Owning Albert Einstein

There are a few figures of history everyone likes to claim for their own - a very few. Albert Einstein was certainly one of them.

Einstein was of course a physicist/mathematician of incomparable genius. Although his greatest accomplishments, the theory of general relativity and the theory of special relativity, were done by 1916, he remained a figure of great importance simply because of his eloquence. How many thousands of debates were won using the logical error of appeal to authority simply because the authority was Einstein?

One area where Einstein was a mess of contradictions was religion. Einstein (who was Jewish) has said so many different things on the topic, from "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind", to "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos." He also said, "The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously."

Sadly, the great thinker did not leave us the "universal theory of everything" he spent half his life looking for. Many with a theological (or atheological) point of view tend to interpret his statements on religion as though they represented the same kind of consistent thinking he sought to develop in physics. Some atheists point to his comments about the anthropomorphic God as evidence that Einstein was in their camp (as if it mattered.) Similarly, many proponents of ideas like Intelligent Design take Einstein's enthusiasm for a spiritual outlook on science as proof that his comments endorse their view.

In reality, Einstein's expressed views come closest to what might be called pantheism - the idea that creation itself is the divinity, so to speak, one that might even be aware and sentient, if the divinity of his famous "dice" comment was more than a convenient construct such as Hawking's "imaginary time." But whatever his views, which seemed to blow with the wind, they weren't the mathematical insights of a physicist. They were the awe and wonder of a man who learned so much about the nature of the universe, that he could not help but be impressed with its grandeur and the sheer beauty of its design. Spirituality was Einstein's poetry - nothing he offered on the topic is a proof for anyone's specific point of view; just an eloquent testament to the beauty he bore witness to.