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Religion and Science
The following article by Albert Einstein appeared in
the New York Times Magazine on November 9, 1930 pp 1-4. It has been reprinted
in Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, Inc. 1954, pp 36 - 40. It also
appears in Einstein's book The World as I See It, Philosophical Library,
New York, 1949, pp. 24 - 28.
Everything that the human race has done and thought is
concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement
of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand
spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the
motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted
a guise the latter may present themselves to us. Now what are the feelings
and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest
sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that
the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and
experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious
notions - fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death.
Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is
usually poorly developed, the human mind creates illusory beings more or
less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings
depend. Thus one tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying
out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed
down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed
toward a mortal. In this sense I am speaking of a religion of fear. This,
though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation
of a special priestly caste which sets itself up as a mediator between
the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis.
In many cases a leader or ruler or a privileged class whose position rests
on other factors combines priestly functions with its secular authority
in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the
priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.
The social impulses are another source of the crystallization
of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities
are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts
men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence,
who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the God who, according to
the limits of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the
tribe or of the human race, or even or life itself; the comforter in sorrow
and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead. This is
the social or moral conception of God.
The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development
from the religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in
the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the
peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from
a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples' lives.
And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions
of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we
must be on our guard. The truth is that all religions are a varying blend
of both types, with this differentiation: that on the higher levels of
social life the religion of morality predominates.
Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character
of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional
endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable
extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience
which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure
form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to
elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially
as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
The individual feels the futility of human desires and
aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both
in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him
as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single
significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear
at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David
and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from
the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element
of this.
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished
by this kind of religious feeling, which 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. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age
that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling
and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes
also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of
Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from
one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God
and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and
science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive
to it.
We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science
to religion very different from the usual one. When one views the matter
historically, one is inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable
antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced
of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment
entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events -
provided, of course, that he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously.
He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or
moral religion.
A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason
that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal,
so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate
object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. Science has therefore
been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's
ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and
social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed
be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes
of reward after death.
It is therefore easy to see why the churches have always
fought science and persecuted its devotees.On the other hand, I maintain
that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for
scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above
all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot
be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which
alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life,
can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and
what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind
revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them
to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial
mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived
chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion
of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have
shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through
the centuries.
Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization
of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true
to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious
feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly,
that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are
the only profoundly religious people.
The following excerpts are taken from Albert Einstein
- The Human Side,Selected and Edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman,
Princeton University Press, 1979.
Einstein on Prayer (pp. 32 - 33)
A child in the sixth grade in a Sunday School in New York
City, with the encouragement of her teacher, wrote to Einstein in Princeton
on 19 January I936 asking him whether scientists pray, and if so what they
pray for. Einstein replied as follows on 24 January 1936:
I have tried to respond to your question as simply as
I could. Here is my answer.
Scientific research is based on the idea that everything
that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds
for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly
be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e.
by a wish addressed to a supernatural Being.
My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the
infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with
our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality
is of the highest importance-but for us, not for God.
"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals
himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns
himself with fates and actions of human beings." Upon being asked
if he believed in God by Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogue,
New York, April 24, 1921, Einstein: The Life and Times, Ronald W. Clark,
Page 502.
"Coughlin [of the Los Angeles tabloid Illustrated
Daily News, in hot pursuit of asking Einstein a provocative, headline-inducing
question] found the right moment while tailing the car that was speeding
the couple [the Einsteins] north on the coast road to Pasadena. It had
stopped to let Einstein stroll over to a small headland known as Sunset
Cliffs, where he stood gazing at the sea and sky. Seizing the moment, Coughlin
leaped from his car, the question on his lips, followed by Spang, his camera
at the ready. "Doctor", Coughlin said, "is there a God?"
Einstein stared at the water's edge some twenty feet below, then turned
to his questioner. Coughlin later wrote: "There were tears in his
eyes, and he was sniffing. Spang shot the picture as Einstein was hustled
away before he could answer me. "Well," I said, "the way
he reacted, he believes in God. Did you ever see such an emotional face?"
