# Albert Einstein's Faith: Was The Great Physicist Spiritual?



## spnadmin (Jul 24, 2010)

Albert Einstein's famous equation, E=mc<sup>2</sup>, remains  difficult for me to grasp fully. But I feel I have come to understand  something of the man -- his expansive spirit, his relentless curiosity,  and his reverence for the beauty and order of nature and thought. I was  daunted as I began, but delving into Einstein was a delight.


  And there is a logic of sorts to that, as humor was an aspect of Einstein's genius. Freeman Dyson suggests  that his ability to make light and to laugh, even at himself, was one  key to the magnitude of his scientific accomplishment. Science is often  about failure. Einstein himself proposed that he made so many  discoveries because he was not afraid to be proven wrong, repeatedly, on  his way to all of them. But Einstein also employed humor to  philosophical and ethical effect, weighing in trenchantly on mankind's  foibles.


  Einstein held a deep and nuanced, if not a traditional, faith. I did  not assume this at the outset. I've always been suspicious of the way  Einstein's famous line, "God does not play dice with the universe," gets  quoted for vastly different purposes. I wanted to understand what  Einstein meant as a physicist when he said that. As it turns out, that  particular quip had more to do with physics than with God, as Freeman  Dyson and Paul Davies illuminate.


  Einstein did, however, leave behind a rich body of reflection on the  "mind" and the "superior spirit" behind the cosmos that has never made  its way into popular consciousness. He didn't believe in a personal God  who would interfere with the laws of physics. But he was fascinated with  the ingenuity of those laws and expressed awe at the very fact of their  existence. Throughout his life, he thrilled to all he could not yet  understand. He was more than content with what he called a "cosmic  religious sense" -- animated by "inklings" and "wondering," rather than  by answers and conclusions. Here is a passage that comes close, I think,  to a concise description by Einstein of his quintessential "faith":
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot  penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most  radiant beauty -- it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute  the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a  deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and  punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are  conscious in ourselves ... Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of  life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together  with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it ever so  tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.​  With Paul Davies, I was able to pursue how Einstein changed our view  of space and especially time, a subject that has always intrigued me.  Before Einstein, as Davies describes it, human beings thought of space  and time as fixed and immutable, the backdrop to the great show of life.  But we now know they are elastic and intertwined, part of the show  themselves. Einstein described our perception of time as an arrow --  traversing linear and compartmentalized past, present, and future -- as a  "stubbornly persistent illusion." Such language is evocative from a  religious standpoint. As Davies discusses, it echoes insights that run  throughout Eastern and Western religions and ancient indigenous  cultures. Davies finds an affinity between Einstein's view of time and  the religious notion of a reality "beyond time," and of "the eternal."  And because he speaks as a person conversant in current advancements of  Einstein's science -- cosmology and the Big Bang, black holes, even the  search for life beyond this galaxy -- his insights carry for me a  special weight of authority and, yes, wonder.
  I came across many wise and touching pieces of writing by the  spiritual Einstein while preparing for these conversations. Einstein was  a passionate letter writer. He wrote to fellow scientists, friends, and  strangers. He loved responding to the letters of schoolchildren. One of  his correspondents for a time was Queen Elisabeth of Belgium. He had  struck up a warm friendship with her and her husband, King Albert, just  before World War II. In one tragic season in the midst of already  tumultuous political times, her husband died suddenly, as did her  daughter-in-law.  Einstein wrote to her:
Mrs. Barjansky wrote to me how gravely living in itself  causes you suffering and how numbed you are by the indescribably painful  blows that have befallen you. And yet we should not grieve for those  who have gone from us in the primes of their lives after happy and  fruitful years of activity, and who have been privileged to accomplish  in full measure their task in life. 

Something there is that can refresh and revivify older people: joy  in the activities of the younger generation -- a joy, to be sure, that  is clouded by dark forebodings in these unsettled times. And yet, as  always, the springtime sun brings forth new life, and we may rejoice  because of this new life and contribute to its unfolding; and Mozart  remains as beautiful and tender as he always was and always will be.  There is, after all, something eternal that lies beyond the hand of fate  and of all human delusions. And such eternals lie closer to an older  person than to a younger one oscillating between fear and hope. For us,  there remains the privilege of experiencing beauty and truth in their  purest forms.​  I emerged from these discussions with a new sense of Albert Einstein  -- not just as a great mind, but as a wise man. He was fully human and  flawed, certainly in his intimate relationships. But he was undeniably  an original, and not just as a scientist. If past, present, and future  are an illusion, as he said, none of us ever really disappear. We all  leave our imprint on what is now. I have a profound sense of Einstein's  imprint, and it comforts me. I suspect that if he heard he was the  subject of a program called _Speaking of Faith_  more than fifty years after his death, he would make a funny, kindly,  self-deprecating joke. But if he could listen with twenty-first-century  ears, he might be intrigued by how his generous, questioning, "cosmic"  religious sense is deeply kindred with the religious and spiritual  yearnings of our age.


_This post is excerpted from my book_ Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit _(pp. 15-18)._


_http://www.huffingtonpost.com/krista-tippett/albert-einsteins-faith-wa_b_651592.html
_


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