On 8 April 2007 Michael Sylvester wrote: > A current biography of Einstein attests that he believed in God.
To which Paul Brandon responded: > or at least was in the habit (according to Neils Bohr) of telling God > what to do. At the most, Einstein might have believed in a very Deistic > sense that there was some underlying purpose to the universe that he > was intensely interested in. Certainly he did not believe in an > anthropomorphic personal god, nor in any formal religion. The biography of Einstein by Walter Isaacson does not attest that Einstein "believed in God" in any sense that such a statement would normally be taken. Leaving aside that Einstein's views on religion have been aired so often that we know that he didn't believe in anything remotely like the God of the major world religions, I have obtained a pre-publication copy of Isaacson's biography which contains a chapter with the title "Einstein's God" in which the author makes clear that (allowing for Einstein's different formulations governed by the circumstances) his belief consisted of a religiosity occasioned by the sense of awe experienced when contemplating the harmony of nature's laws. (I know of no statement by Einstein that indicates that he believed there was some underlying *purpose* to the universe.) I think a TIPSter may have already said that such a view is more akin to agnosticism than to religion in the conventional sense, and in a letter written in the 1940s Einstein told a correspondent that "You may call me an agnostic..." He went on to say that he did "not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist... I prefer the attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our understanding of nature and of our own being." (Quotation from a letter in the Albert Einstein Archives) In a letter to Max Born in 1953 Einstein mocked those who took his allusions to God in relation to the debate on determinism and the status of quantum mechanics (the "non-dice-playing God") as anything more than the "soap bubbles we blow". Nowadays this may validly be addressed to those who use such references to "God" in support of claims that Einstein was religious, but at the time he wrote that they caused resentment "among the faithful of the Church of the Atheists." (*The Born-Einstein Letters 1916-1955: Friendship, Politics and Physics in Uncertain Times*, Macmillan 2005, p.195). Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org/ --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
