.
As I read Einstein, I see a significant resonance with some eighteenth-century views on the “religion of nature.” “Religion is concerned with man’s attitude toward nature at large, with the establishing of ideals for the individual and communal life, and with mutual human relationship.”[184] This way of thinking about religion is often believed to have arisen partly in response to a dislike of organized religion, particularly the tendency of religious institutions to get locked into conflicts about their authority or privilege. This form of religion was also skeptical about any formal belief system; what really mattered was a sense of awe in the presence of natural grandeur and beauty.
This “religion of nature” fits in well with Einstein’s repeated expressions of distaste for religious ceremonies and specific religious doctrines. Historical religions, such as Christianity and Judaism, included elements that he found unnecessary or unacceptable —such as the idea of a personal God who answered prayers, a set of rituals and observances, or a foundational set of narratives or symbols. Einstein tended to regard historical religions as incorporating mythical ideas that had no place in his own understanding of genuine religion.[185] This again echoes a leading theme of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century European “religions of nature.”
Perhaps as a result of their suspicion of religious institutions, such “religions of nature” did not recognize any privileged or authoritarian clergy or priests but rather saw every intelligent person who reflected on the beauty or order of the universe as a “priest.” The best-known example of this is found in the writings of a great British contemporary of Newton, the chemist Robert Boyle. For Boyle, what he termed “natural philosophy” was a kind of spiritual exercise, intended to evoke respect or awe for nature.[186]
Let’s return to Einstein’s statement that “cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.”[187] This sets out clearly his core belief that religion (in his sense of the term) offers a fundamental motivation for scientific research that goes beyond a quest for understanding. This naturally leads us to consider how he understood the relationship of the natural sciences to religion.
Einstein on Science and Religion
Interest in exploring the relation of science and religion began to develop during the early modern period, as the notion of “natural philosophy” began to emerge as a field of research in its own right. During the seventeenth century, human curiosity —once seen as a vice —began to be seen instead as a virtue, capable of motivating people to explore the natural world and open up deeper questions of meaning. Natural philosophy both informed our understanding of the nature of God and was capable of inspiring moral and religious feelings.[188] By the time of Isaac Newton’s death, there was widespread interest in considering how the natural sciences could inform Christian theology and vice versa.
Today, there are three main attitudes within Western culture concerning how science and religion relate to each other:[189]
I favor the third of these approaches. Richard Dawkins is an excellent example of the first such approach. Einstein doesn’t really fit any of them, although most of his statements fit most easily within the second. Although he treats science and religion as quite different and noninteracting, he clearly believes that they could interact positively —for example, in exploring the relation of objective human knowledge and subjective human aspirations.[190]
Any attempt to discuss the relation of science and religion takes place amid the lengthening shadows of earlier controversies, which have since framed —and continue to frame —media discussions of the issue. During the 1930s and 1940s, Einstein was generally invited to discuss the relation of science and religion in the light of the prevailing assumption that these two aspects of human culture were at least in tension with each other, if not in a state of outright war. This perception was catalyzed by two factors. First, the publication of works such as Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), which presented highly selective and unscholarly, inaccurate accounts of religious history to promote the idea that science and religion were permanently and necessarily at war with each other.[191] And second, the rise of religious fundamentalism in the United States during the 1920s, which often led to science being presented as the enemy of religion. The famous Scopes Trial of 1925 confirmed the growing popular impression that science and religion were incompatible. The hostility existed on both sides: there were some scientists who considered religion to be irrational and outdated, and some religious people who considered science to be intellectually and morally corrupting.
Although this media perception persists, modern scholarship has offered a more reliable account of the situation. In a series of important and influential historical studies, the Oxford scholar John Hedley Brooke argued that “serious scholarship in the history of science has revealed so extraordinarily rich and complex a relationship between science and religion in the past that general theses are difficult to sustain. The real lesson turns out to be the complexity.”[192]
Brooke’s analysis has found widespread support within the scholarly community. The Australian historian Peter Harrison has confirmed the outlines of Brooke’s approach and pointed out that “study of the historical relations between science and religion does not reveal any simple pattern at all,”[193] such as the myth of the “conflict” narrative. It does, however, disclose a “general trend” that, for most of the time, religion has facilitated scientific inquiry. That’s one of the reasons why I like the “dialogical” approach to science and faith. It allows for a serious discussion, with the potential for the enrichment of both science and religion.
Yet back in the 1930s, the popular perception was that science and religion were at war with each other. So how could Einstein suggest that there might exist some kind of positive and constructive relationship between them? In addressing the relation of science and faith in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, Einstein had to engage some negative presuppositions about this relationship that were then seen as normative.
