Albert Einstein, who lived from 1879 to 1955, is widely regarded as the greatest physicist of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his work on the photoelectric effect, but he is best remembered for his theory of relativity, which he put forward in two parts, in 1905 and 1915. Einstein was also a man of deep religiosity, although not in the conventional sense, and this feeling provided powerful motivation for his scientific work. His outlook on religion is well documented in Einstein And Religion, by Max Jammer (Princeton University Press, £18.95 in UK).
Einstein was born in Ulm, in south-western Germany, to non-practising Jewish parents. At the age of six, he entered a Catholic primary school, where he received Catholic religious instruction. For balance, his parents hired a relative to teach him the principles of Judaism. The young Albert extracted from Catholicism and Judaism elements common to both, and this excited in him a fervent religious sentiment, including a desire to live a life pleasing to God. He spent several years living in what he later called a religious paradise.
Einstein's religious honeymoon ended at the age of 12. A medical student introduced him to popular books on science, to Immanuel Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason and to books on geometry and mathematics. Albert concluded that much of the detail in the Bible could not be true. This caused him quite a shock, and he started on a path of free thinking from which he never deviated. Einstein became irreligious in the conventional sense, and he never took his bar mitzvah, the Jewish equivalent of confirmation.
He subsequently developed a profound cosmic religiosity, but he had no belief in a personal god who interests himself in our individual affairs, and he never attended religious services. He was heavily influenced by the 17th century Jewish philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza, who held that all events in nature occur according to immutable laws of cause and effect, and that the universe is governed according to mathematical order rather than to purposeful or moral intentions. Spinoza used the concept of God but declared: "Neither intellect nor will appertain to God's nature."
Spinoza also disagreed with the notion of a personal god, and he attributed the divine activities in the Bible to the law-like course of nature. "God's will" is identical to nature's laws and God has no ethical properties. Good and evil are only relative to man's desires. People do not act freely in the sense of having alternatives to their actions. The sense of freedom people feel arises from their ignorance of the underlying causes that motivate their actions. The appropriate object of religious devotion is the harmony of the universe.
Einstein never spontaneously promoted his religious beliefs. He was frequently asked his mind on religion, however, and he usually acceded to all requests he considered genuine. He declared that he believed in "the God of Spinoza", but did not dispute the usefulness of conventional religion. He declared that a personal god "seems to me preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook of life, and I wonder whether one can ever successfully render to the majority of mankind a more sublime means in order to satisfy its metaphysical needs".
Einstein believed that religion first arose naturally out of fear of hunger, dangerous beasts, sickness and death. Because of poor understanding of causal connections, humans invented imaginary beings in their own likeness who had control over the life and the health of the individual. In order to exert a positive influence on these beings, they were offered supplications or sacrifice, the earliest form of prayer and religious ritual.
The second stage in the development of religion, according to Einstein, is "the social/moral perception of God", arising from "the desire for guidance, love and support". This god rewards and punishes, comforts the distressed and preserves the souls of the dead. For Einstein, the Old and New Testaments illustrate the transition from the first to the second stage of religion, all the time revering a god conceived in man's image.
The third stage of religious experience, the one adopted by Einstein, is the "cosmic religious feeling", which has no anthropomorphic image of God. Cosmic religion experiences the universe as a single significant whole and views individual existence as a sort of prison - "The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves in nature and in thought." Einstein believed that religious geniuses of all ages were imbued with this cosmic religious feeling.
Einstein was often called an atheist, but he denied this categorisation. He had his own concept of God: an impersonal intelligence behind the cosmic order. As he said: "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. Veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion."
Einstein never thought of religion and science as enemies. On the contrary, he regarded religion (at least, cosmic religion) and science as mutually dependent. He declared: "I am of the opinion that all the finer speculations in the realm of science spring from a deep religious feeling, and that without such feelings they would not be fruitful." Hence his famous dictum that "science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind".
William Reville is a senior lecturer in biochemistry and director of microscopy at UCC