Over the years, I’ve attended a few debates on atheism versus theism. Einstein eventually comes into the discussion. Both theists and atheists try to pull Einstein into their camp. Did Einstein believe in God? The answer depends on how we define the nature of God. After reading many of his biographies, I came to this conclusion: Einstein was neither a strict theist who believed in the God of the Bible nor a strict materialist who believed in the mindless matter creating the universe and human mind through blind chance. He believed in Spinoza’s God, which is impersonal and inseparable from the universe. Using today’s terminology, he would fit in the category, ‘spiritual, but not religious’.
Genetically, Einstein was a ‘full blooded’ Jew because all his four grandfathers were Jewish. His parents were secular Jews. They took into their home a medical student named Max Talmud, who was an orthodox Jew from Lithuania. Talmud instructed little Einstein all the foundational beliefs of Judaism and transformed him into a serious believer in Judaism. Einstein attended the synagogue services. To the dismay of his parents, Albert insisted on keeping a kosher home and observing Jewish religious customs. Einstein referred to this period as his ‘religious paradise of youth’.
Talmud also introduced Albert to Aaron Bernstein’s Popular Books on Natural Science. Bernstein, a Jewish theologian, was a great popularizer of science. Like they do today, those days Jewish theologians insisted on the importance of scientific knowledge for every Jewish child.
Later in his life, Einstein read the works of philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Due to their influence, Einstein lost faith in the God of Abraham. His God is no longer a person who made a covenant with the nation of Israel. His God is no longer a person who intervenes in the affairs of his creatures. However, Einstein complained about what Jehovah God was doing when the innocent Jews were led to slaughter houses during the Holocaust.
In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Tom was a noble, long-suffering Christian slave. In spite of all cruel hardships of slavery, he maintained a faith in a loving, interventional God. In Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple, the heroine Celie is a poor, black girl who faces discrimination. She writes ‘Dear God’ letters addressed to God because she has no one else to write to when she is frustrated with life’s gory problems. Her friend Shug tells Celie that God isn’t found in church or even in the Bible. The Bible God is a white invention. But her God is ‘everything…Everything that is or ever was or ever will be’. Her God is an it, not a him.
If you walk past the color purple in a field, appreciate its beauty. Don’t think about God who looks like an old white man. Think about God in terms of the color purple.
Einstein moved from Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s God to Color Purple’s God. His God is not a him. His God is an it. It is synonymous with beauty, harmony, and symmetry seen in nature. Like Celie expressed her frustration in terms of ‘Dear God’ language, Einstein expressed his frustrations in God language, for example, when he said, ‘God does not play dice with the universe’.
So, Einstein fits more into pantheism than into Judeo-Christian faith tradition. Still, he cared deeply about Jewish causes. Einstein remained true to the Zionist dream of immigration to Palestine. Einstein himself acknowledged the influence of Judaism on his science – ‘Jews show Jewish heritage in their intellectual work’. Nazi sympathizers labeled Einstein’s theory of relativity as ‘Jewish science’. German physicist and Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard (1862 – 1947) labeled Einstein’s contributions to science as Jewish physics.
Professor Steven Gimbel wrote an entire book on the influence of Christianity and Judaism on Albert Einstein in his book, ‘Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion’. Buy it or get it from your public library and read it. He describes how Protestant Reformation created an atmosphere of free thinking spirit in Europe. From Galileo to Einstein, this anti-authoritarian, questioning-the-tradition outlook on life seeped into scientific thinking paving the way to radical new scientific theories. Just as Catholicism influenced Catholic Descartes and Protestantism influenced Protestant Newton, Judaism influenced Jewish Einstein.
So, though Einstein did not subscribe to Judaism or Christianity, he benefited immensely from the influence these two religions wielded on his contemporary society.
His theories influenced how we look at the universe and our place in it. Pedro Ferreira in his book The Perfect Theory, wrote, “The reward for harnessing Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity is nothing less than the key to understanding the history of the universe, the origin of time, and the evolution of all the stars and galaxies in the cosmos. General relativity can tell us about what lies at the farthest reaches of the universe and explain how that knowledge affects our existence here and now. Einstein’s theory also sheds light on the smallest scales of existence, where the highest-energy particles can come into being out of nothing. It can explain how the fabric of reality, space, and time emerges to became the backbone of nature”
His theories also impacted the truths we learn from the Bible. Let us see them one by one.