Einstein’s approach was to treat science and religion as two distinct and different areas of human reflection, focusing on different aspects of our attitude to our universe. We want to know both how things work and what they mean. In a lecture given at Princeton in May 1939, Einstein considered the limits of rationalism in dealing with the big questions of life.[194] His core aim was to consider the relation of two different realms or modalities of human thought: science (facts) and religion (values). Einstein opens this lecture by setting the context, noting that during the nineteenth century it was “widely held that there was an irreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief.” This was linked with the rationalist perspective that “belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition.” In developing his own perspective, Einstein affirms that “convictions can best be supported with experience and clear thinking.” This is completely consistent with Einstein’s overall approach to science. But what happens if reason cannot establish the principles by which we should live our lives?
Einstein is clear that “those convictions which are necessary and determinant for our conduct and judgments cannot be found solely along this solid scientific way.” What he has in mind here includes moral values and aspirations. When the scientific method is understood properly, these matters lie beyond its scope:
The scientific method can teach us nothing beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. . . . Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations.[195]
Both the identity of that goal and the motivation to reach that goal “must come from another source.”
Having briskly and efficiently shown the “limits of the purely rational conception of our existence,” Einstein then moves on to explore how religion might transcend these limits placed on human reason. For Einstein, “the most important function which religion has to perform in the life of man” is that of disclosing our “fundamental ends and valuations” and to “set them fast in the emotional life of the individual.” What he means by this is that religion discloses both the goals we should be pursuing in life and the ethical values that should guide us in this pursuit, as well as enabling these to become firmly anchored in an individual’s personal existence.
In a second paper of 1941,[196] Einstein turned to deal more explicitly with the relation of science and religion. Science, he suggests, is fundamentally an attempt to “bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thorough-going an association as possible.”[197] It’s a good summary of Einstein’s attempt to go beyond the mere accumulation of observations to achieving an understanding of our world, perhaps extending to the quest for a unified view of reality. The goal of science is to discover rules that permit facts to be interconnected, while aiming to reduce “the connections discovered to the smallest possible number.”[198] This “striving after the rational unification of the manifold” lay at the heart of Einstein’s quest for the unification of reality.
Religion, however, is rather more difficult to define. Einstein suggests that it might be helpful to focus on the capacity of religion to liberate people from their selfish desires on the one hand and their conviction of their individual “overpowering meaningfulness” on the other. Why? Because this allows people to have a sense of their true goal and motivates them to achieve it.
If this is so, Einstein suggests, there can be no conflict between science and religion. Science cannot establish values; religion cannot deal with facts and their relationship. “Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be.”[199] Tensions can arise, Einstein suggests, when religion intervenes “into the sphere of science” —for example, in treating the Bible as a scientific text —or when science attempts to establish human “values and ends.”
Thus far, Einstein appears to endorse a view similar to Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of science and religion as distinct and divergent “nonoverlapping magisteria.”[200] No meaningful or productive conversation is possible between them. Science and religion each occupy their own cultural silo or intellectual ghetto, from which outsiders are excluded. Einstein, however, declines to accept this conclusion. The realms of science and religion are indeed “clearly marked off from each other”; nevertheless, “there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies.”[201] Science is ultimately motivated by religion; religion is informed by science. Einstein summarizes this in one of his best-known aphorisms: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”[202]
Einstein returned to the question of a possible conflict between science and religion in June 1948. After reiterating his belief that, when properly understood, science and religion could not be in conflict, he developed the idea that historical religions, such as Judaism and Christianity, tended to draw on certain “epics and myths” and that it was the mythical or symbolic content of religious traditions that was likely to come into conflict with science, particularly when religions made “dogmatically fixed statements on subjects which belong in the domain of science.”[203]
Einstein does not elaborate on this point, but he appears to be criticizing those who treat the Bible as a scientific text —for example, in seeing it as providing information on the mechanism or chronology of the origins of the universe. This is consistent with the point made earlier: Einstein’s concept of religion does not rest on institutions, defining narratives, or charismatic individuals but on a recognition of the wonder and mystery of our universe and the “superior mind” that lies behind it. He was critical of specific religions —including his own Judaism —for introducing ideas that he considered to be at best unnecessary and at worst inventions and delusions. In particular, as we noted earlier, he was critical of the idea of a personal God, seeing this as implying that such a God could and might interfere with or disregard the laws of nature.
The Problem of the “Now”
Einstein’s analysis of the relationship of science and religion is, as we have noted, shaped by his own distinct understanding of religion, which is not easy to map onto the everyday realities that most people associate with this word. Yet the general points that underlie his discussion remain important. Science is not able to engage the human thirst for meaning and value in life; these need to be found elsewhere, and religion is able to engage these questions.
