Childhood
Becoming a Freethinker and a Scientist
Religious Concepts
On Ego, Consciousness, and “Eternal Life”
Science and Religion
The Religiousness of Science
Religion and Science: Irreconcilable?
A Conversation with Gustav Bucky
Morals
Beliefs
Short Comments on Einstein's Faith
Miscellaneous
Who possesses science and art possesses religion as well.
—Wolfgang von Goethe
quoted in Jammer, p. 79.
The Religiousness of Science
The following short essay is taken from the abridged edition of Einstein's book The World As I See It. In this edition the essay appears on pp. 28-29.
You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religion of the naive man.
For the latter God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands to some extent in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe.
But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.
This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.
The 1954 photograph of Einstein above was taken on his 75th birthday. It comes from Louie de Broglie et al.