Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Spinoza’s Man

Although he had a lifelong interest in philosophy, Einstein had a limited background in the subject, mainly Kant and Plato. He had even less knowledge of theology. Yet I am impressed by his intuitive understanding of the subject and its relevance to his scientific work. Quips about God and dice aside, his scientific ethos can be associated with a theology as nuanced as the quote used as the title of Païs biography: “Subtle is the Lord; but malicious He is not.”

Einstein made only a few explicit comments about religion. Perhaps his most informative was the statement: “A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation.” The phrase ‘superpersonal objects’ is important - not supernatural, or spiritual, or divine, one notices. And Païs reports him as saying in his later years: “Science without epistemology is—in so far as it is thinkable at all—primitive and muddled.” The phrase has explicit philosophical import - how we may connect words to things that are not words underlies all 0f human inquiry.

In line with Kantian epistemology, these objects, these things, that Einstein refers to are literally everything there is in the universe. They are unknowable for what they are in themselves. They first must be perceived by limited human sense capabilities, even capabilities enhanced by technology. Even more fundamentally, they must be expressed in language. And words are not non-words. Words have no logical foundation except in other words. And even language itself is superpersonal, that is beyond the capacity of individual human beings to comprehend entirely much less control.

So Einstein’s epistemological stance in the first instance implies an inherent uncertainty about the world, and with that a requirement for scientific humility. But humility does not imply incapacity. It is here that Einstein seems to make his theological presumption: the universe wants, or at least allows, itself to be known. It supplies what human beings need to be able to investigate it. This is one interpretation of what Enlightenment philosophers have called the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Theologians call this principle ‘Revelation’ and study it in a sub-discipline called Fundamental Theology. This refers to essentially the same thing as the Principle of Sufficient Reason, namely the ability of human beings to receive comprehensible messages about something that is unknowable in its infinity. Typical dogmatic theology - Christian or any other sort - understands that human knowledge of the divine must be incomplete but then insists on limiting what can be known to some rather arbitrary text or interpretation, thus effectively deifying language as well as causing untold misery by attempting to enforce interpretive restrictions.

Einstein’s God is not the dogmatic God of Christianity or Orthodox Judaism. As Païs says, “If he had a God it was the God of Spinoza.” He bases this on Einstein’s admiring statement about the man: “Although he lived three hundred years before our time, the spiritual situation with which Spinoza had to cope peculiarly resembles our own. The reason for this is that he was utterly convinced of the causal dependence of all phenomena, at a time when the success accompanying the efforts to achieve a knowledge of the causal relationship of natural phenomena was still quite modest.”

I think it is interesting that for Spinoza there are two categories of things which exist, substances and modes. Substances, it seems to me, are what Kant would later call things-in-themselves; and modes are the equivalent of descriptions, that is to say, adjectival expressions, thus language. Substances generate modes, but Spinoza is not terribly specific about how this is accomplished. Modes also refer to ways in which God can be described. The modes of God are essentially everything, all the individual substances, of the universe. Thus there is but one substance, and that substance communicates continuously through people, events, molecules, galaxies, etc.

Like Spinoza, Einstein believed that ‘the universe would provide.’ Some have liked to call that belief ‘faith.’ I think that would be a terrible misconstrual. An abiding hope perhaps but not faith in the Christian sense, simply because it was a belief with no fixed content. In fact quite the opposite. Einstein as a scientist was never dogmatic about, for example, the meaning of quantum physics, although he disagreed with the interpretations of many of his colleagues. And this applied not just to scientific results but also to scientific methods for obtaining results:

“He [the scientist] must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist in so far as he seeks to describe a world independent of the acts of perception; an idealist in so far as he looks upon the concepts and theories as the free inventions of the human spirit (not logically derivable from what is empirically given); as positivist in so far as he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of relations among sensory experiences. He may even appear as a Platonist or Pythagorean in so far as he considers the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensable and effective tool of his research”

In short, Einstein was a pragmatist not a dogmatist. His view that “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”is therefore not some sentimental blanket approval of theology. It is a very specific, although sparsely worked out, statement of the kind of religion that was compatible with his conception of science. Spinoza never started a church or a cult. The idea is absurd. So is the idea that Einstein had some sort of dogmatic faith, that he was even in some way an ‘anonymous Christian’ as the Jesuit Karl Rainer would have it. No, in addition to being a genius, he was also theologically thoughtful. He was Spinoza’s man.

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