Justified True Belief

(●) The physicist who rewrote space, time and gravity, and who spent his last thirty years being quoted by both sides of a religious argument he refused to join. + Most people could not tell you what general relativity says (gravity is not a pull reaching across empty space, but a bend in space and time, and heavy things do the bending), and almost everyone knows what Albert Einstein looked like. That is a strange kind of fame, and it had a strange effect. Because he was the most recognizable thinker on earth, and because he talked about God more freely than most scientists do, his sentences were pulled out of their paragraphs and sent around the world to settle arguments he was not having. He belongs on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is that his physics handed Christian thinkers something they had not had before: a universe with a beginning, described by the equations of a man who spent a decade trying to avoid that conclusion. The second is that he said, plainly and often, that he did not believe in the God of the Bible. Both of those are true at once, and a reader who only ever meets one of them has been handled rather than informed. One fact worth keeping. Einstein never received a Nobel Prize for relativity. The 1921 prize, awarded to him in 1922, cites "his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect," which is the business of light falling on a metal and knocking electrons loose, a piece of work from the same astonishing year that helped found quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small. The committee, uneasy about a theory so new, went around the thing he is famous for.

(●) 1879 AD: Born at Ulm to a family whose businesses kept failing, and set on his course by a pocket compass. + Albert Einstein was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, in the kingdom of Württemberg in southern Germany, to Hermann and Pauline Einstein. The family was Jewish, comfortable, and thoroughly unobservant; a year later they moved to Munich, where Hermann and his brother Jakob ran an electrical business that installed lighting and dynamos. It did not prosper. In 1894 the firm failed and the family moved to Italy to try again, leaving the fifteen-year-old Albert behind in Munich to finish school. He was a late talker, and his parents worried. Then, when he was four or five, his father showed him a pocket compass while he was sick in bed. Einstein never forgot it. Whichever way he turned the case, the needle swung back and pointed north, pulled by something that was simply not there to see. He wrote about that moment more than sixty years later in his autobiographical notes, and said that something deeply hidden had to be behind things. The whole of his working life is in that sentence. Religion reached him briefly and intensely. Between about eleven and twelve he went through what he later called a deep religious phase, keeping the dietary laws and composing hymns to God that he sang to himself on the way to school. It ended when he began reading popular science books and concluded that the stories in the Bible could not be true. He was, by his own account, twelve years old.

(●) 1894 AD: He walked out of his Munich school at fifteen and gave up his citizenship a year later. + He hated the Luitpold Gymnasium, and he hated it for reasons a schoolchild today would recognize in about a minute. There was the drill, and there was the rote memorizing, and there was the teacher who told him that his mere presence spoiled the class’s respect. He later compared the teachers to army sergeants, and he meant it as the complaint it sounds like. In December 1894, six months after his family left for Italy, he obtained a doctor’s note citing nervous exhaustion, walked out, and turned up on their doorstep in Pavia having quit school and, as he announced, intending to renounce his German citizenship so as to avoid military service. In January 1896 the renunciation went through and he became stateless, which he remained for five years until Switzerland took him in 1901. Here is where a famous story needs correcting. Einstein did not fail mathematics. In October 1895, two years younger than the usual candidate, he sat the entrance examination for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich and did not pass it: his marks in physics and mathematics were excellent, and he fell short on the general subjects, French among them. He spent a year at the cantonal school in Aarau, which he loved, and entered the Polytechnic in 1896 to train as a teacher of physics and mathematics. He graduated in 1900 near the bottom of a class of five, having skipped lectures and irritated his professors by reading whatever interested him instead of what was set. Every one of his classmates got an assistantship. He did not. For two years he tutored, taught temporarily, and wrote letters asking for work, and the letters were not answered.

