SOURCE: "Einstein on Religion," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, Winter, 1994, pp. 186-97.

[Crosby is an American author, educator, and minister specializing in philosophy and religion. In the following essay, he explains Einstein's religious beliefs.]

Albert Einstein was a devoutly religious man, although he did not believe in a personal God or align himself with the teachings or practices of any particular religious community. In his lifetime he wrote and lectured on many topics other than mathematical physics, including the topic of religion. In what follows, I first discuss his view of the nature of religion in general and of the proper way of conceiving its relations to science. Then I turn to his personal religious vision, which he sometimes called "cosmic religion." I will make some critical observations as I proceed.

In two lectures delivered in 1939 and 1941, Einstein relegates religion and science to separate spheres, each with its own specific problems and concerns. He contends that when each is conceived in this way, conflict between them is impossible. Science deals solely with what is, with facts and relations of facts. Its task is the purely descriptive one of discovering laws which can best explain the regularities of nature. From its sheer descriptions no valuative conclusions can be drawn. Since Einstein virtually identifies science with rationality, i.e., with conclusions supported by "experience and clear thinking," it follows that valuative judgments cannot be based on reason. They can neither be criticized nor defended in a "solid scientific way"; hence, they lie completely outside the province of scientific rationality (Einstein, Later Years).

Einstein recognizes, however, that human existence and activity would be impossible without the valuative choices that pervade everyday life, and he emphasizes the need for ultimate goals to give comprehensive meaning to all human pursuits, including the pursuit of scientific understanding itself. This is where religion comes into the picture. Religion, as he sees it, has nothing whatever to do with descriptions or explanations of facts. It is preoccupied exclusively with values. Its task is to express, not what is, but what ought to be. In particular, religion gives a vision of primary significance and value in whose context the secondary values of daily life have their relative place, importance, and justification.

Religious goals themselves "neither require nor are capable of rational justification." If this is true, what is their source? Einstein states that one must "sense their nature simply and clearly," implying that religious values are apprehended by a kind of immediate intuition. The function of religious systems is to elicit or "make clear" the fundamental aims or ideals disclosed in this act of intuition "and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual." Religious systems accomplish this task through the medium of powerful personalities and the accumulated weight of tradition (Later Years).

For Einstein, then, science and religion occupy entirely separate domains, and it would be as much a mistake for science to try to encroach upon the realm of values as it would be for religion to meddle in descriptions or explanations of natural fact. He hastens to add, however, that "though the realms of religion and science themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies" (Later Years). In other words, there are ways in which science has need of religion, just as there are ways in which religion must rely on science. What are these ways?

Let us consider first religion's contributions to science. Einstein thinks that there are two main contributions. First, since religion is the ultimate source of human values, and science itself cannot be the source of any values, the scientific valuation of truth and understanding must be rooted in religious intuitions. Or to put it another way, the conviction that science is important or worth doing and that a lifetime devoted to scientific inquiry is an appropriate pursuit for a human being is, at bottom, a religious conviction. Thus, the enterprise of scientific theorizing is nurtured and sustained in some decisive way by the religious postures of persons or cultures.

The second important contribution of religion to science is its provision of faith in the intelligibility and rationality of nature, a faith Einstein believes to be absolutely essential to high-level scientific investigation. Since such faith is presupposed by science, it must have its source elsewhere than in science. For Einstein, its source is in certain mystical feelings about nature that are deeply religious in character.

Just as there are two principal ways in which science depends on religion, so there are two major respects in which religion depends on science. The first is that religion must learn from science, if we take the term "science" in its broadest sense, "what means will contribute to the goals [religion] has set up" (Later Years). Scientific knowledge of the natural world is required, this is to say, if religious goals are to be successfully put into practice. Without knowledge of natural causes, there can be no control over natural effects, and the resources of nature cannot be drawn upon for the achievement of religious ends.

The second way in which religion has need of science is that scientific rationality can help to "purify" (Later Years) religious traditions by calling attention to the untenability of certain religious doctrines. One way this can be done is by exposing the incoherence of particular doctrines with the high ideals disclosed and insisted upon by the religious tradition itself. The doctrine of divine omnipotence, for example, is open to rational criticism on this basis. If God is omnipotent, Einstein observes,

then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishments and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?

(Later Years)

Also, science's manifestation of the ordered regularity of all events, a matter lying wholly within its own province of fact, makes untenable belief in a God who rules the universe by acts of free will that are unpredictable in principle, or who exists as an independent cause of natural events alongside of natural causes. This is an issue of fact on which science and only science can decide, and the decision of science lies squarely, Einstein is convinced, on the side of "the rule of fixed [causal] necessity" (Later Years).

