|Albert Einstein (1879-1955)|
Eintein's disapproving objection to the indeterminism of quantum mechanics - the "other theory," which along with Einstein's "theory of relativity," shattered all notions of 'classical physics' and forever changed our understanding of the universe - may be the most famous of his many memorable sayings: "God does not play dice with the universe!"
By his own admission, Einstein was not an atheist. (Indeed, I've heard it said that all physicists are probably closet mystics, drawn to metaphysical speculation as a moth is drawn to the candle's flame, about which I will have more to say, below.) In Time's excerpted article from "Einstein," by Walter Isaacson, (Simon & Schuster: 2007) Isaacson writes:
"(T)hroughout his life, Einstein was consistent in rejecting the charge that he was an atheist. "There are people who say there is no God," he told a friend. "But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views." And unlike Sigmund Freud or Bertrand Russell or George Bernard Shaw, Einstein never felt the urge to denigrate those who believed in God; instead, he tended to denigrate atheists. "What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos," he explained.
"The music of the sphere's." Do any of the spiritual masters, past or present, express either the spiritual nature of the universe, or what may be God, any more poetically? . . . as poetically, perhaps; but, more poetically? Certainly, not.In fact, Einstein tended to be more critical of debunkers, who seemed to lack humility or a sense of awe, than of the faithful. "The fanatical atheists," he wrote in a letter, "are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who--in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses'-- cannot hear the music of the spheres."
|'Finger of God' Nebula: NASA|
But what were the sources of Einstein's "inner-religiousity" or "spirituality?" Isaacson notes that his parents were almost militantly, non-observant Jews, and that he received a Catholic early education. Nonetheless, he seems to have practiced his own form of Orthodox Judaism until at age twelve he abandoned all outward religious affectations.
I suspect that like many of the leading scientists of the early twentieth century (Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Robert Oppenheimer, spring to mind), Einstein may have been influenced, more than is readily discernible, by the then-recently transplanted Eastern wisdom teachings such as Bhuddism and the Advaita Vedanta. As Isaacson again notes, based on Einstein's own thoughts and words, Einstein was a profoundly "religious man." Like Heisenberg, who outlined the "uncertainty principle" in quantum theory that Einstein would spend a career unsuccessfully trying to refute, Einstein also penned a credo entitled, "What I Believe." In it, he notes:
"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."
This is purely speculative, of course. But a man of Einstein's unslakeable curiosity and deeply held spiritual (rather than outerwardly religious) inclinations would surely have looked into the beliefs held by so many others, if not just the beliefs held by Heisenberg and Einstein's close colleague, the Nobel-laureate physicist, Pauli.