Part VI
In this part . . .
Einstein’s life, like his science, was fascinating. Besides physics, he was interested in philosophy, particularly the philosophy of science. Einstein also said repeatedly that he was religious. In this part, I tell you what he really meant by being religious.
To complete our view of Einstein, the man, I’ve collected short biographies of ten women who influenced Einstein.
Chapter 20
In This Chapter
Understanding Einstein’s religious heritage
Discovering Einstein’s religion
Recognizing Einstein’s philosophical views
E instein’s religious beliefs constitute a very important part of who he was. These beliefs have often been misunderstood or quoted out of context. Some people, who want to think that Einstein would’ve supported their views, have used his statements to claim that Einstein believed in the God of their religion. Others have claimed that Einstein was an atheist.
Einstein’s views on religion have influenced many people. The physicist Max Jammer said that after the publication of his book Einstein and Religion, he received some letters mostly from agnostic scientists admitting that they had been inspired after they read Einstein’s concept of religion.
The philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science became the focus of many of Einstein’s writings during the last years of his life. Einstein was not a philosopher in the academic sense. “I was always interested in philosophy but only in a secondary way,” he wrote. His interest was in discovering how nature operates. His deep involvement with the meaning of quantum theory influenced scientists’ views throughout the 20th century.
In this chapter, I give you examples of Einstein’s thoughts on religion and philosophy. From just this short chapter, you can get a pretty good idea of who Einstein’s God was. And you can see that he was not an atheist. You can also get a feeling for his philosophical ideas about how we think and how science works.
Wrestling with Judaism
As I explain in Chapter 2, Einstein was born into a Jewish family, but his parents weren’t practicing Jews; they didn’t follow the traditional customs and didn’t attend the local synagogue. Einstein’s father, Hermann, regarded religious rites and traditions as “an ancient superstition” and was proud not to follow them.
When Einstein was 5 years old, he entered public school. His parents chose the local Catholic school because it offered a better education. They didn’t object to him learning about Catholicism, but they also wanted him to learn about Judaism. They asked one of their relatives to teach him at home. Einstein learned the teachings of the Catholic Church and those of the Jewish faith at the same time.
When Einstein entered secondary school at the age of 9, his religious education continued at school only, this time in Judaism. As a result of this instruction, Einstein suddenly began to follow religious rituals on his own, observing the Sabbath, eating kosher food, and composing songs in honor of God.
Einstein’s religious fervor stopped as suddenly as it had begun. At the age of 12, he began to read popular science books. The stories of the Bible conflicted with the science he was learning. He thought that he’d been misled and began to distrust his teachers, as well as the school and church authorities. This distrust stuck with him and extended to every kind of authority.
Years later, when he was an adult, Einstein’s religious feelings returned, but in a different form. He developed his own personal religious philosophy, what he called his religion. He never deviated from it.
Defining What It Means to Be Religious
During his mature years, Einstein often wrote and gave public lectures about his idea of religion. In a letter to a young girl who’d written to him asking whether scientists pray, Einstein said that a scientist does not accept that the course of events can be influenced by prayer — that is, by the wish of a supernatural being. However, he said, everyone seriously engaged in science discovers that “the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to Man, and one in the face of which we, with our modest powers, must feel humble.”
The German novelist Gerhart Hauptmann once asked Einstein if he was deeply religious. Einstein replied that he was: “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable.” His religion was respect for this force that we can’t comprehend.
In an essay that he wrote in 1930, Einstein said that his religion was “a knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in the most primitive forms are accessible to our minds — it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”
In spite of these statements, when it came time to decide about the religious education of his own children, Einstein said that he disliked very much that they should be taught “something that is contrary to all scientific thinking.” How could he disprove of teaching his children something that he regarded as being “the most radiant beauty”?
To Einstein, religious education meant indoctrination in the rituals of a particular religion. That wasn’t what he meant by being religious. To him, being religious was experiencing the emotion felt in the presence of the mystery of nature and in the veneration of its creator. That, according to Einstein, is something you can’t teach in a class.
