Every now and then some Christian will drop me an email or leave a comment with an appeal to authority argument along the lines of the following: Einstein was one of the greatest thinkers ever and he believed in God. What makes you think you know better than Einstein? At which point I have to point out that while Einstein wasn’t exactly an atheist per se, he wasn’t your conventional sort of theist either. The God that Einstein believed in doesn’t even come close to the what most Christians mean when they use the word God as it’s much closer to the atheist viewpoint of no God at all.
Now another letter written by Einstein on the topic of God is up for auction and it reveals yet again just how disdainful of traditional God belief Einstein really was:
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 to a Jewish family in Germany in 1879, he also adds that “for me, the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”
He also wrote “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 also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”
This probably won’t stop the occasional Christian from trying to lay claim to Einstein as one of their own, but at least it provides us with another point of reference to refute that argument when it rears its ugly head. The letter itself is expected to go for between $12,000 and $16,000 and if I were a rich man I’d consider buying it myself. Einstein is one of my heroes and having something like that in my collection would be very cool indeed.
Posted on 06/26/2008 at 01:08 PM 
LH, what ***Dave said. Einstein is one of my childhood heroes and I was always fascinated with him growing up. Not so much because he was a genius but because it seemed clear from his photos and the stories written about him that he walked his own path through life and wasn’t afraid to be a little out of the ordinary. Being someone who always felt a little off kilter compared to the rest of the world it’s easy to see how that would appeal to me.
There was a time when I thought, based on some of what I had read about him, that Einstein was an atheist, but it becomes clear after reading enough of his writings that he’s actually a very niche form of theist.
Beegor, I stand corrected on the quotes. Those are some excellent sources and I would be remiss to not admit my error.
It’s a claim that has come up on a regular basis in my conversations with Christians over the years. There’s even a chain mail that makes the rounds every so often about an atheist professor and theist student which will often claim at the end that the student in the story is Einstein.
If that’s true then the atheists have more of a claim than I thought. Agnosticism being a weak form of atheism and all. That said I’d still consider Einstein a theist in the vein of Spinoza, which is probably the least worrisome sort.
I’m familiar with Spinoza’s thoughts on God and, in all honesty, I don’t see much difference between that sort of God and no God at all.