Einstein’s God: What did the great physicist really believe about the deity?

The most famous Einstein pronouncement on God came in the form of a telegram, in which he was asked to answer the question in 50 words or less. He did it in 32: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” (These quotes are documented in Walter Isaacson’s excellent 2007 biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.)

In a 1997 issue of Skeptic magazine (Vol 5, No. 2), one of my contributing editors, Michael Gilmore, published an article on Einstein’s God based on a series of letters that he obtained from a World War II U.S. Navy veteran named Guy H. Raner, who corresponded with Einstein on the God question. We republished those letters in their entirety for the first time anywhere. In the first letter, dated June 14, 1945, sent from the USS Bougainville in the Pacific Ocean, Raner recounts a conversation he had on the ship with a Jesuit-educated Catholic officer who claimed that Einstein converted from atheism to theism when he was confronted by a Jesuit priest with three irrefutable syllogisms: “The syllogisms were: A design demands a designer; The universe is a design; therefore there must have been a designer.”

Raner countered the Catholic officer by noting that cosmology and evolutionary theory adequately explain most apparent design in the world, “but even if there was a ‘designer,’ that would give only a re-arranger, not a creator; and again assuming a designer, you are back where you started by being forced to admit a designer of the designer etc. etc. Same as the account of the earth resting on an elephant’s back — elephant standing on a giant turtle; turtle on turtle on turtle, etc.”

At this point in his life Einstein was world-famous and routinely received hundreds of such letters, many from prominent scholars and scientists, so for him to write a lowly ensign aboard a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean reveals how much this story got his goat. On July 2, 1945, Einstein fired back:

I received your letter of June 10^th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. Your counter-arguments seem to me very correct and could hardly be better formulated. It is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere — childish analogies. We have to admire in humility and beautiful harmony of the structure of this world — as far as we can grasp it. And that is all.

Read more:  http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/columns/michael-shermer/einstein%E2%80%99s-god