On auction tomorrow: letter which proves Einstein the Atheist

Wed, May 14 03:10 AM

Was Albert Einstein a man of religion and did he believe in God? For years, the faithful and agnostics fought on this question and, as one would expect, both have tried to claim that the world's greatest scientist belonged to their camp.

Non-believers cited his numerous references to his lack of faith in a personal God. On the other hand, the believers quoted a letter that Einstein wrote to Rabbi Herbert S Goldstein in 1929: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." Spinoza was a 17th century Dutch rationalist who equated God with nature. They also relied on his famous pronouncement that "science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind."

But now a new document has emerged that proves that Einstein was an atheist and didn't believe either in God or religion. It's a letter he wrote on January 3, 1954 to his Jewish philosopher friend Eric Gutkind. This letter was sold in 1955 to a private buyer and has remained out of public view since then. The buyer has now put it on the market again and it will be auctioned on Thursday at Bloomsbury Auctions in London. Handwritten in pen, the letter is estimated to fetch a price of more than £8,000 or Rs 640,000.

Einstein writes: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish." Born in a Jewish family, young Einstein was sent to a Catholic primary school. His parents were not religious, yet they arranged for private tuition in Judaism at home.

As his fame and stature grew, Einstein became an iconic figure to the Jewish diaspora and after the creation of the state of Israel he was offered to be its second president, a offer he politely declined.

Had he accepted this offer and had his views about Judaism, as expressed in this letter, come to light in his lifetime, the scientist would have kicked off a huge furore. In this letter, which was written in German the year before his death, Einstein wrote: "For me the Jewish religion like all others is the incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity, have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

This letter was in fact a remarkable critique of Eric Gutkind's newly published book 'Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt'. Towards the end of this letter, he seems to be losing patience and takes a dig at Gutkind's position of pride. "I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as man and an internal one as a Jew" With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them."

Einstein didn't believe in conventional religion. He even refused to accept god as personal saviour. He was against the "monopolisation" of God by the revealed canons or ordained religions. But at the same time he wouldn't let atheists to hijack his negation of faith for point scoring against the faithful. What irritated him most was the atheist's lack of humility. Publicly he would denounce neither God nor religion. Privately he did not believe in God but he wasn't prepared to use, as he put it, Freudian 'intellectual props' to undermine other people's faith in god.

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