Einstein, Spam & Religion.

A deeply troubled, evangelical friend recently forwarded me a chain email purportedly quoting a confrontation between an un-named atheist professor and a deeply religious student by the name of Albert Einstein. In this confrontation Einstein was reported to have dumbfounded his professor with his logic and essentially proven the existence of god.
The story was untrue. Einstein never engaged in such a conversation. Indeed, Einstein is reported to have become deeply disillusioned with both the teachings of his Jewish background and the Catholic schools he attended before he reached his teens.
Throughout most of his life he was very circumspect about his views, not wanting to antagonize either the believing or non believing camps. However in 1954, a year before his death, he wrote a couple of letters that make his beliefs plain:
In an open letter to those who claimed he worshipped a Judeo/Christian God he wrote:"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

The following abridgement of the letter to Eric Gutkind from Princeton in January 1954, (translated from German by Joan Stambaugh) is particularly telling. It was sold at Bloomsbury auctions in May 2008 for $404,000, a record sum for a single Einstein letter. Professor Richard Dawkins was one of the bidders who failed to purchase it:

"... I read a great deal in the last days of your book, and thank you very much for sending it to me. What especially struck me about it was this. With regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common.

... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual 'props' and 'rationalisation' in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things. With friendly thanks and best wishes

Yours, A. Einstein"