Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist - Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

—Albert Einstein, in a letter February 5, 1921; from Albert Einstein, the Human Side , Chapter 5.

“Mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all.”

—Albert Einstein, letter to V. T. Aaltonen, May 7, 1952, Einstein Archive 59–059; from The Expanded Quotable Einstein , Chapter 28.

“I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”

—Albert Einstein, to Guy H. Raner, Jr., September 28, 1949; from Michael R. Gilmore, “Einstein’s God: Just What Did Einstein Believe About God?,” Skeptic , 1997, 5(2): 64.

“For science can only ascertain what is , but not what should be , and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts.”

—Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years , Chapter 4.

“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.”

—Albert Einstein, according to the testimony of Prince Hubertus of Lowenstein; as quoted by Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times , Chapter 44.

“I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. Your counter-arguments seem to me very correct and could hardly be better formulated. It is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere—childish analogies. We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world as far—as we can grasp it. And that is all.”

—Albert Einstein, to Guy H. Raner, Jr., July 2, 1945, responding to a rumor that a Jesuit priest had caused Einstein to convert from atheism; from Michael R. Gilmore, “Einstein’s God: Just What Did Einstein Believe About God?,” Skeptic , 1997, 5(2): 62.

“I am convinced that some political and social activities and practices of the Catholic organizations are detrimental and even dangerous for the community as a whole, here and everywhere. I mention here only the fight against birth control at a time when overpopulation in various countries has become a serious threat to the health of people and a grave obstacle to any attempt to organize peace on this planet.”

—Albert Einstein in a letter, 1954; from Paul Blanshard, American Freedom and Catholic Power , New Jersey: Greenwood Publishing, 1984, Chapter 2.

“His [Einstein] was not a life of prayer and worship. Yet he lived by a deep faith—a faith not capable of rational foundation—that there are laws of Nature to be discovered. His lifelong pursuit was to discover them. His realism and his optimism are illuminated by his remark: ‘Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not’ ( Raffiniert ist der Herrgott aber boshaft ist er nicht ). When asked by a colleague what he meant by that, he replied: ‘Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse’ ( Die Natur verbirgt ihr Geheimnis durch die Erhabenheit ihres Wesens, aber nicht durch List ).”

—Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein , Oxford University Press, New York, 1982.

“However, Einstein’s God was not the God of most other men. When he wrote of religion, as he often did in middle and later life, he tended to adopt the belief of Alice’s Red Queen that ‘words mean what you want them to mean,’ and to clothe with different names what to more ordinary mortals—and to most Jews—looked like a variant of simple agnosticism. Replying in 1929 to a cabled inquiry from Rabbi Goldstein of New York, he said that he believed ‘in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men.’ And it is claimed that years later, asked by Ben-Gurion whether he believed in God, ‘even he, with his great formula about energy and mass, agreed that there must be something behind the energy.’ No doubt. But much of Einstein’s writing gives the impression of belief in a God even more intangible and impersonal than a celestial machine minder, running the universe with indisputable authority and expert touch. Instead, Einstein’s God appears as the physical world itself, with its infinitely marvelous structure operating at atomic level with the beauty of a craftsman’s wristwatch, and at stellar level with the majesty of a massive cyclotron. This was belief enough. It grew early and rooted deep. Only later was it dignified by the title of cosmic religion, a phrase which gave plausible respectability to the views of a man who did not believe in a life after death and who felt that if virtue paid off in the earthly one, then this was the result of cause and effect rather than celestial reward. Einstein’s God thus stood for an orderly system obeying rules which could be discovered by those who had the courage, imagination, and persistence to go on searching for them. It was to this past which he began to turn his mind soon after the age of twelve. The rest of his life everything else was to seem almost trivial by comparison.”

—Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times , New York: World Publishing, 1971, pp. 19–20.

“That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed.”

“A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving.”

—Albert Einstein

Kierkegaard’s famous “leap of faith” suffers from the huge moral and practical disadvantage that it cannot be made only once, but has to be performed again and again. George Orwell (1903–1950) believed that the decline of religion, and especially the decline of the belief in personal immortality, required us to evolve a post-theistic basis for morality. Here, in his first novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter , we see his protagonist Dorothy, her lonely mind upon a knife-edge as she discovers that the “leap” suffers from acutely diminishing returns.

Kneeling, with head bent and hands clasped against her knees, she set herself swiftly to pray for forgiveness before her father should reach her with the wafer. But the current of her thoughts had been broken. Suddenly it was quite useless attempting to pray; her lips moved, but there was neither heart nor meaning in her prayers. She could hear Proggett’s boots shuffling and her father’s clear low voice murmuring “Take and eat,” she could see the worn strip of red carpet beneath her knees, she could smell dust and eau-de-Cologne and mothballs; but of the Body and Blood of Christ, of the purpose for which she had come here, she was as though deprived of the power to think. A deadly blankness had descended upon her mind. It seemed to her that actually she could not pray. She struggled, collected her thoughts, uttered mechanically the opening phrases of a prayer; but they were useless, meaningless—nothing but the dead shells of words. Her father was holding the wafer before her in his shapely, aged hand. He held it between finger and thumb, fastidiously, somehow distastefully, as though it had been a spoon of medicine. His eye was upon Miss Mayfill, who was doubling herself up like a geometrid caterpillar, with many creakings, and crossing herself so elaborately that one might have imagined that she was sketching a series of braid frogs on the front of her coat. For several seconds Dorothy hesitated and did not take the wafer. She dared not take it. Better, far better to step down from the altar than to accept the sacrament with such chaos in her heart!