Einstein and religion

Physics World magazine has a page of what I can only describe as newsy anecdotes, entitled "Seen and heard". The February 2009 "Seen and heard" page includes the following snippet:

Einstein on the buses
If you have been in a major city in the UK in the last month, then you may have noticed the slogan "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" on the side of one of 800 buses involved in the UK's first ever atheist advertisement campaign. Some of the buses also contain a quote from Einstein: "I do not believe in a personal God and have never denied this but have expressed it clearly". This is not the first time that a religious or atheist camp has tried to pigeon hole Einstein. But surely Einstein's religious beliefs are far more subtle than this. After all, he famously said "science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind", which seems perfectly to capture his thinking.

A quick research of the biography of Einstein by Abraham Pais, looking up the references to "religion" in the index, indeed shows that it is very difficult to say exactly what Einstein's religous beliefs were. His family background was Jewish, but from a family that did not live Jewish practices at home. As a child he went through a very religious, Jewish phase but this did not last. Thereafter he did not practice a religious faith. However, this does not mean that he did not have beliefs that had a religious aspect to them. He turned away from religious practice towards science - but an account that he gave when in his sixties suggests that this was a turning away from the subjective and individual towards the objective, towards "it" (Pais p.39). He therefore appears to have been a realist, in the metaphysical sense, with a trust that there are laws and patterns to be discovered in the study of the material world. I am not really sure that one can claim that Einstein believed in the existence of God as creator; he seems to have used the word "God" more in a passing, poetic way than as a statement of belief in God itself, and the word "religous" in a way that reflects the way the word "spiritual" (in a non-religious sense) would be used today.

Einstein's observation about the mutual relation between science and religion is perhaps more significant as a statement of phenomenology rather than of a statement of Einstein's own religious belief. But a realism about the possibility of knowing the laws of the material world is something with significance for both our understanding of scientific endeavour and for arguing in favour of the existence of God.