Reconciling Religion and Science
After 1930, Einstein wrote several essays on religion and science. In 1940, in an address at the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, in New York, Einstein said that he considered science and religion to be mutually dependent on each other. He wrote that “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
Here again, he refers to his own meaning of the word religion: the feeling of awe brought about by contemplating the order in the universe and believing in a creator of this order.
In 1948, Einstein wrote an essay titled “Religion and Science: Irreconcilable?” in which he discussed two issues:
“Does there truly exist an insuperable contradiction between religion and science?”
“Can religion be superseded by science?”
Einstein said that the answer to both questions is no. Science and religion operate in different domains. Science, he said, is “the systematical thinking directed toward finding connections between our sensual experiences,” while religion is “concerned with Man’s attitude toward nature at large, with the establishing of ideals for the individual and communal life, and with mutual human relationship.”
Meeting Einstein’s God
Einstein’s idea of God is based on two key beliefs:
Determinism: The world obeys the precise laws discovered by science and, after the universe is set into motion, everything that happens is predetermined because the universe must obey these laws.
A denial of anthropomorphism: God does not have human qualities.
In a 1930 essay, Einstein said that he couldn’t conceive “of a God that rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves.” And he added a beautiful description of what God was for him: “I am satisfied with the mystery and eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure on the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”
In 1952, Einstein wrote that he didn’t believe in a personal God. “The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems quite naïve.” And in 1954, in a written response to an interview, he said that he couldn’t accept the idea of God based on the authority of the Church. “I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws.”
Tracking the Development of Religion
In 1930, Einstein wrote an article for The New York Times titled “Religion and Science.” In it, he laid out his (not entirely original) view of the origin of religion. He explained that the development of religion can be divided into three stages:
The first stage, developed by primitive societies, is the need to appease fears: the fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, and death. Einstein called this stage “the religion of fear.”
The second stage is “the social or moral conception of God.” This conception comes from the “desire for guidance, love, and support.” This is the God that comforts, rewards, and punishes.
The third and final stage is what Einstein called the cosmic religion, which is “very difficult to elucidate . . . to anyone who is entirely without it, especially if there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.” This is Einstein’s own religion. In his article, Einstein wrote that this religious feeling “knows no dogma, and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it.”
Holding On Tight to Determinism
Quantum physics was fully developed by 1925. This field started with Einstein’s 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, where he showed that light is lumpy (quantized). Quantum theory would become extremely successful over the years, “the most successful physical theory of our period,” according to Einstein himself.
However, even with its success, Einstein never accepted that quantum physics was the final answer.
What was it about quantum theory that Einstein didn’t like? That it abolished determinism. (See the previous section “Meeting Einstein’s God.”) Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (see Chapter 16), which is at the heart of quantum physics, says that you no longer can know at once everything you want to know about the behavior of objects. Although the principle applies to everything in the universe, from electrons to stars, the effects are noticeable only in the realm of the atom, when you work with subatomic particles.
If the universe behaves according to Heisenberg’s principle, you can never know for certain the past or present of anything in the universe. And you can’t face the future with any certainty about what you’ll encounter. The outcome of everything became probabilistic.
“God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” Einstein once said. He wasn’t ready to abandon classical determinism from physics. And he put up a big fight. He and Niels Bohr, who was the main champion of the new physics, argued back and forth about the meaning of reality. In many cases, Bohr convinced Einstein of the flaws of a particular argument against quantum physics. But Bohr couldn’t answer Einstein’s argument about the EPR problem, which I explain in Chapter 16. Einstein found a way to sidestep Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and determine, with complete accuracy, the outcome of the collision of two particles and their entire future history.
At the time, technology hadn’t advanced enough for the extremely delicate EPR experiment to be performed. Now it has. Since 1982, several real EPR experiments have been performed, and the results show that Einstein was wrong. The basic premise of quantum physics is correct. The world is not deterministic.