(●) 1902 AD: A clerk’s desk in the Bern patent office, a daughter nobody can trace, and then the year that reordered physics. + In June 1902 a friend’s father got him a job as a technical expert, third class, at the Swiss patent office in Bern, examining applications for electrical devices. He stayed seven years, and he always spoke well of it. Judging whether a gadget would actually work is good training for a physicist, and the work left his head free. The private life of those years was harder than the public story allows. In 1901 his fellow student Mileva Marić, a Serbian physicist and the only woman in their year, became pregnant. A daughter, whom they called Lieserl in their letters, was born in Novi Sad in January 1902 while Einstein was in Switzerland; he never saw her, the letters stop mentioning her in September 1903, and what became of her is unknown. Scarlet fever and adoption have both been proposed and neither can be shown. Albert and Mileva married in January 1903, and their sons Hans Albert and Eduard were born in 1904 and 1910. Then came 1905. In a single year, working evenings after the patent office closed, Einstein produced five papers, four of them for the Annalen der Physik, and any one of them on its own would have made a career. The first proposed that light comes in discrete packets of energy, which explained how light knocks electrons out of metal and which won him the Nobel Prize. The second was his doctoral thesis, submitted to the University of Zurich, and it sized molecules from the way sugar behaves in water, which sounds like a small domestic question and was nothing of the kind: for decades it was his most cited paper, because chemical engineers actually used the method. The third took up something anybody can watch through a microscope, the restless jittering of small particles suspended in a liquid, and showed that the jittering is caused by molecules knocking into them, which settled a long argument about whether atoms are real at all. Then the fourth, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," abolished absolute time. For observers moving relative to one another, clocks run at different rates, and simultaneity, two events happening at the same moment, is not a fact about the universe but a fact about a point of view. That paper is what came to be called special relativity, special in the sense of restricted, because it handles only motion at a steady speed. A three-page afterthought that September added the consequence, that the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content, later written E = mc². He was twenty-six, and he was still stamping patent applications.

(●) 1915 AD: He finished general relativity in a Berlin at war, working himself sick. + Special relativity, the 1905 theory, handled motion at a steady speed, and it said nothing at all about gravity. Einstein spent the next decade on that. The idea he started from is homely enough to try in an elevator: a man falling freely does not feel his own weight, and inside a sealed box you cannot tell being pulled by gravity from being accelerated through empty space. From that he reasoned his way to a conclusion that sounds like poetry and is arithmetic. Gravity is not a force reaching across a gap. It is the shape of space and time, bent by whatever sits in them, and a planet in orbit is simply taking the straightest path available to it through curved space. Think of a heavy ball on a stretched sheet, with a marble circling the dent it makes, and you have the picture, though the real thing is four-dimensional and the mathematics took him years and a great deal of help from his friend Marcel Grossmann. He presented the final field equations, the mathematics that says how much a given amount of matter and energy bends the space and time around it, to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin on 25 November 1915. He had moved to Berlin the year before, into a professorship with no teaching duties, and the city he arrived in went to war that August. Food was short and got shorter. Working at the limit through the blockade winters, he collapsed in 1917 with stomach trouble that nearly killed him and left him ill for years; his cousin Elsa nursed him back. He was also, in those years, one of a handful of German intellectuals who refused to sign the notorious manifesto defending the invasion of Belgium, and signed a pacifist counter-manifesto that almost nobody else would put a name to. It made him enemies at home long before the Nazis arrived.

(●) 1919 AD: A British eclipse expedition confirmed him, and he woke up famous in every language while his marriage ended. + Curved space makes a testable prediction: starlight grazing the sun should bend, and by twice the amount Newton’s physics allows. The only way to see stars next to the sun is during a total eclipse, so in May 1919 two British teams sailed out to photograph one, Arthur Eddington to the island of Príncipe off West Africa and a second party to Sobral in Brazil. On 6 November 1919 the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society met jointly in London to hear the plates read. The starlight had moved. The next morning The Times announced a revolution in science and Newtonian ideas overthrown, and within days a German Jewish professor, whose country had just lost a war to the country whose astronomers had proved him right, was the most famous scientist alive. He was not surprised. Asked about it ten years later he said that when the expeditions went out he had been convinced their conclusions would tally with his hypothesis, and that he would have been surprised if he had been wrong. The same year took the other half of his life apart. He and Mileva divorced on 14 February 1919, after years of separation and a written list of conditions he had sent her that reads like a prison regime; part of the settlement promised her the money from the Nobel Prize he had not yet won, and when the prize came he kept his word and handed the money over. He married his cousin Elsa in June. Of his sons, Hans Albert became a professor of hydraulic engineering in California and made his peace with his father late; Eduard, the gifted younger one, was diagnosed with schizophrenia around 1930 and spent most of his life in a Zurich clinic. Einstein left Germany in 1933 and never saw him again.

