Did Albert Einstein Believe in God?
In 1949, Albert Einstein published an essay in New York Times Magazine entitled Religion and Science. There’s a good chance he wrote this in his home office, a book-cluttered space overlooking the pine trees surrounding his Princeton, New Jersey home. A stack of books on topics as varied as the title of his essay clutter the space.
The sun, whose warping of spacetime proved his theory of general relativity and cemented his reputation as one of history’s greatest scientific minds, greets him like an old companion as he sits down to articulate years of contemplation and insight.
The essay sets out to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable relationship between science and religion. The unifying thread weaving through his essay is the evolution of religious thought over time. And it’s an important tack for Einstein to take, without which his final assertion would make little sense. Early religions, he shows, were mainly based on fear. Sacrifices are offered to beings responsible for rain, crops, sickness, death, and wild beasts, in order to avoid what humans fear most. The sacrifices give these primitive groups a sense of control over the uncontrollable—a small consolation amidst the screaming void of existence.
Image by Midjourney, copyright N. B. Hankes
As humanity learned to control the wild places it once feared and roaming tribes gave way to static agricultural civilizations, religious thought evolved to meet the evolving social and moral needs of the time. In the way that fear-based religions fulfilled the need to feel some control over nature, moral religion was born from the need of mankind’s desire for guidance and support within the context of community.
But there’s a religious impulse that exists in all times and places. And all religious evolution across time moves in this direction. Einstein refers to this as a cosmic religious feeling, as evidenced in some of the Psalms of David, some of the prophets, and in Buddhism. The cosmic religious feeling is marked by an understanding of the futility of human desire and an awareness of a broader sublimity revealed in the marvelous order of nature. This is the stuff of mystics. Of this cosmic religious feeling, Einstein writes:
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.
This cosmic religious feeling, he continues, is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. It is the search to know the ultimate truth. So the source of all true religious inquiry is also the source of all true theoretical scientific inquiry: The desire to know God.
Einstein’s sentiment is one mirrored by countless other physicists:
Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations… To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.
There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other…And indeed it was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls.
Max Planck, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1919
One way to learn the mind of the Creator is to study His creation. We must pay God the compliment of studying His work of art and this should apply to all realms of human thought. A refusal to use our intelligence honestly is an act of contempt for Him who gave us that intelligence.
Ernest Walton, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1951
A scientific discovery is also a religious discovery. There is no conflict between science and religion. Our knowledge of God is made larger with every discovery we make about the world.
Joseph H. Taylor, Jr., Nobel Prize in Physics, 1993
It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.
Paul Davies, Kelvin Medal, 2001, Faraday Prize, 2002
Just stop and think about that for a moment: The mind-boggling effort Albert Einstein expended throughout his life in order to reveal the mysteries of the universe came from his desire to know God. It is in this spirit that I have set out to connect Einstein’s cosmic religious feelings to the teachings of Taoism, a religion estimated as some 2,000 years older than Judaism. This is the primary effort of my upcoming book The Tao of Einstein.
Why, of all the spiritual traditions, would I connect Albert Einstein’s worldview to Taoism? Culturally, he was Jewish. His conception of God didn’t fit into any organized religions in the West. And he certainly wasn’t a Taoist. But it’s entirely possible to stumble into Taoist ideas independently. Especially as a physicist. That’s because Taoist philosophy is based on the laws of nature, the same physical laws that Einstein spent a lifetime exploring. These are the connections and parallels that I explore The Tao of Einstein.
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