A famous American atheist, Madeline Murray O’Hare, quoted Einstein in her work All the Questions You Ever Wanted to Ask American Atheists, “If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life… but through striving after rational knowledge.”
Einstein went further, and separated morality from religion and religious teachings when he said, “The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.”
Einstein rejected religious authority at the age of twelve, in part because he could not reconcile biblical tales with scientific knowledge. In his mind, this cast doubt upon both the stories and the authority which presented it. Yet he clearly developed his own moral code and values, and strove to demonstrate his beliefs throughout his life.
Science Will Displace Religion
Einstein was convinced that science would eventually displace religion. “The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion,” he wrote. “It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.” Buddhism is a nontheistic religion closer to philosophy, focusing on an individual’s path to wisdom.
Einstein was aware of and sensitive to criticisms directed toward him from his thoughts on God and religion. Because of this, he took great pains to explain his beliefs and how he came to adopt them. He responded to letters from clerics, politicians, philosophers, students, and even children. In one such letter from a young child, he was asked if scientists pray. Einstein responded earnestly and gently to the child, “…scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, that is, by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being.”
The Rejection of Petitional Prayer and Atheism
Einstein’s rejection of the efficacy of prayer to alter events was based on the revelation that the laws which governed the universe were immutable, which was revealed to him through his work. Adjusting these laws for the benefit of an individual would render them mere guidelines rather than laws, and the universe would then be governed by probability at best. This was the theory behind quantum mechanics, which Einstein rejected.
Einstein not only resented being called an atheist, he considered atheists to be as dogmatic and uninformed as even the most fundamentalist preachers. Einstein recognized his own inability to discover the true meaning of a Supreme Being, which he called the “unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.” This instilled in him a humility that he felt was absent in most declared atheists. “The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle,” he said. Einstein believed atheists held grudges against traditional religion, which closed their minds to the true mysteries of nature and existence.
“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find… There remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable,” he said. “Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.”
Einstein Defines God Through The Existence of Laws
Einstein’s definition of God changed throughout his life. He once defined his vision with a parable: “I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom 1000 years and 1000 dimensions are as one?” Throughout his life, Einstein believed that only what can be observed can be accepted as true. Einstein was unable to observe God, but he saw the laws which govern the universe in his work, and he accepted that those laws were created.
In the 1940s, a rumor circulated that a Jesuit priest had converted Einstein to Christianity. Einstein received a letter asking if it was true. Einstein replied, “I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.”
The interest in Einstein’s religious beliefs and the debate over them did not abate during his lifetime, nor has it in the decades after his death. In the same letter, Einstein bemoaned that he was called an agnostic, and condemned the spirit of the “professional atheist.” Einstein wrote that he preferred to be identified as having “an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”
The Evolution of Fear Into Morality
Einstein believed in a religion of morality rather than what he referred to as a “religion of fear.” He said that it was easy, if one followed the Old Testament through the Gospels of the New Testament, to trace the evolution of the Jewish religion from one of fear to one of morality. To Einstein, blind acceptance of religious teachings was the opposite of science. In considering organized religion, he believed that what men do or think is concerned with either their physical needs, or their desire to avoid or escape pain. “The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts meant to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence, who protects, decides, rewards and punishes.”
Einstein’s rejection of such a personal God, and his explanations for it, caused him to be considered, at various times in his life, and atheist, an agnostic, a practicing Zionist Jew, and a Creationist. In his mind, although he recognized that these judgments were delivered from perspectives tinted by their own religious beliefs, he was none of these. He was deeply reverential of the works of a Supreme Being, though he humbly accepted that he was unable to resolve the mysteries of creation.
Chapter 7: The Pacifist’s Fight
As a child, Einstein often ran away from parades, which were frequent in the Munich of the German Empire under the Kaiser. While the other children followed the marching soldiers, imitating their goose-stepping salutes, Einstein was, on occasion, brought to tears. He told his parents that he didn’t want to become one of those “poor people”, and that, “When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him.” Throughout his life, he shunned martial displays, and was never comfortable amongst members of the military.
