Einstein's God

A few weeks ago, I provided a Potent Quote called “Einstein’s Not-God”. Since then, it’s come to me that I need to provide some balance, as Einstein has sometimes been regarded as an atheist, but I knew there was information out there to the contrary. Einstein had a conception, nay, even an experience of God, but more along the lines of the Nondual, of Nature, Mystery, Inspiration, and Awe. I also knew I could couch this discussion within the context of a story. So here it is.

     Several years ago, I got involved with one of the Chabad centers in Atlanta. Although far from having interest in being a traditional observant Jew, in which practices Chabadniks are immersed, I also knew that their traditional observances were placed within the context of deep mysticism, for which I had a great interest. Many years before that, in my early adulthood, I had likewise studied with the Hare Krishnas for similar reasons, and in between, some years later but before Chabad, I engaged in study with a Christian mystical group called The Holy Order of MANS, whose members also practiced traditional Christian ritual. It was curiously co-founded by a person who was born Jewish and later became a leading American Sufi, Samuel Lewis, also known as “Sufi Sam”, the founder of the Universal Dances of Peace, also known as Sufi Dancing. But as I am wont to do, I digress.

     As part of my involvement with Chabad, I was led to or discovered their website, which is quite extensive, and among other things, contains many blog-like discussion groups facilitated by one of their rabbis, covering a vast range of subjects. I participated in some of those discussion groups, often as a gadfly, questioning and pushing the limits of some of their ultra-orthodox views. In one of those groups, I encountered a fellow who was much more of a critic than me, who seemed to have a deep desire to serve as an irritant. We ended up engaging in a one-on-one email exchange outside of the blog. I remember he was from a country in South America, but I am not certain which one. Maybe Brazil or Venezuela, and I don’t remember his name. Our discussion revealed that he had some kind of personal vendetta against Chabad based upon some harm he claimed they caused him or some close family or friends. It also revealed that he was a pretty hard-core atheist and great believer that science will eventually reveal all the secrets of the universe and that religion or belief in God of any kind was just a bunch of hokum.

     As with many atheists I have encountered, his non-belief was based largely on rejecting what he perceived others believed in, and try as I may, I could not convince him to consider re-examining his rejection in place of a definition or conception of God that he might be comfortable embracing. Of course, there are also humanist atheists who conclude that any idea of God is not necessary, that humans alone, without resort to Divinity of any kind, are capable of establishing a moral and just order without the aid of any kind of Divine guidance or intervention. But he couched his focus more on the beneficence and supremacy of human endeavors through science, and not too much on a broader all-encompassing humanism; science was his religion. He brought up Einstein as an exemplar of a scientific atheist, and I countered that contrary to popular belief, there was plenty of evidence out there that although Einstein rejected the traditional conceptions of a dualistic God as many atheists do, he still had his own conception of God that he could embrace. His response to my assertion was “show me”. So show him I did, with some of the quotes I gleaned from the internet that I am now sharing here. His response to these quotes was something along the lines, “Well, it didn’t take you long to find this.” But he didn’t question the veracity of these quotes, many of which were accompanied by sources that could be verified, which he probably did. That was the end of our conversation, and I never heard from him again. So that is my story, and here is a selection of the quotes:

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. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious. -- Albert Einstein, Response to atheist, Alfred Kerr (1927), quoted in The Diary of a Cosmopolitan (1971)

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is. -- Albert Einstein, The World As I See It (1949)

I can understand your aversion to the use of the term 'religion' to describe an emotional and psychological attitude which shows itself most clearly in Spinoza... I have found no better expression than "religious" for confidence in the rational nature of reality, insofar as it is accessible to human reason. Whenever this feeling is absent, science degenerates into uninspired empiricism. -- Albert Einstein, Letter to Maurice Solovine, January 1, 1951; quoted in Letters to Solovine (1993)

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. -- Albert Einstein, responding to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein's question "Do you believe in God?" quoted in: Has Science Found God? by Victor J Stenger

But the Jewish tradition also contains something else, something which finds splendid expression in many of the Psalms, namely, a sort of intoxicated joy and amazement at the beauty and grandeur of this world of which man can form just a faint notion. This joy is the feeling from which true scientific research draws its spiritual sustenance, but which also seems to find expression in the songs of birds.

--Albert Einstein