Albert Einstein

COLLECTED PIECES FROM HERE & THERE ON THE INTERNET

'Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.'

Religion & Science

The following excerpt was published in The World as I See It (1999) by Albert Einstein Everything that the human race has done & thought is concerned with the satisfaction of felt needs & the assuagement of pain.

- One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements & their development.

- Feeling & desire are the motive forces behind all human Endeavour & human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present itself to us.

Now what are the feelings & needs that have led men to religious thought & 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 & 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 connexions is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates for itself more or less analogous beings on whose wills & actions these fearful happenings depend.

- One's object now is to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions & offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed towards a mortal.

I am speaking now of the religion of fear.

This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets up as a mediator between the people & the beings they fear, & erects a hegemony on this basis.

In many cases the leader or ruler whose position depends on other factors, or a privileged class, combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers & the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.

The social feelings are another source of the crystallization of religion.

Fathers & mothers & the leaders of larger human communities are mortal & fallible.

The desire for guidance, love, & support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God.

- This is the God of Providence who protects, disposes, rewards, & punishes,

- the God who, according to the width of the believer's outlook, loves & cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even life as such, the comforter in sorrow & unsatisfied longing, 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, which is 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 a nation's life.

- That primitive religions are based entirely on fear & the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard.

The truth is that they are all intermediate types, with this reservation, 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.

Only individuals of exceptional endowments & exceptionally high-minded communities, as a general rule, get in any real sense beyond this level.

But there is a third state of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form, & which I will call cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to explain 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 nothingness of human desires & aims & the sublimity & marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature & in the world of thought.

- He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison & wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.

The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear in earlier stages of development—e.g., in many of the Psalms of David & in some of the Prophets.

Buddhism, as we have learnt from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer especially, contains a much stronger element of it.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma & 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 the highest kind of religious feeling & 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, & 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 & no theology?

In my view, it is the most important function of art & science to awaken this feeling & keep it alive in those who are capable of 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 & religion as irreconcilable antagonists, & 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 - that is, if he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously.

- He has no use for the religion of fear & equally little for social or moral religion.

A God who rewards & punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external & internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it goes through.

- Hence science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust.

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, & social ties; no religious basis is necessary.

Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear & punishment & hope of reward after death.

It is therefore easy to see why the Churches have always fought science & persecuted its devotees. On the other hand, I maintain that cosmic religious feeling is the strongest & noblest incitement to scientific research.

Only those who realize the immense efforts &, above all, the devotion which pioneer work in theoretical science demands, can 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 & what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler & 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 those like-minded with themselves, scattered through the earth & the centuries.

Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men & given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures.

It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man strength of this sort.

A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.

You will hardly & one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own.

But it is different from the religion of the naive man.

For the latter God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit & whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands to some extent in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe.

But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation.

The future, to him, is every whit as necessary & 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 & acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

- This feeling is the guiding principle of his life & work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.


 

from someplace in his works

At first, then, instead of asking what religion is I should prefer to ask what characterizes the aspirations of a person who gives me the impression of being religious:

a person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires & is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings, & aspirations to which he clings because of their superpersonal value.

It seems to me that what is important is the force of this superpersonal content & the depth of the conviction concerning its overpowering meaningfulness, regardless of whether any attempt is made to unite this content with a divine Being, for otherwise it would not be possible to count Buddha & Spinoza as religious personalities.

Accordingly, a religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance & loftiness of those superpersonal objects & goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation. They exist with the same necessity & matter-of-factness as he himself.

In this sense religion is the age-old endeavor of mankind to become clearly & completely conscious of these values & goals & constantly to strengthen & extend their effect.

If one conceives of religion & science according to these definitions then a conflict between them appears impossible.

For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, & outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.

Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought & action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts & relationships between facts.

According to this interpretation the well-known conflicts between religion & science in the past must all be ascribed to a misapprehension of the situation which has been described.

A response to a greeting sent by the Liberal Ministers' Club of New York City. Published in The Christian Register, June, 1948. Published in Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1954. Does there truly exist an insuperable contradiction between religion and science? Can religion be superseded by science?

The answers to these questions have, for centuries, given rise to considerable dispute &, indeed, bitter fighting.