(●) 1933 AD: Hitler’s Germany drove him out, and from Princeton he signed the letter that started the bomb. + Relativity had been attacked in Germany through the 1920s as "Jewish physics," and when the Nazis took power in January 1933 Einstein was abroad. He never went back. His property was seized, his books were burned, a German magazine printed his picture with the caption "not yet hanged," and a price was put on his head. In October 1933 he settled in Princeton, New Jersey, at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study, and he stayed there for the rest of his life. He became an American citizen in 1940, keeping his Swiss citizenship as well. The lifelong pacifist changed his mind about one thing. In the summer of 1939 the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who understood that a chain reaction in uranium was now possible and that Germany might build a bomb from it, drafted a letter to President Roosevelt and brought it to Einstein because Einstein’s was the only signature Roosevelt would certainly read. Einstein signed it on 2 August 1939. He did no work on the Manhattan Project, was denied the security clearance to do so, and learned of Hiroshima from the radio. Asked about it in 1947 he said that had he known the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, he would not have lifted a finger. In Princeton he spent his last two decades on a unified field theory, an attempt to show that gravity and electromagnetism are two faces of one thing. It never came out. Younger physicists thought he was wasting himself on a dead end while quantum mechanics, which he never accepted as the final word, went from success to success without him. He knew what they thought and kept going, which is either stubbornness or integrity and was probably both.

(●) 1955 AD: He turned down a presidency, refused an operation, and died at seventy-six with an unfinished calculation beside the bed. + In November 1952, when Chaim Weizmann died, the government of Israel offered Einstein the presidency of the state. He declined within a day. He was deeply moved and, he said, at once saddened and ashamed that he could not accept, having all his life dealt with objective matters and lacking both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people. His last public act was to sign, a week before he died, the manifesto Bertrand Russell had drafted calling on the world’s governments to renounce nuclear war. On 17 April 1955 an aneurysm in his abdominal aorta, a weakened bulge in the body’s largest artery, began to leak. Surgery was offered. He refused it, saying that it was tasteless to prolong life artificially, that he had done his share, and that he wanted to go elegantly. He died early the next morning at Princeton Hospital, working to the last on the unified theory; the final page of calculation was on the bedside table, and it goes nowhere. His body was cremated the same day and the ashes were scattered at an undisclosed place, exactly as he had asked, so that no grave could become a shrine. There was one exception to his wishes, and it was not his doing: the pathologist who performed the autopsy removed his brain and kept it, without the family’s permission, for more than forty years.

What He Taught

(T1) The universe can be understood, and that it can be understood is the thing nobody can explain. + Pick up a stone and drop it. You already know roughly what will happen, and so does a child. Now notice how much more than that is true. The same handful of equations that describe the stone describe a comet, a collapsing star, and the tides, and they were written down by primates on one planet who had never seen most of what they were describing. Einstein thought that ordinary fact was the most extraordinary one there is, and that physics could not account for it. He put the point carefully. There is no logical reason why the world should be the kind of thing a mind can get hold of. Our sense experiences might have come at us as an unsorted heap, with no order in them that thought could find, and we would simply have had no science. Instead the world submits to concepts, and to mathematics invented in advance of any use for it. Einstein called this comprehensibility, and he used the word in its most modest sense: it means only that some sort of order can be produced among our experiences by making general concepts and connecting them. Modest or not, he said flatly that it leaves us in awe, that we shall never understand it, and that it is a miracle. He did not mean a miracle in the religious sense, and it would be dishonest to pretend he did. He meant something that stands there refusing to be explained by the methods that explain everything else. Christian thinkers have noticed for a long time that this is precisely what the doctrine of creation predicts: a world made by a rational God, and minds made in his image to read it (Genesis 1:27; Psalm 19:1). Einstein would not take that step. He also would not stop pointing at the step.

