Einstein & Faith

I finally got around to reading an excerpt from the new biography on Einstein by Walter Isaacson that was in the April 16, 2007 issue of Time. As many others do, I find Einstein a fascinating person especially in what he believe about God.

Einstein grew up in a non-practicing Jewish family, and actually attended a Roman Catholic school when he was young. Around 12 years old, though, he jettisoned religious faith. However, he couldn't not be impressed by the orderliness and mystery of the universe and so ended up with a kind of Spinozan faith in a kind of Deistic god that orders the whole universe including human beings. He believed in causal determinism and at one point said, "Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions." On the other hand, he did hold people accountable for their actions even though his intellectual position didn't support this.

Unlike atheists like Freud and Bertrand Russell who made fun of those who believed in God, Einstein tended to criticize the atheists. He said, "What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos." One of his more famous quotations is, "The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."