Letter by Einstein on Religion
May 15th, 2008
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Albert Einstein is best known as the father of modern physics, having changed the way we understand the world with the Theory of Relativity. However, he is also well known for his philosophical statements on science and mankind. One thing which has been debated widely has been Einstein’s views on religion. Einstein was born and raised a Jew (although not in an especially religious family) and would use the term “god” in many of his most famous statements, such as “God does not play dice.”
But what has been a bit less clear has been exactly what Einstein meant by his use of the word “god” or “religion.” Some have used such quotes by Einstein to claim that he was a religious man, and that religion has a place in science. Others, however, maintain that Einstein was simply using the word as a general figure of speech for the unity of the cosmos and not as a literal personal god.
Now, a letter, penned by Einstein in 1954, has come up for sale at auction. The letter deals directly with the views Einstein held on religion in his later life and can help shed some light on how the great physicist viewed religion.
… The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. 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.
In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.
Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual ‘props’ and `rationalisation’ in Freud’s language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.
With friendly thanks and best wishes
Yours, A. Einstein.
A bit blunt, eh? This letter was written toward the end of Einstein’s life, so it’s possible that his views changed during his lifetime. It makes it pretty clear how Einstein feels about religion. Although he clearly has an affinity toward the Jewish people, as a group, his view on the substance of the religion does not show much fondness.
This letter may finally settle the debate, or it may just add fuel to the fire. Perhaps it will do both.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Good Science, History, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 15th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
It looks like Einstein thought of religion as a crutch. This is consistent with his best-known pro-religion statement that “Religion without science is blind; science without religion is lame.”
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May 15th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
If you read the first article linked, it states that Einstein started off in a “religious paradise” but then began having doubts about the accuracy of the Bible/Torah as early as age 12. Einstein may have had some idea of religion early on in his life but clearly by the time of the 1950’s, he had come to the conclusion that it was worthless. Of course he probably did much earlier.
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May 15th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
The unfortunate thing about this is that it is going to give Eric Gutkind, whom the letter was written to, more PR than he deserves.
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May 15th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
DV82XL said:
You take what you can get. Few things are perfect
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May 15th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Joseph Hertzlinger said:
I always disliked that statement greatly. I agree with the first part, but the second is way too pro-religion. I’d rather be lame than blind, especially in this sense where blind means unable to understand the world at all.
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May 15th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Whenever one discusses Einstein’s attitudes on religion, one must be sensitive to the fact that he was a product of his time and his ethnic background. In that time it was not so easy for a Jew to separate himself completely from his religion. Keep in mind that Einstein did not fit in with the local Jewish community since he was not observant in any manner. Albert was nourished in a family that had broken with tradition and disagreed with conventional customary Jewish views and ideas. He was sent to a Catholic school on pretense that it was convenient and there he remained an outsider, a pattern that repeated itself through out his life, severing all formal connection with the Jewish faith. But Einstein was recruited by Chaim Wiezmann to help raise money for the World Zionist Organization and through which he became a Zionist, a cause to which he was willing to help until the end of his life.
He said that he believed in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men. He was in the end an agnostic.
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May 17th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
I am with Einstein’s thoughts to a certain extent. I cannot pretend to have a brilliant mind such as his.
To clarify, to some extent, Einstein formed his beliefs on experience and the era that he lived in. He had the ability to ’step outside’ convential attitude and base his opinion on experienced religious insight and a highly developed scientific mind.
However, concepts and science have progressed.
What we once perceived God to be has been re-evaluated and, no doubt, will be again in the future.
THEREFORE, I embrace scientific proof but only until such time that science progresses far enough to explain the unexplainable, to progress beyond a point of progress into an area that jeopordises our own existence as we undertand it now OR provide a solution.
Einstein hit the nail on the head when he stated ‘In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew’.
Not only was Einstein a brilliant scientist, he appeared to be a man deeply concerned by common religious thought.
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May 17th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
aegis said:
What you are referring to is the Singularity
The Singularity is an event horizon in the truest sense. But instead of a cosmological event horizon caused by a black hole’s gravitational pull, it’s a social event horizon caused by our inability to extrapolate the trajectory of human civilization beyond a certain point of technological sophistication. It therefore describes a futurological problem — a blind-spot in our predictive thinking.
aegis said:
There is a certain amount of letting Eric Gutkind know that he shouldn’t expect Einstein to cut him any slack because they were both Jewish, in that passage. Keep in mind that Gutkind was asking Einstein to endorse Choose Life, Gutkind’s latest screed, and this letter was the answer. Einstein obviously thought the book was a crock (which it is) and he was letting Gutkind know it.
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May 18th, 2008 at 4:05 am
DV28XL: Thanks for your comments and explaining to me in scientific terms what I was trying to say through natural thought process – it is much appreciated and I have learnt something new. I am no scientist, I didn’t even pass any exams at school in the varying subjects – but maybe that was due more to lack of application than ability.
I have never come across Eric Gutkind and don’t know too much about Einstein other than he seems to have been a brilliant man ahead of his times in thought and deed. Looking at the wording, Einstein seemed to be making a definite reference to his and Gutkind’s religion; two walls of pride. Reminding him, that Einstein did not consider himself superior to others based on his religious background and neither should Gutkind.
In other words, Einstein might not have ‘bought’ into the idea that Jews were ‘The Chosen Ones’. If that was part of his intention in his letter to Gutkind, albeit veiled, he was indeed a radical thinker and must have rattled quite a few cages in his time.
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May 18th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
How did I know it was going to eventually go down this road? Perhaps magic.
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May 18th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Q said:
?????
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May 18th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Perhaps insight?
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May 23rd, 2008 at 2:50 am
There are a lot of stories about Einstein’s personality and relations. The man was a brilliant physicist, that’s an obvious given, but from what I understand he was also a bit awkward, socially inept, stubborn and not always very well organized. Actually, one thing most people don’t realize is that he really didn’t contribute much to physics at all in the later 2/3 of his life. He was respected for his legacy but by 1940 he was basically finished with revolutionizing physics and didn’t do much else groundbreaking.
I’m not saying the man was not an amazing individual, but lets remember that personality has many dimensions and the fact that Einstein was an amazing physicist and mathematician does not mean that what he says regarding politics, philosophy or whatever is necessarily the last word or even that well informed.
In the end, whether or not Einstein was religious or agnostic or atheistic doesn’t mean much. Brilliant people can be completely wrong. It’s totally irrelevant what he believed. The fact that he was Einstein does not make everything he said or believed true. He was a human and entirely fallible.
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August 18th, 2010 at 9:48 am
understanding in Eistein feet, for him, things that cannot be proven in logic is not agreedable to him. It is not commiting a crime. It is a matter of how an individual thinks and believes. He indeed helps many people by his discoveries and ideas. I can say that God still loves him and make him helps other people by sharing his knowledge for the good.
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