Yet, in my own mind there can be no doubt that in both cases a dispassionate consideration can only lead to a negative answer.

What complicates the solution, however, is the fact that while most people readily agree on what is meant by "science," they are likely to differ on the meaning of "religion."

As to science, we may well define it for our purpose as "methodical thinking directed toward finding regulative connections between & sensual experiences."

- Science, in the immediate, produces knowledge &, indirectly, means of action. It leads to methodical action if definite goals are set up in advance.

- For the function of setting up goals & passing statements of value transcends its domain.

While it is true that science, to the extent of its grasp of causative connections, may reach important conclusions as to the compatibility & incompatibility of goals & evaluations, the independent & fundamental definitions regarding goals & values remain beyond science's reach.

As regards religion, on the other hand, one is generally agreed that it deals with goals & evaluations &, in general, with the emotional foundation of human thinking & acting, as far as these are not predetermined by the inalterable hereditary disposition of the human species.

Religion is concerned with man's attitude toward nature at large, with the establishing of ideals for the individual & communal life, & with mutual human relationship.

- These ideals religion attempts to attain by exerting an educational influence on tradition & through the development & promulgation of certain easily accessible thoughts & narratives (epics & myths) which are apt to influence evaluation & action along the lines of the accepted ideals.

It is this mythical, or rather this symbolic, content of the religious traditions which is likely to come into conflict with science.

This occurs whenever this religious stock of ideas contains dogmatically fixed statements on subjects which belong in the domain of science.

Thus, it is of vital importance for the preservation of true religion that such conflicts be avoided when they arise from subjects which, in fact, are not really essential for the pursuance of the religious aims.

When we consider the various existing religions as to their essential substance, that is, divested of their myths, they do not seem to me to differ as basically from each other as the proponents of the "relativistic" or conventional theory wish us to believe. & this is by no means surprising.

For the moral attitudes of a people that is supported by religion need always aim at preserving & promoting the sanity & vitality of the community & its individuals, since otherwise this community is bound to perish.

A people that were to honor falsehood, defamation, fraud, & murder would be unable, indeed, to subsist for very long.

When confronted with a specific case, however, it is no easy task to determine clearly what is desirable & what should be eschewed, just as we find it difficult to decide what exactly it is that makes good painting or good music.

It is something that may be felt intuitively more easily than rationally comprehended.

Likewise, the great moral teachers of humanity were, in a way, artistic geniuses in the art of living.

In addition to the most elementary precepts directly motivated by the preservation of life & the sparing of unnecessary suffering, there are others to which, although they are apparently not quite commensurable to the basic precepts, we nevertheless attach considerable importance.

- Should truth, for instance, be sought unconditionally even where its attainment & its accessibility to all would entail heavy sacrifices in toil & happiness?

There are many such questions which, from a rational vantage point, cannot easily be answered or cannot be answered at all. Yet, I do not think that the so-called "relativistic" viewpoint is correct, not even when dealing with the more subtle moral decisions.

When considering the actual living conditions of present day civilized humanity from the standpoint of even the most elementary religious commands, one is bound to experience a feeling of deep & painful disappointment at what one sees.

For while religion prescribes brotherly love in the relations among the individuals & groups, the actual spectacle more resembles a battlefield than an orchestra.

- Everywhere, in economic as well as in political life, the guiding principle is one of ruthless striving for success at the expense of one's fellow men.

- This competitive spirit prevails even in school &, destroying all feelings of human fraternity & cooperation, conceives of achievement not as derived from the love for productive & thoughtful work, but as springing from personal ambition & fear of rejection.

There are pessimists who hold that such a state of affairs is necessarily inherent in human nature; it is those who propound such views that are the enemies of true religion, for they imply thereby that religious teachings are utopian ideals & unsuited to afford guidance in human affairs.

The study of the social patterns in certain so-called primitive cultures, however, seems to have made it sufficiently evident that such a defeatist view is wholly unwarranted.

- Whoever is concerned with this problem, a crucial one in the study of religion as such, is advised to read the description of the Pueblo Indians in Ruth Benedict's book, Patterns of Culture.

- Under the hardest living conditions, this tribe has apparently accomplished the difficult task of delivering its people from the scourge of competitive spirit & of fostering in it a temperate, cooperative conduct of life, free of external pressure & without any curtailment of happiness.