Earlier I suggested it was helpful to use the philosopher Mary Midgley’s idea of multiple maps of a complex reality to reflect on the relationship of the natural sciences, ethics, politics, and religion. We are meaning-seeking beings. Science is one offspring of our perennial urge to make sense of our existence; religion is another. We might suggest that the natural sciences develop maps that deal with the question of how things function or the ways in which aspects of our universe are interconnected. Einstein argues that the sciences disclose “how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other.” That map is important. But we need more than just this map, as it does not disclose “those convictions which are necessary and determinant for our conduct and judgments.” It is important to map the contours of the external world; we also need another map of the contours of our innermost longings, fears, and hopes. An objective account of our world does not easily or adequately engage our deepest existential questions.
To explore this further, it is helpful to reflect on Einstein’s notion of space-time. As we have seen, Einstein’s general theory of relativity sets out the notion of a four-dimensional space-time that warps and curves in response to mass or energy, thus causing the deflection of light beams as they pass by massive objects such as the sun. Although we intuitively think of space and time as quite separate notions, Einstein’s theory invites us to see them as fused together to form a four-dimensional continuum. In effect, space and time are merged into the single idea of space-time. Its four-dimensional curvature can be described by Riemannian geometry. The amount of curvature in a region reflects the strength of the gravitational field at that point.
The Curvature of Space and Time
Space and time curve in response to the mass of an object.
So where do we fit into this scheme of things? We can certainly think of ourselves as objects located in space-time. Yet one of the most distinctive features of human beings is that we try to make sense of our existence. Philosophers and theologians often make this point by emphasizing that human beings are both objects and subjects. Yes, we are located within the natural world, but we also think about this and try to work out how we fit into this world and what life is all about. The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger raised concerns during the 1940s about what he described as the “removal of the subject from science.” Physics has ignored scientists as subjective realities, even though their subjective experience is their essential link with the external world. The continuing interest in existentialism within Western culture reflects this anxiety that certain approaches to science dehumanize us by treating us as scientific objects rather than as thinking subjects.[204] A related point was made by Max Planck. Like Einstein, Planck held that there were limits to the capacity of science to fully understand our universe: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”[205]
Subjectivity is one of the things that makes us special as human beings. We might indeed talk about “space” and “time,” and some of us might even talk about “space-time”; yet we find it more natural to think in more subjective terms of “place” and “history.” A place is a space that is special because of its associations or memories. “Home” is a good example of a place. It is about far more than a specific spatial location: it evokes a sense of belonging and identity. Home is where our heart is; it is an emotionally important idea, which transcends a mere location on a map.
Similarly, history designates far more than the mere passage of time. It’s about things that have happened that matter and that affect us.[206] As objects, we exist in space-time; as people, we live in a place and in history. We want to reflect on our significance as individuals and so see the distinction between past, present, and future as more than changed coordinates in space-time. As human beings, we see this as a past in which we were not yet born, a present in which we live, and a future in which we are dead. That’s why the “now” —this slice of space-time in which we exist as living and reflective beings —is so important to us. Yet, as Einstein realized, physics cannot make such a distinction, no matter how important this distinction might be to us.
Physics represents all the events experienced by a single person as a “world-line,” a line in four-dimensional space-time. Yet there is nothing about any point on my world-line that singles it out as my “now.” The German physicist Hermann Weyl thought this was a good thing, and it stopped physicists from becoming embroiled in pointless philosophical debates: “The objective world simply is; it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.”[207]
Other physicists were not so sure. Surely something was missing from this hyperobjective and totally impersonal account of human existence? Reading Weyl’s views reminds me of a famous passage in C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, which complains about the drabness of a rationalist world and its failure to connect with the deepest longings and questions of the human heart: “On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other, a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.”[208]
This problem was noted and addressed by Sir Arthur Eddington, who played such a critical role in confirming Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In his 1928 classic The Nature of the Physical World, which introduced the phrase “Time’s Arrow,” Eddington noted how there was a mismatch between the pure objectivity of physics and the subjective experiential world of individuals: “Something must be added to the geometrical conceptions comprised in Minkowski’s world before it becomes a complete picture of the world as we know it.”[209] For Eddington, this “picture as it stands is entirely adequate to represent those primary laws of Nature”; it is not, however, adequate to engage our inner perceptions of the passage of time or other subjective concerns.