Spang was standing on the edge of the headland, where the great scientist
had stood. He looked down, then called me: "Come over here."
I looked down and there, caught against the base of the little cliff, was
a shark that must have been dead in the hot sun for several days. "Makes
anybody cry", Spang said." Einstein:
A Life, Denis Brian, Page 206.
Albert Einstein was born 1879 in Ulm. After graduation
in 1900 he worked as a patent clerk in Bern, conducting research in physics
in his spare time. In 1905 he published five papers that transformed the
course of physics and established his reputation as one of the foremost
scientists of his age.
From the first world war on Einstein was a committed
pacifist and anti- nationalist. Soon after Hitler became chancellor, he
left Germany and joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
So convinced was he that Hitler was planning war that he went against his
pacifist leanings. He advised free Europe to re-arm, and wrote to Roosevelt
urging the US to undertake research into the atomic-bomb.
Einstein died in 1955. He is best known for the theory
of relativity, which states that time, mass and length all change according
to velocity. Space and time are a unified continuum, which curves in the
presence of mass.
The last three decades of his life were devoted to the
search for a field theory which would unify gravitation and electro-magnetism.
Einstein always said that he was a deeply religious man,
and his religion informed his science. He rejected the conventional image
of God as a personal being, concerned about our individual lives, judging
us when we die, intervening in the laws he himself had created to cause
miracles, answer prayers and so on. Einstein did not believe in a soul
separate from the body, nor in an afterlife of any kind.
But he was certainly a pantheist. He did regard the ordered
cosmos with the same kind of feeling that believers have for their God.
To some extent this was a simple awe at the impenetrable mystery of sheer
being. Einstein also had an urge to lose individuality and to experience
the universe as a whole.
But he was also struck by the radiant beauty, the harmony,
the structure of the universe as it was accessible to reason and science.
In describing these factors he sometimes uses the word God, and sometimes
refers to a divine reason, spirit or intelligence. He never suggests that
this reason or spirit transcends the world - so in that sense he is a clear
pantheist and not a panentheist. However, this reason is to some extent
anthropomorphic, and to some extent involves Einstein in a contradiction.
His religious thinking was not systematic, so he never
ironed out this discrepancy. But it seems likely that he believed in a
God who was identical to the universe - similar to the God of Spinoza.
A God whose rational nature was expressed in the universe, or a God who
was identified with the universe and its laws taken together. His own scientific
search for the laws of this universe was a deeply religious quest.
Einstein's attachment to what he once called `the grandeur
of reason incarnate' led him into the longest battle and the greatest failure
of his life. He was implacably imposed to Niels Bohr's interpretation of
quantum physics. Bohr believed that matter was fundamentally indeterminate,
and our knowledge of it limited to probabilities.
Einstein's comment, "God does not play dice,"
became notorious. The phrase uses the present tense, not the past. This
suggests that Einstein was probably not referring to the fact that a creator
God would not in the beginning have created a universe in which chance
reigned supreme. Rather he may have meant that as God or reason incarnate,
the universe could not be governed by chance alone.
Einstein believed till the last that quantum physics
was incomplete: he was sure that one day an explanation would be found
which would explain the causes of the apparent indeterminacy and once again
make it plain that the universe was governed by laws. So far this has not
happened.
Perhaps if Einstein had sought more consistency in his
own religious thought, and had been less concerned with a God who embodied
human ideas of reason, he might have learned to be excited by indeterminacy.
Then he might have come to see indeterminacy as another manifestation of
the mystery, creativity and playfulness of Being. from Scientific
Pantheism by Paul Harrison
On A Pre-Established Harmony
Address delivered at a celebration of Max Planck's sixtieth
birthday (1918) before the Physical Society in Berlin. Published in Mein
Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.
"...[T]he development of physics has shown that
at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one
has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest. Nobody who
has really gone deeply into the matter will deny that in practice the world
of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the
fact that there is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical
principles; this is what Leibnitz described as a 'pre-established harmony.'"
