Albert Einstein was born in Germany in 1879 and died in New Jersey in 1955 at the age of 76. He was brought up by secular Jewish parents, but claimed to have lost his faith at the age of 12.
During his lifetime as a citizen of six different countries (!), Albert Einstein made a number of seemingly contradictory quotes about God.
Writing about his loss of faith at such an early age, Einstein commented: ” Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies.” Einstein used many labels to describe his religious views, including “agnostic”, “religious nonbeliever” and a “pantheistic” believer in “Spinoza’s God.” He disassociated himself from the label “atheist.”
Read for yourself the contradictions in Albert Einstein’s quotes about God:
- The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.
- I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
- 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.
- I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.
- I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation.
- My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance — but for us, not for God.
- The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.
- I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
- I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.
- I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.
- We know nothing about [God, the world] at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. Possibly we shall know a little more than we do now. but the real nature of things, that we shall never know, never.
- Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is the same as that of the religious fanatics, and it springs from the same source… They are creatures who can’t hear the music of the spheres.
- There are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support for such views.
- What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.
- When the answer is simple, God is speaking.
The last quote about God by Albert Einstein is perhaps the most perplexing of all.
Did he believe – or didn’t he? What do you think? Share your thoughts by making use of the comments feed provided below.