Einstein discussed this problem with the philosopher Rudolf Carnap, who worked at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton for two years from September 1952, thus overlapping with two of the final three years of Einstein’s life. As Carnap later recalled in his personal memoirs, Einstein was concerned about the problem of “now.” Human beings regarded the present as distinct from the past and the future and considered it to be special, but this distinction could not be sustained on the basics of physics alone. “Einstein thought that these scientific descriptions cannot possibly satisfy our human needs; that there is something essential about the ‘Now’ that is simply beyond the reach of science.”[210]
Einstein’s understanding of the relationship of science and religion can be seen as an attempt to integrate (or at least to hold together) the objective and subjective aspects of human existence, recognizing that both are important parts of a larger account of life. Some atheists may regard this as a ridiculous suggestion; others may welcome it while making the point that its generality makes it difficult to develop. Not many share Einstein’s idiosyncratic concept of religion. Surely there is a need to place Einstein in dialogue with specific communities of faith and ask where those conversations might go? In doing this, nobody is suggesting that Einstein is a member of such communities, simply that a dialogue might have some worthwhile outcomes.
We shall develop this point in the concluding chapter of this work, which asks a question that both needs to be asked and can be answered: What might a Christian learn from reading Einstein? How does Einstein inform and engage a Christian “big picture” of our world? In asking this question, we move beyond offering an analysis of Einstein’s ideas and achievements and explore how Christians might weave his ideas into their own understandings of our world.
[158] For the complexity of the term religion, see Harrison, “The Pragmatics of Defining Religion.”
[159] Dürrenmatt, “Albert Einstein,” 58.
[160] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 262.
[161] Jammer, Einstein and Religion, 150.
[162] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 35.
[163] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 38–39.
[164] This is Einstein’s famous response in 1929 to Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, who asked him whether he believed in God: Jammer, Einstein and Religion, 49.
[165] For a good summary of Einstein’s relation to Spinoza, see Jammer, Einstein and Religion, 43–51.
[166] Although some trace aspects of Einstein’s scientific theories back to the influence of this Dutch Jewish philosopher, these associations need to be treated with caution. See Jammer, Einstein and Religion, 46.
[167] Michalos, “Einstein, Ethics, and Science,” 347–48.
[168] The best study remains Jammer, Einstein and Religion, which scrupulously documents the multiple elements of his understanding of religion.
[169] Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 9.
[170] Southwold, “Buddhism and the Definition of Religion.”
[171] My own analysis leads me to more or less the same conclusions as Jammer’s.
[172] Letter to Eduard Büsching, dated October 25, 1929, quoted in Jammer, Einstein and Religion, 51.
[173] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 47–48.
[174] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 38.
[175] Letter to Eric Gutkind, dated January 3, 1954.
[176] Jammer, Einstein and Religion, 50–51. “Karl Eddi” was a pseudonym for the German journalist Eduard Karl Büsching, author of a book titled Es gibt keinen Gott (“There is no God”). On reading the book, Einstein suggested that its argument was such that it ought to have a different title: Es gibt keinen persönlichen Gott (“There is no personal God”).
[177] Kessler, The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan 1918–1937, 322.
[178] This is the view, for example, of Richard Dawkins: Dawkins, The God Delusion, 18.
[179] Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy, 140–41.
[180] Jammer, Einstein and Religion, 125–27.
[181] Dukas and Hoffmann, Albert Einstein, the Human Side, 39.
[182] Letter to Albert Chapple, dated February 23, 1954. Einstein Archive 59–405.
[183] Einstein, The World as I See It, 90.
[184] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 50.
[185] Einstein’s letter of January 3, 1954, to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, which is not included in the material reviewed by Jammer, Einstein and Religion, makes this point, which is repeated elsewhere in his published writings.
[186] Levitin, “The Experimentalist as Humanist.”
[187] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 38–39.
[188] Harrison, “Sentiments of Devotion and Experimental Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century England.”
[189] Other scholars offer different categories. For example, Ian Barbour develops four such options: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. See Cantor and Kenny, “Barbour’s Fourfold Way.”
[190] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 41–42.
[191] For a systematic dismantling of this work’s arguments and evidence, see Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion.
[192] Brooke, Science and Religion, 6.
[193] Harrison, “Introduction,” 4.
[194] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 41–44.
[195] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 41–42.
[196] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 44–49.
[197] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 44.
[198] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 48–49.
[199] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 45.
[200] Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria.”
[201] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 45.
[202] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 46.
[203] Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 50.
[204] Earnshaw, Existentialism, 1–25.
[205] Planck, Where Is Science Going?, 217.
[206] For a good discussion, see Brueggemann, The Land.
[207] Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, 116.
[208] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 197.
[209] Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 68. For a good discussion, see Galison, “Minkowski’s Space-Time.” Although Einstein developed special relativity without any of the mathematical formalism introduced by Minkowski, similar existential concerns can be raised about both ways of conceptualizing space and time.
[210] Schilpp, The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, 37–38. I have altered the translation of the final section of this sentence to capture the sense of Carnap’s original German: “. . . es gäbe etwas Wesentliches am Jetzt, das einfach außerhalb der Reichweite der Wissenschaft liege.”