When other boys played at being soldiers, Einstein refused to take part, preferring to occupy himself with his construction sets, or some other activity on his own. This perceived oddity by his peers, possibly exacerbated by Einstein’s Judaism, led to occasional difficulties. Taunting and physical altercations occasionally occurred on his way to and from school, but Einstein would later recall them as “not too vicious.”
By the time Einstein was sixteen, he was ready to renounce his citizenship as a German, and German military conscription may have drove him to this decision. Later, when outside of the age limits for the draft, he accepted German citizenship once again. Einstein’s avoidance of military service reinforced his belief in pacifism, which he retained all his life.
Einstein’s Pacifist Beliefs Isolate Him
When World War I began in the late summer of 1914, one of the early German military moves was an attack on France through neighboring Belgium, violating the latter’s neutrality. The French and British press loudly proclaimed their outrage at what they declared the brutal “rape” of Belgium at the hands of the Huns. A group of 93 renowned German scientists, artists, and scholars— among them several of Einstein’s closest friends and colleagues— signed a proclamation which became known as the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three. The proclamation was a call for the German intellectual community and institutions to give uneq
uivocal to the German war effort, and it was largely successful.
Einstein refused to sign the proclamation, and wrote an opposing document, which remained unpublished until Einstein revealed it after the war had ended. Nonetheless, he made his pacifist views well known among his peers. Not yet famous, but well respected within the scientific community, Einstein’s influence did not extend beyond the world of academia during the Great War. He was unable to enlist support within the academic community for his views opposing the war, which he blamed on the spirit of nationalism. Of his colleagues who had supported the Manifesto, Einstein wrote, “They have spoken in a hostile spirit. Nationalist passions cannot excuse this attitude, which is unworthy of what the world has heretofore called culture.”
Einstein Opposes the War and Suffers and Loses Popularity
Rather than joining his colleagues in support of the German war effort, Einstein joined the New Fatherland League. This group presented its views in a pamphlet, The Creation of the United States of Europe. The group’s views decried nationalism, which led to its ban in 1916. Einstein’s pacifist views and the causes of the war were published in an article he wrote for the Goethe League, entitled “My Opinion of the War.” In this article, he expressed his belief that wars were caused, at least in part, by a biological feature in the human male. “I think it is the sexual character of the male that leads to such wild explosions,” he wrote. Einstein was a proponent of a world organization with police powers to prevent war between nations.
In the aftermath of the war, as Einstein’s fame grew, his popularity in Germany suffered. He became a founding member of the German Democratic Party, a socially liberal organization, and was a vocal supporter of the Weimar Republic. In his many appearances in Germany and overseas, he voiced his desire to see a federal government of all Europe, an organizational structure that would work to avoid the possibility of another war. His outspoken criticism of nationalism, coupled with his support of Zionism, steadily eroded his popularity in Germany. As the Nazi party gained strength in Germany, Einstein’s influence in the nation of his birth waned.
At first an active supporter of the League of Nations, Einstein rejected that organization when it refused to prevent France’s occupation of the Ruhr region — Germany’s industrial heartland — in 1923. “I have become convinced that the league has neither the strength nor the sincere desire it needs to achieve it aims. As a convinced pacifist, I request that you strike my name from the list of members,” he wrote, adding, “By its silence and its actions, the League functions as a tool of those nations which, at this point of history, happen to be the dominant powers.”
Einstein’s Opposition to Enforced Military Service
In 1929, while Einstein was still living in Berlin, he was asked what he would do in the event of another war. He replied, “I would unconditionally refuse all war service, direct or indirect, and would seek to persuade my friends to take up the same stance, regardless of how I felt about the causes of any particular war.”
The following year, Einstein journeyed again to the United States. On this visit, he spoke out against military service in a speech which became famous as the 2% Theory: “In countries where conscription exists, the true pacifist must refuse military duty…The timid may say; What’s the use? We’ll be sent to prison. To them I say, even if only two per cent announced their refusal to fight, governments would be powerless – they would not dare send such a huge number to prison.”
After returning to Germany Einstein published an article about this trip, which was published in the United States. Among his comments was an admonition to the American people that they “must realize that they have responsibility for the political development in the world. The role of idle spectator is unworthy of America.”