(Q) "The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking ... it can be put in order, this fact is one which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand. One may say ‘the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.’" + Source: Albert Einstein, "Physics and Reality" (1936), in Ideas and Opinions, pp. 292–293 (Jean Piccard translation). The essay was written for the Journal of the Franklin Institute and is Einstein at his most philosophical, examining what physics rests on that physics cannot prove. The sentence that gets quoted on its own sits in the footnote he hung on that same paragraph, the one explaining how modestly he means the word: "The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle." The version that travels furthest, "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible," is somebody else’s tidying up and not what he wrote (T1).

(T2) God is the lawful harmony of what exists, and not someone who concerns himself with what happens to people. + In April 1929 a New York rabbi named Herbert Goldstein, trying to settle a public quarrel about whether the world’s most famous scientist was an atheist, cabled him five words and prepaid fifty for the answer: do you believe in God. Einstein wired back twenty-five German words. They are the clearest statement he ever made in a single sentence, and they name the philosopher he was borrowing from. Baruch Spinoza was a seventeenth-century Dutch Jewish thinker who was expelled from his synagogue at twenty-three for his opinions, and who argued that God and nature are not two things. For Spinoza there is exactly one infinite reality, and everything that exists is a mode of it, mode being his word for a way that the one reality happens to be arranged: a wave is not a second thing standing alongside the sea. God, on this account, does not stand outside the world making choices, because God is the necessary order the world consists of. The name for a view of that shape is pantheism, from the Greek words for "all" and "God": the universe and God are not two, and there is nobody outside the whole of things to be addressed. That is what Einstein meant when he used the word God, and he used it constantly. He also had a nickname for it, der Alte, "the Old One," which is where one of the most quoted sentences in popular science comes from. Writing to his friend Max Born on 4 December 1926 about the new quantum mechanics and its irreducible randomness, meaning its claim that at the smallest scale nature deals in probabilities rather than settled outcomes, he said that the theory said a lot but did not bring us closer to the secret of the Old One, and that he was convinced that He is not playing at dice. That line is used in pulpits as evidence that Einstein believed in a personal God. It is an objection to a physical theory, made by a man who thought God was the lawfulness of nature and that a random universe would therefore not be lawful enough. The distance from here to Christian belief is worth stating plainly rather than blurring. Scripture’s God is not the order of the world; he made the world and is not part of it, and he is addressed as "Father" by people who expect to be heard (Matthew 6:9; Acts 17:24–25).

(Q) "I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." + Source: Einstein’s telegram in reply to Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, reported in the New York Times, 25 April 1929, p. 30. Goldstein had asked the question by cable at the prompting of a public dispute in which Cardinal O’Connell of Boston had called relativity a cloak for atheism. Einstein told Viereck later that year that the reply had not been intended for publication, and added, smiling, that nobody except an American could think of sending a man a telegram asking him whether he believed in God. It was printed everywhere within days all the same, and he spent the rest of his life writing to people who had read it as a profession of faith in a God who listens (T2, T5).

