Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn
out not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply.
This is certainly true of Einstein and Hawking. The present
Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, Martin
Rees, told me that he goes to church as an 'unbelieving Anglican
... out of loyalty to the tribe'. He has no theistic beliefs,
but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in
the other scientists I have mentioned. In the course of a recently
televised conversation, I challenged my friend the obstetrician
Robert Winston, a respected pillar of British Jewry, to admit
that his Judaism was of exactly this character and that he didn't
really believe in anything supernatural. He came close to admitting
it but shied at the last fence (to be fair, he was supposed
to be interviewing me, not the other way around). When I pressed
him, he said he found that Judaism provided a good discipline
to help him structure his life and lead a good one. Perhaps
it does; but that, of course, has not the smallest bearing on
the truth value of any of its supernatural claims. There are
many intellectual atheists who proudly call themselves Jews
and observe Jewish rites, perhaps out of loyalty to an ancient
tradition or to murdered relatives, but also because of a confused
and confusing willingness to label as 'religion' the pantheistic
reverence which many of us share with its most distinguished
exponent, Albert Einstein. They may not believe but, to borrow
Dan Dennett's phrase, they 'believe in belief'.
One of Einstein's most eagerly quoted remarks
is 'Science without religion is lame, religion without science
is blind.' But Einstein also said,
It was, of course, a lie what you read about
my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically
repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never
denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in
me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration
for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal
it.
Does it seem that Einstein contradicted himself?
That his words can be cherry-picked for quotes to support both
sides of an argument? No. By 'religion' Einstein meant something
entirely different from what is conventionally meant. As I continue
to clarify the distinction between supernatural religion on
the one hand and Einsteinian religion on the other, bear in
mind that I am calling only supernatural gods delusional.
Here are some more quotations from Einstein,
to give a flavour of Einsteinian religion.
I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is
a somewhat new kind of religion.
I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or
a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic.
What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can
comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking
person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious
feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
The idea of a personal God is quite alien to
me and seems even naive.
In greater numbers since his death, religious
apologists understandably try to claim Einstein as one of their
own. Some of his religious contemporaries saw him very differently.
In 1940 Einstein wrote a famous paper justifying his statement
'I do not believe in a personal God.' This and similar statements
provoked a storm of letters from the religiously orthodox, many
of them alluding to Einstein's Jewish origins. The extracts
that follow are taken from Max Jammer's book Einstein and Religion
(which is also my main source of quotations from Einstein himself
on religious matters). The Roman Catholic Bishop of Kansas City
said: 'It is sad to see a man, who comes from the race of the
Old Testament and its teaching, deny the great tradition of
that race.' Other Catholic clergymen chimed in: 'There is no
other God but a personal God ... Einstein does not know what
he is talking about. He is all wrong. Some men think that because
they have achieved a high degree of learning in some field,
they are qualified to express opinions in all.' The notion that
religion is a proper field, in which one might claim expertise,
is one that should not go unquestioned. That clergyman presumably
would not have deferred to the expertise of a claimed 'fairyologist'
on the exact shape and colour of fairy wings. Both he and the
bishop thought that Einstein, being theologically untrained,
had misunderstood the nature of God. On the contrary, Einstein
understood very well exactly what he was denying.
An American Roman Catholic lawyer, working on
behalf of an ecumenical coalition, wrote to Einstein:
We deeply regret that you made your statement
... in which you ridicule the idea of a personal God. In the
past ten years nothing has been so calculated to make people
think that Hitler had some reason to expel the Jews from Germany
as your statement. Conceding your right to free speech, I still
say that your statement constitutes you as one of the greatest
sources of discord in America.
A New York rabbi said: 'Einstein is unquestionably
a great scientist, but his religious views are diametrically
opposed to Judaism.'
'But'? 'But'? Why not 'and'?
The president of a historical society in New
Jersey wrote a letter that so damningly exposes the weakness
of the religious mind, it is worth reading twice:
We respect your learning, Dr Einstein; but there
is one thing you do not seem to have learned: that God is a
spirit and cannot be found through the telescope or microscope,
no more than human thought or emotion can be found by analyzing
the brain. As everyone knows, religion is based on Faith, not
knowledge. Every thinking person, perhaps, is assailed at times
with religious doubt. My own faith has wavered many a time.
But I never told anyone of my spiritual aberrations for two
reasons: (1) I feared that I might, by mere suggestion, disturb
and damage the life and hopes of some fellow being; (2) because
I agree with the writer who said, 'There is a mean streak in
anyone who will destroy another's faith.' ... I hope, Dr Einstein,
that you were misquoted and that you will yet say something
more pleasing to the vast number of the American people who
delight to do you honor.
What a devastatingly revealing letter! Every
sentence drips with intellectual and moral cowardice.
Less abject but more shocking was the letter
from the Founder of the Calvary Tabernacle Association in Oklahoma:
Professor Einstein, I believe that every Christian
in America will answer you, 'We will not give up our belief
in our God and his son Jesus Christ, but we invite you, if you
do not believe in the God of the people of this nation, to go
back where you came from.' I have done everything in my power
to be a blessing to Israel, and then you come along and with
one statement from your blasphemous tongue, do more to hurt
the cause of your people than all the efforts of the Christians
who love Israel can do to stamp out anti-Semitism in our land.
Professor Einstein, every Christian in America will immediately
reply to you, 'Take your crazy, fallacious theory of evolution
and go back to Germany where you came from, or stop trying to
break down the faith of a people who gave you a welcome when
you were forced to flee your native land.'
The one thing all his theistic critics got right
was that Einstein was not one of them. He was repeatedly indignant
at the suggestion that he was a theist. So, was he a deist,
like Voltaire and Diderot? Or a pantheist, like Spinoza, whose
philosophy he admired: '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'?
Let's remind ourselves of the terminology. A
theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition
to his main work of creating the universe in the first place,
is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate
of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the
deity is intimately involved in human affairs. He answers prayers;
forgives or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by performing
miracles; frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we
do them (or even think of doing them). A deist, too, believes
in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were
confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in
the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter,
and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs. Pantheists
don't believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word
God as a nonsupernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe,
or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. Deists differ
from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not
interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts
and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ
from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic
intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic
synonym for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up
atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.
There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms
like 'God is subtle but he is not malicious' or 'He does not
play dice' or 'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?'
are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic. 'God
does not play dice' should be translated as 'Randomness does
not lie at the heart of all things.' 'Did God have a choice
in creating the Universe?' means 'Could the universe have begun
in any other way?' Einstein was using 'God' in a purely metaphorical,
poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of those
physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious
metaphor. Paul Davies's The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere
between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism -
for which he was rewarded with the Templeton Prize (a very large
sum of money given annually by the Templeton Foundation, usually
to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion).
. . .
