A New Year's message from Albert Einstein
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Corey S. PowellSunday, September 15, 2002
The days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur -- a period when Jews shake off their routine and reflect on the deeper meanings of their lives -- stir up mixed emotions in those of us who value the power of faith and yet thoroughly subscribe to a modern, scientific view of the world. Events of the past year only make this inner discord more acute.
In troubled times, religion offers a sense of comfort and continuity. Yet it is impossible to ignore that extreme forms of religious belief have contributed to the current turmoil in many parts of the globe.
I have found reconciliation in the philosophy of somebody not usually regarded as a religious figure: Albert Einstein.
Einstein's quotes and writings are full of similar contradictions. He frequently invoked the name of God, yet he equally frequently insisted that he was an atheist. He did not see this as a paradox. Rather, he saw it as a path toward a new kind of religion, and a new kind of relationship between humans and the universe.
Einstein was deeply averse to the idea of a personal God who responds to prayer. "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," he wrote in 1932.
Nine years later, in a paper contributed to a symposium on science, philosophy and religion, Einstein expounded on the dangers of belief in a willful, all-powerful deity.
Such a God, he wrote, conflicts with the demands of science by interfering with the predictable operation of natural law. Such a God also conflicts with the needs of humanity. "If this being is omnipotent, then every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being?" he asked.
For an alternative, Einstein looked to the writings of the 17th-century Dutch philosopher and theologian Baruch Spinoza, who in essence redefined God as the embodiment of all of the laws of nature.
Einstein suggested a way to cut through the modern Rosh Hashanah conundrum. "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, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge," he wrote.
He regarded the process of scientific discovery as a profoundly spiritual experience, comparable to older forms of revelation or divine ecstasy, and called it the "cosmic religious feeling."
Einstein knew that many skeptics would deride his claim that the theory of relativity possesses the same kind of spiritual power as the Old Testament.
He defended the idea in a 1930 manifesto, published in the New York Times Magazine: "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 kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and the centuries.
"Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people."
I sense this cosmic religious feeling today in the work of Eric Lander at the Whitehead Institute, a geneticist who is trying to decipher the fantastically complex biomolecular interactions that guide human development.
I sense it in the work of Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford University investigating the first fraction of a second in the history of the universe. The current Big Bang theory is the most complicated, comprehensive and thoroughly tested creation story in history. Like all such stories, the Big Bang reveals a great deal about the society that created it.
We are no longer content with the revealed truths of Genesis and other ancient mythologies. We want to participate in the origin of the universe by understanding it on our own terms and connecting it to laws and phenomena that we can study.
Many people consider the pursuit of scientific knowledge morally neutral, no matter how grand it may be. Einstein, however, regarded the faith of the scientist as "closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages," partly because it allows us to look past our differences and recognize the harmony of natural law that chains us all to one another, and to the cosmos as a whole.
Evolution demonstrates that all humans are closely related: Homo sapiens has existed for fewer than 100,000 years and is quite genetically uniform. Astronomy shows that we all share a tiny, fragile and precious refuge, the only habitable planet that we know of.
All of us are made of the same elements, forged in the same stars, governed by the same miraculous physical laws that allow the sun to shine, rivers of water to flow, and atoms of carbon to bond with hydrogen and oxygen in our chemically dynamic bodies.
This kind of scientific faith also offers a way to grab control of the old human conquering spirit, a relic of our survival instinct, and redirect it from physical acquisition to intellectual exploration.
Not long ago, adventurers set out to conquer ostensibly savage lands and convert the native populations. Now we reach out with our minds to touch the edge of the universe and the beginning of time.
People read about cosmology in much the way that their predecessors read about exotic travels. The Big Bang can serve the same role today that Tahiti or the Congo or Antarctica did a couple of centuries ago: It opens the imagination to the exotic magnitude of the world. It feeds the restless mind and spirit with a feeling of adventure.
Einstein's cosmic religious feeling is not as heretical as it sounds. It builds on centuries of Judeo-Christian traditions that encourage searching for the divine in the physical world.
Einstein envisioned that traditional religions could embrace his view once they learned to abandon the idea of a personal God that can wreak vengeance on our enemies or reward us in the next world for suicide attacks in this one.
"After religious teachers accomplish the refining process indicated, they will surely recognize with joy that true religion has been ennobled and made more profound by scientific knowledge," he declared.
Change has been slow in coming. Scientists are loath to talk earnestly about spiritual matters for fear of undermining their image as neutral thinkers untouched by the subjectivity of emotion.
Joel Primack, a cosmologist at UC Santa Cruz, sees the world at a theological turning point:
"Perhaps progress in religion can occur as it does in science: Without invalidating a theory, a greater myth may encompass it respectfully, the way general relativity encompasses Newtonian mechanics. In the next few decades, powerful ideas of modern cosmology could inspire a spiritual renaissance, but they could also be totally ignored by almost everyone as irrelevant and elitist."
If Einstein's cosmic religion fails to find an audience, that will be a sad loss -- not just for the devout researchers on a quest for ultimate knowledge, but for everyone seeking a more just and peaceful world in the New Year.
Corey S. Powell is the author of "God in the Equation" (Free Press, 2002), from which this essay is adapted.©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Page D - 1
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