(T3) A God who rewards and punishes makes no sense in a world where every event is fixed by what came before. + This is the argument underneath everything else Einstein said about religion, and it is not really an argument about physics. It is about responsibility. He was a determinist. Determinism is the view that every event, including every human decision, follows necessarily from the conditions that preceded it, the way the next position of a billiard ball follows from the last one. Einstein held it without reservation and said so in print: we can have no freedom at all in the philosophical sense, because we act under outward compulsion and inner necessity together. The line he quoted all his life came from the philosopher Schopenhauer, that a man can do what he wills to do but cannot determine what he wills, and he found it consoling rather than bleak. If nobody could have done otherwise, then nobody is to be despised, and he said the thought bred tolerance in him and kept him from taking himself too seriously. Now run a God of reward and punishment through that. If people cannot do otherwise, judging them is judging the machinery, and Einstein thought an all-powerful God judging creatures whose every thought he had caused would in effect be passing judgment on himself. He said so in 1930 and again in his 1941 essay on science and religion, and he thought it was the real source of the conflict between religion and science, not Galileo and not Darwin. Christians have answered this for centuries and the answer is worth naming, because the objection is a good one and deserves better than silence. The historic reply is that the argument proves too much: a person who says "I could not have done otherwise, therefore blame me for nothing" has also given up praising anyone, thanking anyone, or holding a tyrant accountable, and nobody lives that way for an afternoon. Scripture takes human responsibility as a given and grounds it in something Einstein’s billiard-ball picture leaves out, that God made people to answer to him and gave them a real choice to make (Deuteronomy 30:19; Romans 2:6–8). Where Christians have argued among themselves is over how that choice fits with God’s sovereignty, which is a family quarrel inside the answer rather than a concession to the objection.

(Q) "A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man’s actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God’s eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes." + Source: Albert Einstein, "Religion and Science," New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930; collected in Ideas and Opinions. The "him" of the sentence is the man Einstein has just described as thoroughly convinced that causation runs through everything, which is a description of himself. In the same essay he insists that this costs morality nothing, because ethical behavior rests on sympathy, education and social need, and needs no religious basis at all (T3).

(T4) Awe at the order of the world is what makes a scientist, and he was willing to call that awe religious. + Anybody who has stood outside on a cold clear night, far enough from a town to see the whole sky at once, knows the feeling that arrives unasked and has nowhere in particular to go. Having taken away the God who listens, Einstein was left holding something of that kind, and he refused to let go of it, and he spent thirty years trying to find words for it. He called it cosmic religious feeling, and he described it as a third stage beyond two earlier ones: the religion of fear, in which people try to bribe the powers that send the storm, and the religion of morality, in which God is the guardian of right and the comforter of the sad. The third stage has no God made in a human image at all. It is the sense a person gets of the futility of his own wants set against the order that shows itself in nature and in thought, and the wish to grasp the universe as one significant whole. He was careful to say that this is not a decoration on the work but the engine of it. Nobody spends years of solitary labor disentangling the motions of the planets, he said, for practical results or professional advancement; Kepler and Newton did it out of a deep conviction that the universe is rational and a longing to catch even a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in the world. He went further and said he could not conceive of a genuine scientist without a profound faith that the laws of the world are open to reason, which is a faith in the strict sense, since no experiment can establish it before you start experimenting. The most famous sentence he ever wrote about religion comes from exactly here, and it is routinely read as a friendly handshake between church and laboratory. It is not quite that. Read in its paragraph, religion is what sets the goals and supplies the passion for truth, science is what finds the means, and the religion in question is the cosmic feeling, not any church’s creed. Even so, he meant it, and he meant the lameness seriously: a science with no reverence in it was, to him, a cripple.

(Q) "The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." + Source: Albert Einstein, "Science and Religion" (1941), written for the symposium Science, Philosophy and Religion; collected in Ideas and Opinions, pp. 41–49. The sentence immediately before it says that science can only be created by people who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding, and that this feeling springs from the sphere of religion. The sentence immediately after it begins to take back a good deal, and opens the passage in which he asks teachers of religion to give up the doctrine of a personal God (T3, T4).

(T5) He would not be called an atheist, and he would not be claimed as a believer either. + In 1929 the journalist George Sylvester Viereck sat Einstein down and asked him, more or less at gunpoint, for his philosophy of life. Asked whether he believed in God, Einstein said it was the most difficult question in the world and not one he could answer with a yes or a no. Then he gave the answer he gave for the rest of his life: he was not an atheist, he was not sure pantheist was right either, and the problem was too large for minds like ours. What he offered instead was a parable, and it is the warmest thing he ever said about the limits of his own position. A child walks into an enormous library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in languages it cannot read. The child knows somebody must have written them. It does not know who, or how. It notices a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order it only dimly suspects. That, Einstein said, is where the human mind stands before God, even the greatest and most cultured mind. Two things in that interview are usually left out by whichever side is quoting it. He said he was fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism, which is the atheists’ half. And, asked how far Christianity had influenced him, he said he was a Jew but was enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene, that Jesus was too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, that he accepted the historical existence of Jesus unquestionably, and that nobody can read the gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus, because his personality pulsates in every word and no myth is filled with such life. He is comparing Jesus, favorably and at length, with the legendary heroes of antiquity. He is also not saying that Jesus is God, and he never said it.