Beauty of Truth
A truthful scientific theory comes with immense beauty inscribed all over it. German mathematician Emmy Noether (1882 – 935) was probably the greatest female mathematician in history. In 1915, she was invited by David Hilbert to join the mathematics faculty at Gottingen. She would invest a lot of time in appreciating the beautiful symmetries of physical theories. She saw symmetrical beauty in the theory of relativity. For me it points to the words of the psalmist: ‘Your works are wonderful. I know that full well’ (Psalm 139:14). In the theory of relativity, we see how that immense divine beauty is inscribed in the laws of physics.
Reality of Relativity and Of Mathematics
David Hilbert authored the Foundations of Geometry and the Foundations of Physics to make mathematics and physics as self-sufficient systems of thought. However, Kurt Godel destroyed his whole project and showed that at least some of the foundations are borrowed from outside of those systems.
David Hilbert also conceived of a formalist interpretation of mathematics in which mathematicians freely invented such terms as number, point, line, triangle, function etc and then explored the logical consequences of these terms in various combinations. Mathematics has no necessary connection at all to anything outside itself and no meaning outside of itself. He said, “Instead of point, line, and plane, one must always be able to say table, chair, and beer mug”. For Hilbert, math was just a game like basketball. The rules are made up by people who play the game. If you walk away from the playing field, they have no meaning.
Hilbert independently created the field equations for general relativity but thought they were just inventions of his mind. However, these equations made great predictions about nature like gravitational waves, black holes, expansion of the universe etc and proved him wrong. Last hundred years or more since the discovery of relativity, physicists discovered the amazing things predicted by general relativity. Eugene Wigner, a student of David Hilbert, described ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences’. Theory of relativity is a wonderful example which establishes the reality of connectedness between mathematics and nature.
Myth of Relativism and the Existence of Absolutes
When I was in high school, my physics teacher used to tell us a famous joke about Einstein’s description of relativity. Allegedly this joke used to be told by Einstein when he wanted to describe his theory. “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like an eternity. That’s relativity”. An hour with a pretty girl feels like a minute, a minute over a hot stove feels like an eternity. There is no evidence Einstein himself told this joke, but it is not an accurate description of relativity. Relativity is not about how we feel about time or how we feel about space. Worse, it is not about how we feel about morality. Today we have people who say, ‘Didn’t Einstein tell us everything is relative, including morality?’. Let us see.
English historian Paul Johnson wrote about how the misconceptions of Einstein’s theories led to relativism and moral anarchy in our modern world. In his book, Modern Times, Paul Johnson wrote “Marx, Freud, Einstein all conveyed the same message to the 1920s: the world was not what it seemed. The senses, whose empirical perceptions shaped our ideas of time and distance, right and wrong, law and justice, and the nature of man’s behavior in society, were not to be trusted. Moreover, Marxist and Freudian analysis combined to undermine, in their different ways, the highly developed sense of personal responsibility, and of duty towards a settled and objectively true moral code, which was at the center of nineteenth-century European civilization. The impression people derived from Einstein, of a universe in which all measurements of value were relative, served to confirm this vision – which both dismayed and exhilarated – of moral anarchy…..At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism”.
There is no basis for relativism in relativity. In fact, quite the opposite. Einstein wanted to call his theory a theory of invariance. There are certain invariances in the universe like laws of physics and the speed of light. Einstein spent his life investigating the things which change and things which do not. His conclusions were that every observer, whether at rest or in uniform motion, sees the same general laws of physics. Speed of light, ‘c’ is the same, independent of motion of source. Contrary to popular assumptions about it, theory of relativity reaffirmed the existence of physical absolutes.
An Expanding Universe with a Beginning
Einstein’s general theory of relativity prompted questions of cosmology: How did the universe begin? How has it evolved with time? How will it change in the future?. As a theory of gravity, general relativity was the natural destination for answering these questions. Using his field equations, Einstein showed what the large-scale geometry of the universe should be. According to Einstein’s equations, the universe could be evolving in two days: Expansion or Contraction.
