What did Einstein actually believe about God?

What did Einstein say, in his own words?

The famous dice line came first. On December 4, 1926, Einstein wrote to his friend Max Born, a fellow physicist, about the new quantum theory. In the English translation published by Physics Today, he says an inner voice tells him the theory “is not yet the real thing.” Then he adds that he is convinced “He is not playing at dice.” “He” refers to “the Old One,” Einstein’s name here for God. The letter is about physics: whether chance sits at the bottom of nature. Our feature The Dice Letter at 100 tells that story.

In 1929, Boston’s Cardinal William O’Connell attacked Einstein’s theories as leading toward atheism, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on April 28 of that year. That is why Rabbi Goldstein sent his telegram. Einstein’s biographer Walter Isaacson gives its full wording: “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words.” Einstein used about half of those words.

In 1929 Einstein also gave a long interview to the journalist George Sylvester Viereck. In the part printed in The Saturday Evening Post that October, he said he was a Jew but was “enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene,” meaning Jesus. According to Viereck’s account, as quoted by Isaacson, he also said, “I’m not an atheist.” He compared all of us to a small child in a huge library full of books in languages it cannot read. The child senses an order in the books but does not know what it is.

In 1930 he set out his view in an essay, “Religion and Science,” for the New York Times Magazine. He described three stages of religion. First comes a religion of fear. Next comes a moral religion, built around a God who rewards and punishes. The third stage he called “cosmic religious feeling.” It knows no dogma and no God “conceived in man’s image,” he wrote. In this light, he said, Democritus, Francis of Assisi and Spinoza were closely akin. He called this feeling “the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” In the same essay he said that good ethics rests on sympathy, education and social ties, with “no religious basis” needed.

In a credo from 1930, known in English as “The World As I See It,” he wrote that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.” Sensing a reason and a beauty that our minds can barely reach, he said, is true religiosity. Then came a limit: “In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.”

In 1940 he wrote a paper on science and religion for a conference in New York, and the journal Nature printed it that November. There he described religion as the effort to get clear about values and goals, which science cannot supply: science can say what is, but not what should be. That is the setting of his famous line: “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” In the same paper he said the main source of conflict between science and religion “lies in this concept of a personal God.” He urged religious teachers to give that idea up.

Finally, on January 3, 1954, a year before his death, he replied to a book by the philosopher Eric Gutkind. In this “God letter,” which sold at Christie’s in 2018 for $2,892,500, he wrote that “the word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses.” In Christie’s translation, he called the Bible a collection of “venerable but still rather primitive legends.” Other translations differ slightly.

Who was Spinoza, and what was “Spinoza’s God”?

Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632, into the city’s Portuguese-Jewish community, and he died in 1677. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in 1656 that community issued against him the harshest ban it ever pronounced, and it was never lifted. He wrote of “God or Nature” (in Latin, Deus sive Natura). For Spinoza, God is not a planner with goals. Everything follows from nature’s laws, and there are no miracles. The encyclopedia sums up his view: all talk of God’s purposes or plans is “an anthropomorphizing fiction,” a way of picturing God as if God were a human being.

That is the God Einstein pointed to: something close to the order of nature itself. Scholars add two twists. First, the encyclopedia’s author, Steven Nadler, argues that Spinoza did not think worship or religious awe was the right response to God or Nature; understanding was. Einstein, by contrast, wrote in 1940 of “profound reverence” for the order he found in the world. Second, the scholar Don Howard, as summarized by Weinstein, argues that Einstein’s God is closer to the ancient Stoic idea of logos, a rational order running through the cosmos. So “Spinoza’s God” was a useful shorthand, not a perfect match.

What is the strongest objection?

Some readers say Einstein’s “God” was only a figure of speech, so he was an atheist in all but name. There is real support for this. Galina Weinstein, a scholar in the University of Haifa’s philosophy department, argues that his references to God expressed ideas about order and understanding, “not theological affirmations.” Leopold Infeld, who wrote a popular physics book with Einstein, once remarked that Einstein used the word God “more often than a Catholic priest,” and Weinstein adds that he never used it in the usual religious sense. And the 1954 letter is blunt.

But Einstein himself pushed back on that reading. Isaacson reports that Einstein told a friend what made him “really angry”: people who say there is no God and “quote me for support of such views.” In a 1941 letter quoted by Weinstein, he wrote that “fanatical atheists” show the same kind of intolerance as religious fanatics. He rejected a personal God, as atheists do. He also embraced reverence and awe, and he did not want to be recruited by either side.

What do people often get wrong?

“God does not play dice” was a statement of faith. It was a statement about quantum physics. The 1926 letter speaks of “the Old One” and “He,” and the popular short form swaps in the word God. For Einstein, such God-talk was a vivid way of saying that nature follows exact laws.

“Science without religion is lame” shows he believed in God. In that same paper he asked religious teachers to give up the idea of a personal God. By “religion” he meant a striving for values, plus a faith that the world can be understood by reason.

“Einstein was an atheist.” He rejected a personal God, but he also rejected the label, as shown above.

“Einstein believed in the God of the Bible.” He admired Jesus as a figure. But in 1954 he wrote that no interpretation, “no matter how subtle,” could change his view of the Bible as a collection of legends.

A quote is reliable because it is famous. Weinstein warns that popular quote books often cut Einstein’s remarks loose from their original setting and language. Take the line “God is subtle, but He is not malicious.” It appears in German over a fireplace in Princeton’s old Fine Hall, now Jones Hall, as the Princetoniana Museum notes. Weinstein explains that it reportedly answered a puzzling physics experiment. Here “God” means the order of nature.

Where can people of faith and skeptics agree?

• He took the question seriously. He kept explaining his view for decades.
• He respected faith he did not share. Speaking of Jesus, he told Viereck that no one “can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot,” meaning a clever one-liner.
• He disliked fanaticism on every side. He criticized religious fanatics and “fanatical atheists” alike.
• Wonder comes first. Weinstein notes that Einstein called it a kind of miracle that the world can be understood at all. Believers and skeptics can share that sense of wonder.
• Humility fits everyone. His picture of a child in a vast library invites humility from all sides.

How can you check this yourself?

• Read the telegram report. The JTA archive page from April 28, 1929, prints Einstein’s German words and an English translation.
• Read the dice letter. Physics Today prints the December 4, 1926 letter, with Born’s own reaction.
• Ask where a quote comes from. A letter or essay in his own words is stronger than an interview someone else wrote up, or a quote collection.
• Compare translations. Einstein wrote in German. In 2023, The Guardian corrected its 2008 quotation from the 1954 letter, removing words it had included in error. Wording can drift easily.
• Check the date and the topic. His statements about a personal God stayed the same from 1929 to 1954. A line from 1926 about physics is not a line about faith.

The answer holds after all this detail. Einstein rejected a personal God, refused the atheist label, and found something close to religious awe in the order of nature. Whether that order points to anything more is a question science cannot settle.