But it is at the point of this second contribution of science to religion that Einstein's analysis of the relations of the two begins to fall apart and lapse into a disturbing incoherence of its own. Does not his well-taken criticism of an omnipotent God apply just as much to his own unshakable conviction of complete causal determinism? In what sense can human beings be held responsible for their deeds and thoughts if their every deed and thought is the inevitable outcome of a causal chain stretching unbroken into the distant past? How, indeed, can goals and values function at all in a universe where human beings are incapable of choosing otherwise than they do choose, the causal conditions remaining the same? And is not science itself impossible, if humans are incapable of freely choosing what seem to them to be the best theories, as assessed on the basis of the available reasons? Or how can one act responsibly toward ideals of honesty and truth in scientific inquiry, if every human act is the outcome of "the rule of fixed necessity," the dishonest ones as well as the honest ones? So far as I know, Einstein made no attempt to answer such questions. But since they bear so intimately on questions of value, is not there at least prima facie reason for thinking that Einstein has brought science, or what he thinks of as science, into direct conflict with the valuative domain of religion?

Another point is equally damaging to Einstein's case. It could easily be argued that belief in complete causal necessity is part and parcel of that faith in the intelligibility of nature Einstein identifies as religious in character, and hence, that it is not just a factual claim growing out of the domain of science. Ronald Clark does argue in just this way, stating that Einstein's stubborn, lifelong opposition to the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, in the face of its wide acceptance by the scientific community and its unquestionable theoretical success, "was based … upon an interior assumption about the world that had much more resemblance to religious faith than to the ever-questioning skepticism of science." Einstein believed that the universe's workings were comprehensible: "therefore these workings must conform to discoverable laws; thus there was no room for chance and indeterminacy." This conviction lay behind his famous dictum contained in a letter to Max Born on December 12, 1926, that while the quantum theory "says a lot,… [it] does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that he does not throw dice."

So it seems that religion and science were not kept nearly so much to their own domains as Einstein's depiction of those domains would require. This suggests that those domains cannot be rigidly distinguished along the lines he has laid down. The gap between fact and value is not nearly so clean as he and other positivistically minded thinkers of his generation believed. The valuations of religion are undergirded by religious claims about the nature of things, just as scientific claims rest upon valuational assumptions of science. Lurking behind Einstein's way of distinguishing religion from science, as well as behind much of his own thinking as a physicist, were his own personal religious commitments, sometimes confused with straightforward scientific fact. To his personal religious vision we now turn. It can be briefly described under three main headings or themes.

The first theme of Einstein's "cosmic religion" is what he terms "that humble attitude of mind towards the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence" (Later Years). Or as he states the theme elsewhere, "[t]he most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible" ("On Physical Reality," 1936; quoted by Frank, in Schilpp). This sense of the rational structure of the world and of its amenability to understanding through simple, elegant mathematical theories of sweeping breadth, was a matter of profound religious import for Einstein. It gave to his life's work the character of a pilgrimage or religious quest, its spirit akin to Johannes Kepler's exclamation, "I think God's thoughts after him!" Einstein describes this feeling best when he says:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.

("What I Believe")

The first theme of Einstein's personal religious vision, then, is this mystical feeling for nature, a reverence for its elusive vastness and complexity, but also for its discoverable logical order and intelligible structure. To penetrate even a little way into this marvelous order is to be put in touch with an "illimitable superior spirit," presence, or power which Einstein frequently refers to as "God."

But (and this brings us to the second theme) this God of nature, or this God who is nature, cannot be conceived as a personal being. Einstein sees his cosmic religion, inspired by the successes of science, as working to rid "the religious impulse of its anthropomorphisms." We can surmise that one reason for his opposition to traditional personalistic theism was that, for him, nature itself is divine, the object of highest religious veneration, whereas traditional theism subordinates nature to a transcendent Creator. Another reason, spoken of earlier, is that a personal God, acting by free will, would be capricious and unpredictable. To the extent that God's actions affect the course of natural events, to that extent those events would be unlawlike and scientifically unknowable. This would distract seriously from the first theme of cosmic religion.

Still another reason is that belief in a personal God who exercises free will invites all kinds of ad hoc explanations about natural occurrences, particularly those which are threatening to human beings. It panders to the worst kinds of superstitions, idle hopes, and irrational fears of humankind. This pandering, in turn, threatens to place "vast power in the hands of priests," such as prevailed prior to the age of scientific enlightenment (Later Years). Evidently, Einstein thinks it better to be ruled by blind laws of nature that are at least in principle comprehensible to reason than by a God whose ever-changing decisions require arbitrary and occult interpretations of a powerful priestly class.

The third and final theme of Einstein's cosmic religions is the ideal of selflessness. "A person who is religiously enlightened," he says, "appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings because of their super-personal value" (Later Years). The mystical feeling for the vastness of nature conduces to this attitude of selflessness, for it shows the individual person to be only a tiny fragment of a "huge world which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle" (Einstein, in Schilpp). One is humbled by the challenge of trying to comprehend such a world and can soon lose oneself in contemplation of its beauty and immensity.

Against this backdrop, giving attention to merely selfish pursuits and concerns seemed to Einstein to be absurd. Talking late one night with his friend Leon Watters, Einstein looked intently at a picture of Watter's recently deceased wife and reflected: "[t]he individual counts for little; man's individual troubles are insignificant; we place too much importance on the trivialities of living" (quoted Clark). Einstein speaks of being impressed at an early age with the idea that persons he greatly admired seemed to have "found inner freedom and security in devoted occupation" to trying to unravel the secrets of nature (Einstein, in Schilpp). For him, the life of contemplation enables one somehow to rise above "the bondage of ego-centric cravings, desires, and fears" (Later Years). Such contemplation sets the fleeting existence of humans in the context of the sweeping, all-inclusive totality of universe whose fundamental principles know no alteration but are true for all time, and whose lawlike processes flow forever. "The scientist," he exults,

is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past.… His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals as intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.

