Scientist's reply to sell for up to £8,000, and stoke debate over his beliefs
- The Guardian,
- Tuesday May 13 2008
Albert Einstein, pictured in 1953. Photograph: Ruth Orkin/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." So said Albert Einstein, and his famous aphorism has been the source of endless debate between believers and non-believers wanting to claim the greatest scientist of the 20th century as their own.
A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument - or at least provoke further controversy about his views.
Due to be auctioned this week in London after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, the document leaves no doubt that the theoretical physicist was no supporter of religious beliefs, which he regarded as "childish superstitions".
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 the letter, he states: "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."
Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel's second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God's favoured 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. As far as my experience goes, they are 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."
The letter will go on sale at Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair on Thursday and is expected to fetch up to £8,000. The handwritten piece, in German, is not listed in the source material of the most authoritative academic text on the subject, Max Jammer's book Einstein and Religion.
One of the country's leading experts on the scientist, John Brooke of Oxford University, admitted he had not heard of it.
Einstein is best known for his theories of relativity and for the famous E=mc2 equation that describes the equivalence of mass and energy, but his thoughts on religion have long attracted conjecture.
His parents were not religious but he attended a Catholic primary school and at the same time received private tuition in Judaism. This prompted what he later called, his "religious paradise of youth", during which he observed religious rules such as not eating pork. This did not last long though and by 12 he was questioning the truth of many biblical stories.
"The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression," he later wrote.
In his later years he referred to a "cosmic religious feeling" that permeated and sustained his scientific work. In 1954, a year before his death, he spoke of wishing to "experience the universe as a single cosmic whole". He was also fond of using religious flourishes, in 1926 declaring that "He [God] does not throw dice" when referring to randomness thrown up by quantum theory.
His position on God has been widely misrepresented by people on both sides of the atheism/religion divide but he always resisted easy stereotyping on the subject.
"Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him," said Brooke. "It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions ... but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion."
Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Brooke said that Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
Article # 2
- The Guardian,
- Tuesday May 13 2008
... I read a great deal in the last days of your book, and thank you very much for sending it to me. What especially struck me about it was this. With regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common.
... 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.
By Andrew Brown
The physicist did not believe in God - but nor did he really believe in atheism. Therein lay his strength
Albert Einstein's letter to the Jewish philosopher Eric Gutkind, which will be auctioned this week, reveals him as a model atheist, not just for all the things that he didn't believe in, but for way he dealt with people who lacked the gift of unfaith. Einstein didn't think himself smarter than believers about the things that really matter.
That doesn't mean that he agrees with them. It's quite clear that he did not believe in either God or the Jewish people. He didn't believe in America, either; he didn't believe in providence. God was to him "an incarnation of the most childish superstition". Theological argument was "a language inaccessible to him" and the word God "nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses".
Nonetheless, not much of this mattered when dealing with a philosopher. "What separates us are only the internal 'props' and or 'rationalisations' in Freud's language ... we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evaluations of human behaviour ... with regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community, we have a great deal in common," he wrote. It may have been that this was no more than politeness to a fellow survivor from the German-Jewish civilisation of pre-war central Europe that Hitler and Stalin had combined to destroy by the time he wrote his letter. But I think it was something deeper and more important: that among the things that he didn't believe in was atheism.
The clue to this, perhaps, was in his admiration for Freud. Now Freud was a programmatic atheist, in a way that Jung most certainly wasn't. Jung thought religious thoughts had real content, and Freud thought they didn't. But it doesn't follow that Freud thought we could be entirely rid of them and Jung didn't. If anything, Jung took the possibility of being free of religion much more seriously, because he thought that it was a possible and real condition, responsible for much of the unhappiness in the world. If, on the other hand, you believe that religion is just a form of self-deception, then we will never be rid of it so long as we are not rid of self-deception, and that is an ideal to strive for rather than a condition easily obtained for the price of a few works of popular atheology.
If we are Freudians, we have a tragic view of life: it is one thing to say that certain of our instincts and apprehensions of the world are childish; quite another to be rid of them. In its vulgar form this insight can lead to the endless dismissal of other people's arguments as motivated solely by discreditable unconscious motives. But in its more sophisticated form, it is a very useful corrective to the view that our arguments are motivated by pure rationality. There is an element if childishness and wish-fulfilment in everybody's view of the world; with effort and self-discipline it is possible to master it, but never entirely to eliminate it.
Einstein did flay in this letter almost everything that Gutkind believed in. The claim that Jews were special seemed to him absurd; the civilised interpretation of the Bible, an artificial distortion of the text; even the claim the humans have free will had been exposed by Spinoza. But he didn't regard these theological views as fundamental. He didn't really think they interfered with the "striving to make life beautiful and noble," and he meant those words. And it seems to me that if he really believed that a devout Jew - or any kind of devout believer - really shared his striving to make life beautiful and noble, he had not merely rid himself of religious belief. He had rid himself of belief in atheism too. This is a lack of faith really worth having.
Guardian, May 13, 2008.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/andrew_brown/2008/05/faithless_einstein.html
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Controversies in science
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