People are generally in confusion about Einstein. Some think that he was an atheist, while others believe he was not. Study of Einstein’s various statements reveal that Einstein was not a denier of God, rather he was a skeptic, or a person who is not sure about God’s existence. I will cite here a report from The Times of India about Einstein’s view on God:
In 1997, Skeptic, a hard unbelief science magazine, published for the first time a series of letters Einstein exchanged in 1945 with a junior officer in the US navy named Guy Raner on the same topic. Raner wanted to know if it was true that Einstein converted from atheism to theism when he was confronted by a Jesuit priest with the argument that a design demands a designer and since the universe is a design there must be a designer. Einstein wrote back that he had never talked to a Jesuit priest in his life but that from the viewpoint of such a person, he was and would always be an atheist. He added it was misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere and that we had to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world as far as we could grasp it. But Raner persisted. “'Are you from the viewpoint of the dictionary,'” he wrote back, “'an atheist, one who disbelieves in the existence of a God, or a Supreme Being.”' To this Einstein replied: “'You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervour is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.” (The Times of India, New Delhi, May 18, 2012)
Einstein’s position about God’s existence is almost the position of all other scientists too in this matter. God is not the subject of scientific study. Then what is the reason why scientists do not deny God’s existence rather, they mostly consider themselves as agnostics? Agnosticism is a position wherein you neither deny God’s existence nor affirm belief in God.
It is true that the subject of scientific study is the material world. But the material world is the creation of the Creator. This is why the study of science is indirectly the study of the creation of the Creator. A scientist can thus deny God’s existence, but he cannot deny the signs of the Creator scattered all over the universe in His creation.
The truth is that the material world discovered by scientists encompasses immaterial truth, for example, meaningfulness, design, intelligent purpose and planning. Such discoveries about the material world indirectly gives evidence of God’s existence. To form an opinion about God’s existence, we can here apply a scientific principle. That is, the principle of determining which explanation of the universe is more in accordance with scientific discoveries—an explanation of the world without a Creator, or an explanation of the world made by a Creator. Certainly, the latter explanation is more in conformity with the kind of world discovered by science. This principle of reasoning is called verificationism in science.
There is another important scientific principle called the ‘principle of compatibility’. That is, a theory which might not be tested by direct observation of its proposition, but observation of other factors shows that this theory is indeed right. Such indirect observation helps in proving the theory correct. If this principle of science is applied to God’s existence, then belief in God will become an established fact. Those scientists who say that they are agnostics are actually skeptics, because their own knowledge cannot make them deny God with certainty. Therefore, they say they are agnostics.
From a purely scientific perspective, there is no proof for God’s existence. Science has discovered the existence of subatomic particles such as, electrons, proton and neutrons. However, scientists have not yet directly seen these subatomic particles neither through their own eyes nor through the microscope. Then why scientists believe that subatomic particle do exist in reality? The argument that they have put forward is: “Though we cannot see subatomic particles, we can see their effects.”
Further study shows that this is not merely an issue of cause and effect. Study of science has revealed that the universe has intelligent planning, harmony and wisdom. This fact has been accepted and acknowledged by top scientists, for examples, Sir James Jeans, Sir Arthur Eddington, Albert Einstein, David Foster, Fred Hoyle, and so on. A scientist has said: “Molecular biology has conclusively proved that the matter of organic life, our very flesh really is mind-stuff.”
A more appropriate statement would be that the God presented in religion is not the direct subject of science, but scientific discoveries indirectly give affirmation of belief in God. Science has not proved God’s existence, but it has provided a lot of data that gives evidence of God’s existence.
In the scientific explanation of the universe, there is a missing link. This interpretation of the universe describes ‘actions’ but there is no knowledge about the ‘actor’ causing the action. On the contrary, the explanation given by the Quran of the universe includes both the actor and the action. In other words, the Quran tells us about both the cause and the causative factor. If science is accepting that there is action or intelligence in the universe, then logically it is not right that there should not exist an actor or intelligence behind this action.
Although Albert Einstein was born in a Jewish family, after his scientific study he developed doubts about God’s existence. Just a year before his death in 1954 he had written a letter to the Israeli philosopher Eric B. Gutkind. One of the sentences from the letter reads: “The word God was nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses.”
What Einstein had termed ‘human weakness’ is not really a matter of weakness, rather it is a great attribute of a human being. It can be more properly phrased as: man is an ‘explanation-seeking’ animal. This trait of a human being is at the basis of all kinds of developments. It is because of this characteristic that man tries to understand phenomena and thus achieve success by putting to use the knowledge thus gained. If human beings did not possess this quality, the entire modern civilization would have been left undiscovered to this day.