Reading Philosophy
As I explain in Chapter 2, when Einstein was growing up, his family invited a poor medical student to dinner once a week. The student, Max Talmud, became one of Einstein’s early influences, encouraging him to read books on science. When Einstein was 13, Talmud brought him Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, not an easy read even for philosophy students. Einstein read the book and discussed it with Talmud.
A couple years after Einstein finished his undergraduate education, when he was working at the Bern patent office, he and two friends (who he’d been tutoring in physics) formed what they called the Olympic Academy, which I explain in Chapter 9. The three friends “had a wonderful time in those days in Bern,” as Einstein wrote later. “Our cheerful ‘Academy’ . . . was less childish than those respectable ones which I later got to know only too well.”
The purpose of the academy was to read and discuss books on physics, philosophy, and literature. The group read Plato, David Hume’s treatise on human nature, John Stuart Mill’s system of logic, Benedict de Spinoza’s ethics, and Richard Avenarius’s critique of pure existence, among other books.
These readings stimulated Einstein’s thinking on the philosophy of religion and science. They also allowed him to write and speak with authority on the philosophy of science.
Defining Thinking
Einstein started his autobiographical notes with a discussion about what thinking is. Einstein explained that he did so because “the essential in the being of a man of my type lies precisely in what he thinks and how he thinks, not in what he does or suffers.”
Einstein asked the question: “What, precisely, is ‘thinking’?” When images pop up in our minds as a response to stimuli from our senses, he said, “this is not yet ‘thinking.’” When such images form a series, and one of the images calls up another, “this too is not yet ‘thinking.’”
Einstein said that the transition from free association or daydreaming to thinking “is characterized by the more or less dominating role which the ‘concept’ plays in it.” A concept can stay in our minds in private thought.
If a concept is to be transmitted to others, it must be put into words, and sometimes that’s not easy. But, Einstein said, the most important part of thinking occurs before reaching the communication stage: “I have no doubt that our thinking goes on for the most part without the use of words and beyond that to a considerable degree, unconsciously.”
Einstein wrote that “the physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are signs and more or less clear images which can be voluntarily reproduced and combined.” In his case, these elements were visual and muscular. Einstein’s great success in working with complex abstract concepts seems to have been due to his ability to visualize them.
Interpreting the Scientific Method
In his inaugural address before the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1914, Einstein described his ideas regarding the scientific method from the point of view of theoretical physics. In this respect, he described his own method of scientific research and his interpretation of how science works.
“The theorist’s method,” he said, “involves using as his foundation general postulates or principles from which he can deduce conclusions.” The second part, drawing the conclusions, is the easy part; physicists are well-trained for that in graduate school. But the first part is difficult, Einstein said, because there aren’t any methods or techniques already established that can be applied to do it. “The scientist has to worm these general principles out of nature by perceiving in comprehensive complexes of empirical facts certain general features which permit of precise formulation.”
Einstein gave as an example his own development of the special theory of relativity. The first part, the difficult part, was to extract the principle of relativity from nature. After he did that, the second part came out easily.
To a certain extent, Einstein’s method is the one that physicists still use today in the construction of their theories. It’s what scientists call the scientific method. And it has been extremely successful.
Stating the Goals of Science
According to Einstein, physical theory has two main goals:
“To encompass as much as possible all phenomena and their connections.”
“To achieve this on the basis of as few logically independent concepts and . . . relations between these as possible (basic laws, axioms).”
Einstein restated the second goal “crudely but honestly” as follows: “We do not only wish to know how Nature is (and how her processes develop) but also wish, if possible, to arrive at the perhaps utopian and seemingly pretentious goal to know why Nature is as is and not otherwise.”
Einstein’s views on the goals of science and on the scientific method are part of his philosophical views on the nature of the universe and on our attempts to understand through science how nature works. His ideas influenced modern philosophers of science in their interpretations of how scientific theories are constructed.