(Q) "I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds." + Source: George Sylvester Viereck, "What Life Means to Einstein," in Glimpses of the Great (1930), pp. 372–373. The interview first ran in the Saturday Evening Post of 26 October 1929, and Viereck printed a fuller text in the book a year later, which gives the wording to quote and the place to cite. The library parable follows immediately, introduced with "May I not reply with a parable?" The remark about being enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene comes a page later in the same conversation (T5).

(Q) "The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends." + Source: Albert Einstein to Eric Gutkind, 3 January 1954, written in German from Princeton; the letter was sold at auction in 2008 and again in 2018, and the text is public. Gutkind had sent Einstein his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt, and this was the thank-you. In the same letter Einstein calls the unadulterated Jewish religion, like every other religion, an incarnation of primitive superstition, and says that the Jewish people, to whom he gladly belongs and in whose mentality he feels profoundly anchored, has for him no different dignity from any other people. Written a year before his death, it is the hardest thing he ever put on paper about the faith of Israel and the church, and leaving it out would make the friendlier quotations dishonest.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His own equations gave the universe a beginning, and a Belgian priest had to argue him into it. + When Einstein applied general relativity to the universe as a whole in 1917, the equations would not sit still. They described a cosmos that had to be expanding or contracting, and like nearly every physicist of his generation he took it for granted that the universe was eternal and unchanging. So he added a term to hold it steady, the cosmological constant, a repulsive effect tuned to balance gravity exactly. Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Catholic priest and trained physicist, published in 1927 a solution describing an expanding universe, and in 1931 followed it with the proposal that the expansion runs back to a single dense origin, what he called the primeval atom and what Fred Hoyle, who never accepted the theory, later nicknamed the Big Bang. Einstein did not like it. Lemaître recalled him saying at the 1927 Solvay conference in Brussels that the calculations were correct but the physics abominable. Then Edwin Hubble’s measurements at Mount Wilson showed the galaxies actually receding, and Einstein changed his mind in public. In January 1933, after hearing Lemaître lecture in California, he stood up and called it the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which he had ever listened. He dropped the cosmological constant; George Gamow later reported that Einstein called it his biggest blunder, though the remark comes to us only through Gamow and historians have their doubts. Christian thinkers seized on the result, and one of them had to be restrained. When Pope Pius XII told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in November 1951 that the new cosmology confirmed the creation of Genesis, it was Lemaître, the priest who had proposed the theory, who quietly urged him not to press the point, on the ground that a physical model is not a proof of the doctrine and will change as physics changes. The caution is well taken and the connection remains. The cosmological argument, which reasons that a universe with a beginning needs a cause for that beginning, is among the oldest arguments in natural theology, natural theology being the attempt to reach God from the world itself rather than from Scripture. After Einstein it had a beginning to work with that came from physics rather than philosophy.

(†) Theologians took his wonder at an intelligible universe and drew the conclusion he would not draw. + Einstein kept saying that the comprehensibility of the world is a miracle and refusing to say what sort. Christian thinkers spent the second half of the century saying what sort. The most serious of them was Thomas F. Torrance, a Scottish Reformed theologian who read Einstein closely for decades and won the Templeton Prize in 1978 for the work. Torrance argued that Einstein’s deepest instincts were borrowed goods: the conviction that the universe is rational, that it is contingent (it did not have to be this way, so you must go and look rather than deduce it from an armchair), and that it is nonetheless intelligible all the way down, is the working assumption Christian theology handed to European science in the first place, out of the doctrine that a free and rational God made a world that is neither divine nor chaotic. On that reading Einstein was living off a Christian inheritance while declining the estate. A physicist made the same point without the theology. In 1960 Eugene Wigner published a paper on what he called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences, observing that mathematics worked out for its own sake keeps turning out to describe the physical world, and calling it a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. Christian philosophers have pressed the obvious question about gifts, which is who gives them. Paul makes the underlying claim in a sentence: what can be known about God is plain from what has been made (Romans 1:19–20). Einstein’s awe is exactly the response that verse describes, stopped one step short.