The 20th century started with a firm belief in an eternal universe. Einstein was no exception. Two thousand years ago, Aristotle believed in a universe with no beginning. Three hundred years ago, Sir Isaac Newton believed in a universe with a beginning because he believed in a Creator God of Genesis account. After completing his great masterpiece Principia, Newton appended it with an essay called General Scholium. In this essay, Newton praised God for his great creation. Since Newton, the secularization of science in the West slowly removed God from cosmology. At the dawn of the 20th century, most cosmologists believed in a universe without a beginning. They went back to following Aristotle who argued for an eternal universe. Einstein also embraced Aristotle’s eternal cosmos rather than Newton’s finite universe. He was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of an expanding or contracting universe. In 1917, he published a paper entitled “Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity”, in which he introduced a cosmological constant to create a static universe. Einstein insisted that the expanding or contracting solutions weren’t physically possible.
However, other physicists could see through Einstein’s vain attempts to save the eternal universe. They showed him that he was wrong about this. Georges Lemaitre and Alexander Fridemann showed an expanding universe. In 1927 Solvay Conference, Einstein told Lematre, “Although your calculations are correct, your physics is abominable”. However, beginning in 1919 with observations made by Edwin Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory, astronomical evidence was not on Einstein’s side.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity made another prediction: the frequency of light from a source will be shifted if that source is in motion. Using this fact, American astronomer Vesto Slipher measured the velocities of galaxies. He observed that the light from many galaxies shifted toward lower frequencies. According to general relativity, this indicated that these galaxies were moving away from us. In 1929, Edwin Hubble and Veslo Slipher announced one of the greatest discoveries of modern times: Galaxies are moving away from us and the universe is expanding. Today we have space-based gravitational wave-detectors looking for gravitational waves that were produced during the first fraction of a second after the Creation.
A year later, Einstein finally agreed that our universe is expanding. According to his friend George Gamow, Einstein called this the ‘biggest blunder’ he ever made in his life.
Astronomer Fred Hoyle and his colleagues Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold tried their best to save the eternal universe. He decided to fix Einstein’s field equations and postulated the existence of a creation field or C-field, which would create energy over time. Hoyle’s steady-state universe would be sustained by this mysterious force. This was against one of the foundational laws of physics – the law of conservation of energy. Hoyle was unfazed and insisted that all that was needed was “about one atom every century in a volume equal to the Empire State Building”. Almost nothing. Max Born said, “for if there is any law which has withstood all changes and revolutions in physics, it’s the law of conservation of energy”. Albert Einstein was less merciful. He called it“romantic speculation”.
A universe with a beginning – it has earth-shattering political consequences. After China declared itself an officially atheist nation, it also prohibited teaching the Big Bang theory. When Chinese astrophysicist Fang Lizhi talked about a universe with a beginning, the Communist Party threw tantrums because their official policy is there is no God and the universe is eternal. In his book, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History, Timothy Cheek wrote, “In December 1972, Fang Lizhi became the first Chinese physicist to publish a research article on modern cosmology, and specifically the Big Bang theory. This highly technical article met with a furious response from leading theoretical circles of the Party. Fang and his co-authors had broken a long-standing taboo by introducing the Big Bang theory to the Chinese physics world. Insofar as the Big Bang contradicted Engels’s declaration in the nineteenth century that the universe must be infinite in space and time, Fang’s paper was tantamount to heresy against Marxism. This was because, according to Party theorists, the finite universe posited in Big Bang theory left room for a divine creator, and thus represented philosophical idealism that contradicted Engel’s canonical dialectical materialism. From 1973 until Mao’s death, the Shanghai Cultural Revolution Group under Yao Wenyuan pilloried Fang and his colleagues for promoting capitalist metaphysics.”
Why did Chinese Communists and Mao Zedong attack the Big Bang theory? Why did they attack Einstein’s general relativity? Because it left room for a divine creator. It contradicted Engel’s dialectical materialism. It promoted so-called capitalist metaphysics.
Of course, the atheist scientists in the West are more sophisticated than Mao Zedong and Communists. Let us see how deftly Stephen Hawking played word games with the clear implications of General Relativity and Big Bang.
In A Briefer History of Time, Stephen Hawking wrote, “In the classical theory of gravity, there are only two possible ways the universe can behave: either it has existed for an infinite time, or else it had a beginning at a singularity at some finite time in the past. For reasons we discussed earlier, we believe that the universe has not existed forever. Yet if it had a beginning, according to classical general relativity, in order to know which solution of Einstein’s equations describes our universe, we must know its initial state – that is, exactly how the universe began. God may have originally decreed the laws of nature, but it appears that He has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it. How did He choose the initial state or configuration of the universe? What were the boundary conditions at the beginning of time? In classical general relativity this is a problem, because classical general relativity breaks down at the beginning of the universe”.