On Questioning Authority
First published in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist,
ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp. First published in a separate edition by Open
Court Publishing Company, 1979.
"I came--though the child of entirely irreligious
(Jewish) parents--to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt
end at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books
I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could
not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking
coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived
by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every
kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward
the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment -- an
attitude that has never again left me."
On The Great Riddle
First published in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist,
ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp. First published in a separate edition by Open
Court Publishing Company, 1979.
"Out yonder was this huge world, which exists independently
of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle,
at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation
of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a
man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom
and security in its pursuit. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world
within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half
consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal."
On Religion And Science
Written expressly for the New York Times Magazine, where
it appeared on November 9, 1930 (pp. 1-4). The German text was published
in the Berliner Tageblatt, November 11, 1930.
"...[T]he scientist is possessed by the sense of
universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and
determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality; it is a
purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous
amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence
of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking
and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."
"The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe.
We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered
to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that
someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It
does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child
notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order
which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects." -Einstein
"I cannot believe that God would choose to play
dice with the universe."
"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens
above and the moral universe within ."
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and
human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
-Einstein
Famous Quotes by Albert Einstein
on Religion and God
"I cannot believe that God would choose to play
dice with the universe."
"I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes
his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves.
Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives
his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish
such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life
and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of 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."
"We should take care not to make the intellect our
god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
"True religion is real living; living with all one's
soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness."
"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion.
The religion which based on experience, which refuses dogmatic. If there's
any religion that would cope the scientific needs it will be Buddhism...."
"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes
the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own --
a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can
I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although
feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms."
on Life
"The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy
in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat."
"The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of
activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives."
"A hundred times every day I remind myself that
my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others ."
"Without deep reflection one knows from daily life
that one exists for other people ."
"The ideals which have always shone before me and
filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make
a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics
built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle."
"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all
fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."
on Nature, the Universe, and the Mysterious
"The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe
when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous
structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a
little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity."
"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens
above and the moral universe within ."
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the
mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this
emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt
in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the
mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone
to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and
lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenatrable
for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the
most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor
faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true
religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself
amoung profoundly religious men."
"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe
is that it is comprehensible."
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us
the "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences
himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a
kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind
of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection
for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this
prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature in its beauty."
"The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe.
We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered
to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that
someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It
does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child
notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books---a mysterious order
which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects."
on Relativity
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and
it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems
like a minute. THAT'S relativity."
"Relativity teaches us the connection between the
different descriptions of one and the same reality"
"I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I
was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is
that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time.
These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual
development was retarded,as a result of which I began to wonder about space
and time only when I had already grown up."
on Mankind
on Knowledge, Imagination, and Creativity
"The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe
when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous
structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a
little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity."
"We all know, from what we experience with and within
ourselves, that our conscious acts spring from our desires and our fears.
Intuition tells us that that is true also of our fellows and of the higher
animals. We all try to escape pain and death, while we seek what is pleasant.
We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organised
that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of
the race. Hunger, love, pain, fear are some of those inner forces which
rule the individual's instinct for self preservation. At the same time,
as social beings, we are moved in the relations with our fellow beings
by such feelings as sympathy, pride, hate, need for power, pity, and so
on. All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the
springs of man's actions. All such action would cease if those powerful
elemental forces were to cease stirring within us. Though our conduct seems
so very different from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts
are much aloke in them and in us. The most evident difference springs from
the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power
of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language
and other symbolical devices. Thought is the organising factor in man,
intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.
In that way imagination and intelligence enter into our existence in the
part of servants of the primary instincts. But their intervention makes
our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts."
"The only source of knowledge is experience"
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in
the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the
Gods."
"When I examine myself and my methods of thought,
I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me
than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge."
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide
your sources."
"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational
mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant
and has forgotten the gift."
"We should take care not to make the intellect our
god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind
too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who read too much and uses
his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
"Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship
of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate
and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations
and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to
me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in
the social life of man."
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