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Einstein's Atheism |
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| Let there be no doubt about it now | ||
 by Michael Weiss, May 13, 2008 |
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Not chosen, just posin'Believers have long maintained, based on his ambiguous rhetoric about religion, that Albert Einstein was one of them. Yet in a soon-to-be- auctioned-off letter the father of relativity wrote to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, the mystery as to his true thoughts on the subject has at long last been solved:
As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people".
"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..."
[...]
"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."
Of course, there were plenty of clues leading up to this conclusive point, not least of which was Einstein's socialism, but it seems to me that that that last comment is the most is significant. Jews do not lack power anymore (although they are besieged by elements seeking to rob them of it), and this raises the question of what the great man would have made of the sexagenarian state whose presidency he famously refused, and whose very survival may depend on the apocalyptic technology he helped invent...
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Anonymous
You CAN'T say "you have 'a great affinity with Jewish people' BUT they "have no different quality for ME than all other people". That internally contradicts itself!!! Notice that ME. (Emphasis added.) If you have a great affinity for them, well, then they DO have a different quality for you, than all other people. Gee wiz. Stick to physics. What the poor man meant was, "I have difficulty understanding or defining my great affinity for Jewish people." But he wasn't an English major. One can assume all this was in German anyway.
OK, he was ordinary in that one way. He was a Jew who had internal contradictions about what he felt about being a Jew. Join the club, Albert.
He STILL said, "I can't believe God plays dice with the universe". That is a very unphysics-y thing to say. That is a Jew talking. He wriggled and squirmed all his life about this, like lots of people. So what. And he did talk about ultimate beauty and stuff. And he was NOT anti-Israel or anti-Zionist. He was widely hated. His wife, the second one, planted plain-clothes protectors all around him, without his knowledge.
Anonymous
(hated because he was so smart, and a Jew. And feisty. A character. Charismatic. Assured.)
Anonymous
Nothing you quote above about Einstein's views of religion as superstition or his views of traditional Judaism (like other religions) as childish indicate that he is in fact an Atheist. I fully agree with his comments around superstition and the childish aspects of religious myth but I am not an atheist. I am also quite an Einstein fan and have read much about the man and this is what I understand to be the case.Einstein's views god the way Spinoza (an excommunicated Jew who becomes one of the world's great philosophers) views god. In the most recent and applauded biography on Einstein titled "Einstein: His Life and Universe" by Walter Issacson, the author makes a good argument that Einstein was not an atheist. He does so, by quoting Einstein's objection to those individuals who are so angry at religion, that they throw the idea of god out with the dirty waters of religion. This argument is not that of an atheist. Surely Einstein does not believe in a personal god (who judges, punishes and disrupts the world), but it is less clear that he does not believe in a god of some sort. To Einstein god is unknowable by definition and the word god is the code name for the "something greater than us" in the universe... the very mysteries that we may never solve and the magic or miracle that the universe itself is and the glue that makes it so. In fact going back in history you can find that with each new concept of god, people are accused of being atheists. In many cases, those called atheists are not what any of us would call atheists today... In the end, I think the idea of god is in the eye of the beholder and very difficult to define for anyone who is really thoughtful but the evidence is not in your entry above to say that Albert was an Atheist !