Later in an essay for Time magazine, Albert Einstein: TIME’s Person of the Century, Stephen Hawking wrote, “General relativity completely changed the discussion of the origin and fate of the universe. A static universe could have existed forever or could have been created in its present form at some time in the past. On the other hand, if galaxies are moving apart today, they must have been closer together in the past. About 15 billion years ago, they would all have been on top of one another and their density would have been infinite. According to the general theory, this Big Bang was the beginning of the universe and of time itself. So may be Einstein deserves to be the person of a longer period than just the past 100 years.
General relativity also predicts that time comes to a stop inside black holes, regions of space-time that are so warped that light cannot escape them. But both the beginning and the end of time are places where the equations of general relativity fall apart. Thus the theory cannot predict what should emerge from the Big Bang. Some see this as an indication of God’s freedom to start the universe off any way God wanted. Others (myself included) feel that the beginning of the universe should be governed by the same laws that hold at all other times. We have made some progress toward this goal, but we don’t yet have a complete understanding of the origin of the universe.”
You can see the evolution of Hawking’s ideas in cosmology. In his book, he says General relativity takes us to a universe with a beginning. God may have originally decreed the laws of nature but it appears that He has since left the universe. Later in his essay, Hawking says, ‘According to General relativity, the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe and of time itself. The equations of general relativity fall apart at the Big Bang. What should emerge from the Big Bang? Some say God brought this universe in the way He wanted. But I feel the laws of physics brought out this universe. You can see how Stephen Hawking was contradicting himself: General theory of relativity states the laws of physics fall apart at the big bang, but the laws of physics brought the universe out of the big bang!
In his book The Grand Design, he wrote, “Because there is a law of gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing”. Hawking placed physical laws even before the creation of the universe. He enthroned these laws as the creators of the universe. This assertion also contradicts Einstein’s relativity. General Relativity says that time itself started with the beginning of the universe.
In his book Mind of God, English physicist Paul Davies wrote, “Matter, space, and time are linked in the general theory of relativity. …If we consider the moment of infinite compression, space was infinitely shrunk. But if space is infinitely shrunk, it must literally disappear, like a balloon that shrivels to nothing. And the all-important linkage of space, time, and matter further implies that time must disappear too. There can be no time without space. Thus the material singularity is also a space-time singularity. Because all our laws of physics are formulated in terms of space and time, these laws cannot apply beyond the point at which space and time cease to exist. Hence the laws of physics must break down at the singularity….The picture that we then obtain for the origin of the universe is a remarkable one. At some finite instant in the past the universe of space, time, and matter is bounded by a space-time singularity. The coming-into-being of the universe is therefore represented not only by the abrupt appearance of matter, but of space and time as well” (Mind of God, Paul Davies)
Please note those words: Because all our laws of physics are formulated in terms of space and time, these laws cannot apply beyond the point at which space and time cease to exist. Hence the laws of physics must break down at the singularity.
You cannot strip the laws of physics from matter, space and time. But Hawking had no problem in separating the laws of physics like the law of gravity from matter, space and time. He was on a mission to remove God from the beginning of the universe. He wanted to displace God with gravity. But he was not doing science. He was carried away by his naturalism and atheism.
American astronomer and NASA scientist Robert Jastrow wrote in his book God and the Astronomers, “I am fascinated by the implications in some of the scientific developments of recent years. The essence of these developments is that the Universe had, in some sense, a beginning – that it began at a certain moment in time, and under circumstances that seem to make it impossible – not just now, but ever – to find out what force or forces brought the world into being at that moment. Was it, as the Bible says,
“Thine all powerful hand
that crates the world
out of formless matter”?
No scientist can answer that question; we can never tell whether the Prime Mover willed the world into being or the creative agent was one of the forces of physics; for the astronomical evidence proves that the Universe was created 15 billion years ago in a fiery explosion, and in the searing heat of that first moment, all the evidence needed for a scientific study of the cause of the great explosion was melted down and destroyed”
Robert Jastrow says that all the evidence needed for a scientific study of the cause of the great explosion was melted down and destroyed. But Hawking, the great fire fighter, could carry the law of gravity through this fire. He ignored the fact that General Relativity takes us back to the beginning of the universe which prohibits physical laws moving beyond the point of creation.
