Losing My Religion: Albert Einstein Revealed As Atheist?
HOW ONE COMES TO GOD IS ITS OWN MYSTERY. Some are raised in a church and arrive at adulthood unquestioning. Others pick up the habit out of need or want, their faith a byproduct of delivery from desperate moments. Some, like me, never stop vascillating between the need for religion and the refusal to embrace it out of anger. The eternal question beckons: if a perfect God exists, how could he or she could rationalize the horrors that are afflicted daily onto man by man and nature?
So an agnostic like me relied heavily on the bon mots about God from Albert Einstein, the only human ever designated as Time's "Person of the Century." His epochal E = mc2 explains all of earth's energy. (Full disclosure: Crabby knows nothing of physics except what Wiki tells her.) While wrestling with my own doubts, it was reassuring to know that Einstein, a man with the insight to read nature's algorithms, was credited with saying that God does not play dice with the universe.
There it is, on page 386 of Walter Isaacson's Einstein, (Simon & Schuster, 2007) in an answer to the question "Do you believe in God?," the reknown scientist answers:
"I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. 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 those books. It does not know how. ...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."So what to make of the revelation that Einstein called religion a "childish superstition" in a letter to be auctioned off tomorrow in London?
According to the Guardian, "Einstein penned the letter on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since." In it Einstein writes, "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."
He also delivered some disappointing words for the Bible's chosen people:
"For me the Jewish religion like all others 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.""He's fairly unequivocal as to what he's saying,'' said Rupert Powell, the Bloomsbury Auctions managing director. "There's no beating about the bush."
But we can be sure that the words of an auctioneer will not be the last on Einstein's religiosity. As John Brooke of Oxford University told the Guardian, "Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him. ...[W]hat he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion."
And so it goes. Einstein's beliefs remain a mystery even when we have his own words to contemplate. The riddle remains. My torment does not abate.
Posted May 14, 2008
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