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No dice for God
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Albert Einstein (Wikipedia)
There is a video going around the Internet that dramatizes a story that I first heard about through chain-email. It is easy for me to dismiss chain-email because I've come to associate letters that urge me to forward a message to my friends with falsehood. In fact I can't think of any email I've received which contained the words "please forward this to ten friends" that also contained a true story. But videos have a way of becoming viral and it would be nice if the folks who put these things together would at least try to do a little fact checking. In this case, the video is a dramatic retelling of the myth of The Atheist Teacher and the Clever Student. The urban legend repository Snopes has several variants of this tale in their collection. All of them involve a pompous and smug atheist instructor getting "schooled" by a student.
There are a lot of versions of this legend, and I find the one with the marine to be the most amusing. But like most urban legends, this story is just a story. Why would it matter if the person in the story is Albert Einstein? And did Albert Einstein even believe in god?
Many religious people have tried to claim Albert Einstein as a believer. And many atheists have tried to claim him as an atheist. The believers use quotes like "God doesn't play dice," to say that Einstein clearly acknowledges the existence of a supreme being. And the atheists say that Einstein used the idea of God as a metaphor for order and logic in the universe. And while Einstein clearly used the word "god" in a lot of his writing, there are several false stories about him being a believer that are promulgated by the faithful.
The problem with trying to pin down any particular person as a believer or atheist by way of quotes is that people's beliefs change throughout their lives. And their quotes may be taken out of context which can also render conclusions about them erroneous. Albert Einstein didn't leave a lot of mystery about his beliefs if one bothers to look. A collection of some clarifying quotes from Albert regarding his beliefs can be found at the website of the late Stephen J. Gould.
My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.
Albert Einstein in a letter to M. Berkowitz, October 25, 1950; Einstein Archive 59-215; from Alice Calaprice, ed., The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 216.
I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
Albert Einstein, letter to a Baptist pastor in 1953; from Albert Einstein the Human Side, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, eds., Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 39.
The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.
Albert Einstein, letter to Hoffman and Dukas, 1946; from Albert Einstein the Human Side, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, eds., Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981.
I cannot then believe in this concept of an anthropomorphic God who has the powers of interfering with these natural laws. As I said before, the most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. And this mysticality is the power of all true science.Albert Einstein; from Peter A. Bucky, The Private Albert Einstein, Kansas City: Andrews & McMeel, 1992, p. 86.
Is evil simply an absence of God? It isn't a question that lends itself to scientific testing. But if you can think of a way to test such a hypothesis, please share it in the comments. In the end, whatever the philosophical merits of this apocryphal tale may be, the video and the chain letters are at best a fiction and at worst an outright lie.
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