Not every scientist embraced Hawking’s godless universe. Many great physicists like George Gamow, Georges Lemaitre, John Polkinghorne concluded that the expansion of the universe implied that the universe had a beginning in time and space consistent with the Genesis account of the Bible. As a matter of fact, until modern times, almost all scientists in the Western world believed in the Genesis account: God created a universe with a beginning.
In 1933, after listening to Lemaitre’s lecture on cosmology, Einstein said, ‘This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened”. The most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation is already in the Bible.
We read in Genesis chapter 1, that on Day 1 of creation, God created light, time, space and earth. God put them in a relationship with each other from the first day of creation. That is what General theory of relativity teaches us. Unknowingly, Einstein proved Genesis chapter 1. He brought us back to Biblical cosmology.
Isaac Newton wrote General Scholium praising God for this great creation. What is General Scholium? It is praising and worshiping God. That is the proper end of science? understanding the wisdom of our Creator and worshiping Him.
Nature of Light
Einstein also radically changed our view of light. His fascination with light stimulated his mind to perform various thought experiments like traveling along a beam of light.
In 1905, he proposed that light doesn’t only behave like a wave, but it is also made up of individual particles called quanta. Today we call them photons. Light attained a status which was not given to any other physical entity. Light waves do not behave in the same way that water waves and sound waves do.
Building on Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism, in 1905, Einstein asserted that light always travels at a fixed and constant speed. The speed of light is unique in being the same in all frames of reference. Unlike other kinds of waves, it can also move through space itself. Nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light. These concepts started the quantum revolution.
Light also showed great unity in diversity. We see the unification of electricity and magnetism in light. French physicist Louis de Broglie (1892 – 1987) postulated the wave nature of electrons and hypothesized the wave-particle duality of all matter. His mathematics connected and unified Einstein’s idea of light quant with Bohr’s hypothesis of electron waves.
Light also opened our eyes to see the nature of the universe. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts the frequency of light from a source will be shifted if that source is in motion. American astronomer Vesto Slipher (1875 – 1969) performed the first measurements of radial velocities for galaxies, realized that distant galaxies are redshifted and provided the first empirical basis for the expansion of the universe.
As the universe expanded after the moment of creation, light made most of the energy. The whole universe is filled with it. This light still exists all around us. In 1964, two radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected this cosmic microwave background radiation for the first time. The Bible teaches us that light reigned in the earliest era of the universe. And God said, let there be light and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good. (Genesis 1:3-4).
Light’s relationship with time, space, gravity and matter is also fascinating. Moving at a speed faster than the speed of light makes one travel backward in time. Similarly space acts differently as one gets closer to the speed of light. Gravity bends the trajectory of a ray of light. Gravitational waves propagate through space at the speed of light. Thus, even the effects of gravity are limited by the speed of light. In Einstein’s famous equation E= mc², light connects matter and energy. As matter moves at nearly the speed of light near black holes, it becomes an incredibly hot source of energy.
In the Bible, light is the only physical entity equated to God. God is light, says 1 John 1:5. When we understand the supremacy of light over the universe, we can guess why God chose light to describe his nature.
Unified Field Theory
Albert Einstein spent more than 30 years of his adult life searching hopelessly for a unified field theory – a theory of everything. To bring diverse physical entities into mutual relationships through mathematics has been a constant search in physics.
Celestial gravity and earthly gravity – Newton tried to bring them together
Electricity and Magnetism – Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell brought them together.
Theology and science – Johannes Kepler brought them together.
Special relativity and quantum physics – Paul Dirac brought them together
Electromagnetism and gravity – Einstein wanted to bring them together.
The theory of everything, our search for unity in diversity, our desire to connect all things in nature – they are signs of our spiritual nature. As humans we get satisfaction only when we discover the underlying interconnectedness and harmony of seemingly diverse things in nature. Einstein quipped, ‘I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details.’ At this moment, only God knows how all things are connected. Maybe sometime in the future, some great mind can finally teach us what Einstein longed for all his life.
Conclusion
To summarize, in the mathematics of relativity, we understand the secrets of nature and also God’s amazing wisdom.