(†) Both sides recruited him, and he spent his life writing letters telling them to stop. + From 1929 onward the mail came in from both directions, and he answered it. Believers had read the Spinoza telegram, or the line about the Old One not playing dice, as a profession of faith. Unbelievers had read the essays on the personal God and wanted his name on their banner. He told both that they had him wrong, and the letters are the most useful thing he left on the subject, because a man correcting a misreading of himself has to say what he actually meant. The clearest of them went in September 1949 to Guy Raner, a former naval officer who had written asking whether a Jesuit chaplain was right to claim that Einstein had abandoned atheism after debating Catholic theologians. Einstein said he had repeatedly stated that the idea of a personal God was a childlike one, that Raner might call him an agnostic, and then, in the same breath, that he did not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist, whose fervor comes mostly from a painful act of liberation out of a religious upbringing. He preferred, he said, an attitude of humility answering to how weak our understanding of nature and of ourselves really is. Eight years earlier, in a letter of 7 August 1941, he had put the second half of that less gently: the fanatical atheists, he wrote, are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of the chains they have thrown off after hard struggle, creatures who in their grudge against the traditional opium of the people cannot hear the music of the spheres. He was also, in his lifetime, the most misquoted man alive, and he knew it. He did not say that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible, he did not fail mathematics at school, and he had nothing whatever to do with the tract about the student who defeats an atheist professor by proving that cold is the absence of heat and evil the absence of God. What he did say, over and over, was that the order of the world fills a person with awe and that he would not put a face on it. Christians who want him as a witness have him for the first half of that sentence and not the second, and he spent twenty-five years making sure the distinction survived him.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God who answers, a will that is free, a body that is raised, and a Bible that is more than legend. + He was clear about his position, so the ledger can be clear too. Four things he denied are load-bearing walls of the Christian faith. - A God who answers. Einstein’s God does not concern himself with the fate and the doings of mankind. The God of Scripture counts sparrows and numbers hairs, and is told so by Jesus to people worried about being overlooked: "Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God" (Luke 12:6). Prayer in the Bible is not a ritual aimed at the order of nature; it is a child asking a father for something, with the expectation of being heard (Matthew 7:11). - A will that is free. Because he held that every action follows by necessity, he concluded that nobody can be held responsible before God. Scripture puts the choice in front of people and means it: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life" (Deuteronomy 30:19). Take responsibility away and you lose not only judgment but repentance, forgiveness, and thanks. - A body that is raised. He could not believe that the individual survives the death of his body, and thought that those who hoped otherwise were driven by fear or egotism. The Christian claim is not that a soul floats free but that a dead man walked out of a tomb in Jerusalem and that others will follow him: "But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Corinthians 15:20). Paul, who had staked everything on it, said that if it did not happen, Christians are of all people most to be pitied (1 Corinthians 15:19). Einstein’s position and Paul’s cannot both be right, and neither of them pretended otherwise. - A Bible that is more than legend. The Gutkind letter calls Scripture a collection of venerable but rather primitive legends. Against that stands the church’s claim that these documents are God’s own speech through human writers (2 Timothy 3:16), and the ordinary historical work of asking whether the gospel accounts read like legend, which Einstein himself, reading them as literature, thought they did not. None of this makes him an enemy, and treating him as one gets the man wrong. He hated cruelty, refused to sign for his country’s war when signing was cheap and refusing was not, gave away his prize money in a divorce settlement, and told atheists to their faces that they could not hear the music. He looked at the order of the world with something very like reverence and said so for fifty years. He simply would not believe that the order has a face, or that it came looking for him.