(Ideas and Opinions)

One other reason Einstein found belief in a personal God to be so distasteful was because he judged it to be inimical to this selfless ideal of religious enlightenment. Such a view pictures God as continually concerning himself with the petty affairs of individual persons, rewarding or punishing them on a day-to-day basis for their good or bad deeds, or for their successes or failures in currying his favor or avoiding his wrath (see Ideas and Opinions). Benedict Spinoza, whom Einstein regarded as a kindred spirit where matters religious were concerned and whom he admired as his favorite philosopher, held that belief in a personal God conduces to jealousy and self-centeredness. Spinoza argued that each person imbued with this belief will try to think out "for himself, according to his abilities, a different way of worshipping God, so that God might love him more than his fellows, and direct the whole course of nature for the satisfaction of his blind cupidity and insatiable avarice" (Spinoza). This was a view with which Einstein could readily concur. For him, as for Spinoza, to conceive of God as personal is to run directly counter to genuine religious, as well as scientific, sensibility. It belittles God's majesty and greatness, making him a manipulable pawn, and it reinforces the narrowest and most selfish impulses of humankind.

There is much that is insightful and inspiring in Einstein's cosmic religion. But I wonder if it does not tilt too far in the direction of the aesthetic or the merely contemplative to do justice to the religious impulse in all its dimensions. I do not insist that Einstein should have believed in a God who is personal and free, but that his religious vision should have elucidated some basis for the active exercise of personal freedom on the part of human beings. I say this partly because his theory of the nature of religion turns so crucially on the concept of goals and values, which seem to require the exercise of freedom for their discernment and attainment. I also say it because Einstein's own life was so exemplary in its dedication to the free pursuit of knowledge and in its deep moral concern for the freedom of the individual. Here we can be thankful for the gap in one person's life between profession and practice!

Einstein once asserted that "the highest principles for our aspirations and judgements are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition." He then went on to state that the primary religious goal articulated in that tradition is, on its purely human side, "free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind" (Later Years). But such sentiments and practices seem radically incoherent with the pessimistic resignation Einstein felt driven to by his belief in cosmic determinism. His comment on the confrontational politics of East and West during the period of the Cold War is a dramatic case in point.

Things are going much as they did after 1918, except that there are different actors on the stage. They play as badly as they did then, but the general bankruptcy which threatens will be incomparably worse. Having lost the illusion of free will, one cannot even react in anger.

(Einstein, letter to Otto Lehmann-Russbuldt, 1947; quoted by Michelmore)

Given the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of reconciling these two sides of Einstein's thought, one is led to observe of him what Frederick Copleston concluded about Spinoza: we cannot avoid the impression that he "tried to have it both ways; to maintain a thorough determinism based on a metaphysical theory, and at the same time to propound an ethic which makes sense only if determinism is not absolute" (Copleston).

It is fascinating to note that a philosopher like Immanuel Kant centered his own religious vision squarely on unshakable belief in the reality of human freedom. Only in the experience of freedom did Kant find firm basis for belief in God. Such a belief could not stem, he was convinced, from blind, causally determined forces of a nature viewed wholly through the eyes of theoretical science. Thus Kant stood at a position exactly opposite to that of Einstein as far as his view of religion was concerned, even though, like Einstein, he conceived of nature as a deterministic system.

Uriel Tal tries to give a Kantian twist to Einstein's view of the relations of a deterministic nature, on the one hand, and human morality (along with religion), on the other, insisting that each belongs to a separate realm of thought with its own grounding and its own principles. Hence, scientific causation and determinism pose no threat to responsible human freedom. However, I find no clear evidence of such a Kantian view in Einstein's writings; evidence from them Tal adduces in trying to make this case, e.g., Einstein's 1930 dialogue with James Murphy and J. W. N. Sullivan in Forum magazine, seems skimpy and unconvincing. In my judgment, Einstein's thought is much closer to Spinoza's than to Kant's.

But were not Einstein and Kant each half wrong and half right? The conclusion to which I come, after reflecting on the place of religion in Einstein's thought, is that an adequate religious vision must achieve some kind of synthesis between his own outlook and that of Kant. Such a vision would conceive of God or the religious ultimate, whatever that might be, as a ground both of causality and freedom, of continuity and novelty. It would encourage, on the one hand, a mystical sense of the imposing order of the natural world and of respects in which the fleeting existence of each individual being is subordinate to the sublimity and sweep of its ongoing regular processes. On the other hand, it would elicit responsible awareness of a future significantly pliable to acts of human freedom and of a natural order that permits of such freedom; and it would stress the irreducible dignity and importance of each human life. The second emphasis may not fit squarely with the main thrust of Einstein's expressed ideas on religion, but it resonates with the force of his life and greatness of his spirit.