Albert Einstein And God

I point out that this clearly shows that Einstein did not believe in a personal God. I show this not as an appeal to Einstein as an authority to prove atheism, which is silly, but to show how wrong theists who quote him are. Second to those who say Einstein was a physicist and had no special knowledge of theology, I say that if anyone can be said to be an expert in theology, or to have opinions which carry more weight than anyone else's, then Einstein was an expert. He thought and wrote a lot about religion. Finally this quote argues for the position that ethics and value in life need not depend upon a god, contrary to some theists claims, and getting into other FAQs. On that I quote Einstein not for his authority, but for his eloquence.

No one who has actually read Einstein as I have can seriously question his belief in determinism or point to him as an example of a theist.

The following is from Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A Symposium, published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941.

"The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be *refuted* [italics his], in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.
"But I am convinced that such behavior on the part of representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task..."

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