The Push for Disarmament
In the early 1930s, there were several disarmament groups in Europe, and a disarmament conference in Geneva in 1932 gave Einstein some hope in his quest for peace. (This conference was the source of the Geneva Convention, which became famous for defining war crimes). Einstein attended and gave a press conference at which he expressed his doubts over the direction of the discussions. “One doesn’t make war less likely to happen by formulating rules of warfare,” he said. “The solution to the peace problem can’t be left in the hands of governments.”
Einstein was again visiting the United States when the Nazi party took control the German government in January 1933. By then, his activism for peace and his advocacy of resistance to war had caused the FBI to open a file on him, suspecting him of being a communist sympathizer. It eventually grew to over 1400 pages.
Defying the Nazis and Warning of Their Intent
Einstein called the Nazi party, “a group of armed bandits…which will soon destroy or paralyze everything that is civilized.” The German government confiscated his properties and most of the funds he had left behind in Germany, although he managed to retrieve some of his money through Dutch bankers.
His views on conscription began to change. On a trip to Belgium, he told a fellow pacifist and supporter of disarmament, “If I were Belgian I would not, in the present situation, refuse military service.” He advocated an international force formed through the League of Nations, supporting the idea of an international standing army. “I loathe all armies and any kind of violence,” he said, “yet I am firmly convinced that at present these hateful weapons offer the only effective protection.”
At a speech in England’s Royal Albert Hall, Einstein revealed that, “My present attitude towards military service was reached with the greatest reluctance and after a difficult inner struggle.” As he did in his work in theoretical physics, Einstein saw a causal determinism in the situation in Europe, and shifted his views after observing its effect.
Relocating to the United States, he settled at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. It became his final home, and he never returned to Europe. As Hitler and the Nazis strengthened their hold on the German Reichstag and revealed to the world the growing strength of the German military, Europe marched towards war. Einstein continued to support efforts for a true and lasting peace, and believed that the abolition of war was possible, despite the growing tensions in Europe.
As the Nazi’s expanded their power, they also expanded their persecution of the Jews. Einstein did his best to alert the West to the Nazi’s capabilities concerning the Jewish population of Germany, warning of the “systematic campaign of physical destruction.”
Einstein and the Atomic Bomb
By the mid-1930s, work on splitting the atom was proceeding in Europe, particularly in Berlin, and the possibility to produce an explosion of tremendous force was debated in scientific circles. Ironically, some of the research in Berlin was supported by Austrian Jews exiled in Sweden, contributing to the work via correspondence. When their discovery of nuclear fission was published in January 1939, it drew the attention of Einstein’s colleague Leo Szilard, who realized its potential for weaponization.
In July 1939, Szilard met with Einstein, with whom he had worked for more than a decade before in Germany, and presented to him the possibility of atomic bombs. The initial research into the splitting of the atom, the result of which was immense energy, was based on Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2 (Energy is equal to mass times the squared speed of light). Einstein’s reaction to the presentation was, “I did not even think about that,” an indication of his total commitment, at the time the equation was formulated, to peaceful pursuits. They agreed that they should warn the Belgian government of their findings, since at the time the most of the world’s known reserves of uranium were in the Belgian Congo. A second meeting in August led to the decision to inform President Franklin Roosevelt of the danger of an atomic Germany. The letter was written by Szilard, with input from Einstein, and signed by both.
Later, concerned at the evident lack of urgency, Einstein sent two more letters to President Roosevelt in the spring of 1940, calling for immediate action. With
Europe now again at war, the President ordered the formation of advisory committees, which studied the matter through 1941. In January of 1942, in the weeks following the US entry into the war, Roosevelt ordered a full scale effort to build an atomic bomb, and the matter was assigned to the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Manhattan District.
Einstein’s pacifist beliefs, and the FBI’s file which suggested he had communist leanings and associates, prevented him from being granted the security clearance necessary to allow him to work on the Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb by 1945. Einstein had no regrets over his inability to participate in the project. By 1945, as he told his friend and fellow Nobel Laureate Linus Paulding, he regretted ever signing the letter, and in an interview published in 1947 in Newsweek magazine, he stated that if he had known that the Germans would not succeed in developing the bomb, “I would have done nothing.”
Einstein: A Life of Genius (The True Story of Albert Einstein) Page 6