The interpretation of religion, as here advanced, implies a dependence of science on the religious attitude, a relation which, in our predominantly materialistic age, is only too easily overlooked.

While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect & susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge.

- If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one & if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.

 

Albert Einstein:

Religion & Anti-Semitism

excerpts from The Private Albert Einstein by Peter A. Bucky
various conversations between Bucky & Einstein over a thirty year period.

BUCKY:

It's ironic that your name has been synonymous with science in the twentieth century, & yet there has always been a lot of controversy surrounding you in relation to religious questions. How do you account for this unusual circumstance, since science & religion are usually thought to be at odds?

EINSTEIN:

Well, I do not think that it is necessarily the case that science & religion are natural opposites. In fact, I think that there is a very close connection between the two. Further, I think that science without religion is lame &, conversely, that religion without science is blind. Both are important & should work hand-in-hand. It seems to mc that whoever doesn't wonder about the truth in religion & in science might as well be dead.

BUCKY:

So then, you consider yourself to be a religious man?

EINSTEIN:

I believe in mystery &, frankly, I sometimes face this mystery with great fear. In other words, I think that there are many things in the universe that we cannot perceive or penetrate & that also we experience some of the most beautiful things in life in only a very primitive form. Only in relation to these mysteries do I consider myself to be a religious man. But I sense these things deeply. What I cannot understand is how there could possibly be a God who would reward or punish his subjects or who could induce us to develop our will in our daily life.

BUCKY:

You don't believe in God, then?

EINSTEIN:

Ah, this is what I mean about religion & science going hand-in-hand! Each has a place, but each must be relegated to its sphere. Let's assume that we are dealing with a theoretical physicist or scientist who is very well-acquainted with the different laws of the universe, such as how the planets orbit the sun & how the satellites in turn orbit around their respective planets. Now, this man who has studied & understands these different laws - how could he possibly believe in one God who would be capable of disturbing the paths of these great orbiting masses?

No, the natural laws of science have not only been worked out theoretically but have been proven also in practice. I cannot then believe in this concept of an anthropomorphic God who has the powers of interfering with these natural laws. As I said before, the most beautiful & most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. & this mysticality is the power of all true science. If there is any such concept as a God, it is a subtle spirit, not an image of a man that so many have fixed in their minds. In essence, my religion consists of a humble admiration for this illimitable superior spirit that reveals itself in the slight details that we are able to perceive with our frail & feeble minds .

BUCKY:

Do you think perhaps that most people need religion to keep them in check, so to speak?

EINSTEIN:

No, clearly not. I do not believe that a man should be restrained in his daily actions by being afraid of punishment after death or that he should do things only because in this way he will be rewarded after he dies. This does not make sense. The proper guidance during the life of a man should be the weight that he puts upon ethics & the amount of consideration that he has for others. Education has a great role to play in this respect. Religion should have nothing to do with a fear of living or a fear of death, but should instead be a striving after rational knowledge.

BUCKY:

& yet, with all of these thoughts, you are still identified strongly in the public mind as definitely Jewish & this certainly is a very traditional religion.

EINSTEIN:

Actually, my first religious training of any kind was in the Catholic catechism. A fluke, of course, only because the primary school that I first went to was a Catholic one. I was, as a matter of fact, the only Jewish child in the school. This actually worked to my advantage, since it made it easier for me to isolate myself from the rest of the class & find that comfort in solitude that I so cherished.

BUCKY:

But don't you find any discrepancy between your previous somewhat anti-religious statements & your willingness to be identified publicly as a Jew?

EINSTEIN:

Not necessarily. Actually it is a very difficult thing to even define a Jew. The closest that I can come to describing it is to ask you to visualize a snail. A snail that you see at the ocean consists of the body that is snuggled inside of the house which it always carries around with it. But let's picture what would happen if we lifted the shell off of the snail. Would we not still describe the unprotected body as a snail? In just the same way, a Jew who sheds his faith along the way, or who even picks up a different one, is still a Jew.

BUCKY:

You were the focus of much attack on the part of the Nazis in Germany because of your Jewishness. What explanation have you come up with for why the Jews have been hated so much throughout history?

EINSTEIN: