For Einstein, God was not a divine being in the traditional religious sense, but a metaphor for the elegant, harmonious, ultimately knowable order of the cosmos. He believed that the universe functioned according to precise, universal laws – and that understanding these laws was among humanity’s highest callings. The most profound human experience, he argued, was an encounter with the “mysterious” – a deep awe-inspired wonder in the face of the unknown. In the context of the vastness of the universe, this feeling awakened what he called a “cosmic religious feeling.” So central was this conviction to Einstein’s worldview that he famously rejected the inherently probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, with the declaration that: “God does not play dice.”
Did Einstein Have a Religious Youth?
Albert Einstein was raised in a secular German-Jewish family. His parents, though Jewish by heritage, were proudly secular and believed Jewish religion and its rituals to be little more than outdated “ancient superstition.” He went to a catholic primary school and ended up taking the standard course in Catholicism, which he did very well in and is reported to have immensely enjoyed.
However, at age nine, he moved to a high school in Munich that offered Jewish religious instruction. Likely in opposition to his parents’ secularism, Einstein briefly became fervently religious. According to his sister, he meticulously “observed Jewish strictures in every detail” – kept kosher, and even composed his own hymns ‘for the glorification of god’ (Issacson, 2008).
This stage in his life came to an abrupt end around the age of twelve. The catalyst appears to have been his growing exposure to science. By the time he was ten, Max Talmud, a poor Jewish medical student who used to dine with the Einstein family once a week, began bringing him editions of the popular illustrated science series People’s Books on Natural Science by Aaron Bernstein.
These books ignited a latent passion and led Einstein to question the literal truth of religious texts. Realizing that the Bible’s stories must not be true, he later claimed the revelations of science to have been a “shattering experience.” From then on, Einstein avoided religious instruction and rituals for the rest of his life.
What Was the “God Letter”?
The clearest expression of Einstein’s beliefs on monotheism appears in a 1954 letter to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, written in response to his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt (1952). Einstein was not a fan of the book. Rejecting Gutkind’s notion of Judaism as a dynamic, revolutionary force, Einstein argued that organized religion was, in his view, little more than organized superstition. He also explicitly dismissed the idea of a personal, monotheistic god.
The idea of the “word of god”, he claimed, was “nothing but the expression and product of human weakness”. By extension, the Hebrew Bible was but “a collection of honourable, but still primitive, legends”. He proceeded to argue, contra Gutkind, that there was nothing special about Jewishness, nor, for that matter, any other religious creed. All organized religion was pre-scientific, superstitious, and thus “primitive.”
True to form, Einstein maintained a respectful tone. He praised Gutkind’s intellect and suggested that on other “concrete things,” they would surely find common ground (Menand, 2018).
Regardless, while he spoke positively about the moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and often talked about God in a metaphorical sense – particularly in relation to physics – his “god letter” leaves no doubt: the idea of a personal, anthropomorphic god was wholly incompatible with his worldview.
What Was Einstein’s Theory of Cosmic Religion?
Einstein’s public rejection of the idea of a personal god who answers prayers and intervenes in human affairs was a fairly standard view for a scientist of his generation (Menand, 2018). Yet, like the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza – whom he greatly admired – Einstein did not dismiss the concept of God altogether. Rather, he redefined it for his own purposes. To him, “God” was the sum total of the laws of nature and the universe itself.
In 1929, when asked by Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein if he believed in God, Einstein famously replied that he believed “in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”
This apparent awe extended into his second great passion – music. Gifted a violin by his mother, Pauline, as a child, he developed a deep, lifelong love of Mozart, whose music he believed to be “so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe itself.” As his biographer Alexander Moszkowski put it, ‘music, nature and god became intermingled in him in a complex feeling, a moral unity, the trace of which never vanished’ (Issacson, 2008).
In this light, Einstein saw himself as a deeply religious man, though not in the traditional sense. For him, the deepest spiritual experience was a reverence for the power of science to comprehend the unknown. His “cosmic” religion was rooted in the awesomeness and sublime intelligibility of the cosmos.
