Marko
Uršič
Einstein on Religion and Science
Key words: Einstein, cosmic religion,
Spinoza, pantheism, theism, Tillich, determinism, causality, quantum mechanics,
epistemology of science.
Abstract: After having outlined the main tenets of
Einstein’s religious beliefs and attitudes, especially his “cosmic religion” which he
expressed in a series of well-known articles from 1930 on, this paper discusses
two principal questions: 1) Does Einstein’s
“cosmic religion” necessarily imply the negation of God as Person? and 2) What
has Einstein really meant with determinism?
Concerning the first
question, Einstein was a follower and admirer of Spinoza’s philosophical monism,
however, he understood the phrase Deus
sive natura in his own way; Einstein’s God is not simply identical with
Nature, He is the “subtle” Lord of nature, but on the other hand Einstein was
critical towards the concept of a “personal God”. Yet, if we distinguish the
“personal God” and “God-as-Person” (following Paul Tillich), we may conclude
that Einstein’s “cosmic religion” is not quite incompatible with God as
Person.
The second question is
followed by a set of linked subquestions: A) Why has Einstein so much insisted
that God does not “play dice”? B) Does determinism in Einstein’s sense
necessarity imply the negation of the freedom of human will? C) What is the
distinction between determinism and the “Law of Causation”? – Assuming that
there is an important distinction
concerning the question (C), the author of this paper argues that the main
Einstein’s concern in his famous polemic against the “Copenhagen interpretation”
of the quantum mechanics was primarily the universal validity of the “Law of
Causation”, and not the determinism as the negation of freedom of human will
itself. From the scientific point of view, the strict determinism would obtain
only under the following two
presuppositions: in case we had a well-formed universal Theory of Nature (the
“Final Theory” in the strong sense), and if the causal relation were
demonstrated as linear and universally transitive – however, it is neither the
case.
For
motto of my contribution in this conference at 100th anniversary of
Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity I have chosen a quotation from his famous
essay The World As I See It (1930)
which reveals very well Einstein’s greatness, his modesty, compassion and human
faith:
“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is
here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes
thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life
that one exists for other people – first of all for those upon whose smiles and
well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many,
unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A
hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based
on the labors of other men, living and dead, and I must exert myself in order
to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. [...]
The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new
courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.”
In
my reflections of Einstein-philosopher, who often pondered on the relation
between science and religion, considering his own scientific work as a kind of
religious devotion, as unveiling God’s “Design”, as scientific questing of the
ultimate Logos in Cosmos – in these reflections I am referring mainly to some well
known articles on religion, which Einstein wrote after 1930, motivated also by several
misunderstandings from the side many theologians and other people, who estimated
him an atheist. Einstein’s articles on religion were included into two well-known
collections, in The World As I See It
(1949) and Out of My Later Days (1950),
but here are quoted from a later edition, titled
Ideas and Opinions (1954); next to
these articles I quote some passages from Einstein’s letters, particularly to
Max Born. As secondary literature I refer mainly to both Abraham Pais’
monographs about Einstein’s life and work (Subtle
is the Lord, 1982, and Einstein Lived
Here, 1994), to Max Jammer’s book Einstein
and Religion (1999), and to some recent articles of Gerald Holton and Alan
H. Batten.
Einstein
outlines in Religion and Science
(1930) three stages of religious development in the history of mankind:
1.
religion of fear
2.
social and moral religion (“God as Providence”)
3.
“cosmic
religious feeling” (die kosmische
Religiosität).
Einstein
says that “with primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious
notions – fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death”, and that is why “the
human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself [... and]
tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and by
offering sacrifices…”.
According to Einstein, we can explain with human fear also “the formation of a
special priestly caste which sets itself up as a mediator between the people
and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis”.
On
the second stage: “The desire for guidance, love and support prompts men to
form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence, who
protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes, […] the comforter in sorrow and
unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead”,
i. e., God as saviour (sotér), in Christianity
incarnated in Jesus, Son of Man. – In other cultures, says Einstein, there are
other gods of providence, yet their common feature is the anthropomorphic conception.
The third and the highest
stage of religious experience – which belongs partly, but not in the pure form,
already to the first and second stages – is the “cosmic religious feeling”,
without any “anthropomorphic conception of God”. The main features of this feeling
are outlined in the following passage from Religion
and Science:
“The individual feels the futility of human desires
and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in
nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a
sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant
whole. […] The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this
kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image;
so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence
it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were
filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases
regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked
at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are
closely akin to one another.”
For
Einstein, in his religious quest the key reference is Spinoza. We are not far
from truth if we consider Einstein as a modern, scientific and cosmological
Spinozist, i. e., a pantheist whose religious attitude
and feeling is die kosmische Religiosität.
Spinoza was Einstein’s favorite philosopher, quoted and mentioned by him many
times in his writings, letters and conversations. He even composed a poem, an
ode To Spinoza’s Ethics (1920), which
begins with the verses:
How much do I love that noble man
More than I could tell with words
I fear though he’ll remain alone
With a holy halo of his own.
Einstein
declared his belief in Spinoza’s God (Deus
sive natura) also in the famous telegram which he sent in 1929 to New York’s rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein who was worried by
the Boston’s
cardinal’s charge that Einstein’s theory of relativity implies “the ghasty
apparition of atheism”. Goldstein asked Einstein: “Do you believe in God? Stop.
Answer paid 50 words.” Einstein answered Godstein in 25 German words, here in
English:
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.
We
may note here that Spinoza, strictly speaking, would not say that God “reveals”
Himself (or Itself) in…, but that God actually is the same as “the lawful harmony of the world”. This is namely
the strict pantheist position, so we may assume from Einstein’s telegram that
he was not quite a strict pantheist. Max Jammer quotes an Einstein’s answer,
when he was asked to define God: “I’am not an atheist, and I don’t think I can
call myself a pantheist.”
Then he speaks about his belief in the laws of the marvelously ordered universe,
which give evidence of the divine Creator. However, Einstein was surely a
pantheist in some broader sense; at another occasion, speaking of the superior
Mind that reveals itself in the world, he maintained that “in common parlance
this may be described as ‘pantheistic’ [belief] in Spinoza’s [sense]”.
Jammer understands Einstein’s ‘pantheistic’ attitude
in the following way: “Einstein agreed with Spinoza that he who knows Nature
knows God, but not because Nature is God but because the pursuit of science in
studying Nature leads to religion.”
Well, this could be said of some theist as well, so let us suspend a definite
conclusion at the moment.
As
Gerard Holton correctly points out, the main Einstein’s motive and the
principal methodological maxime in his quest of the “third paradise”, i. e., of
the union of his first and second “paradises”, religion and science
respectively, was die Einheitlichkeit,
the supreme Unity of all phenomena.
This was, of course, also the basic idea behind Einstein’s “Principle of Relativity”
and the later “Principle of General Covariance”. We know from his biographies
that Einstein was not content with associations which his expression “Principle
of Relativity” (or “Theory of Relativity”) had provoked, so he would prefer
that his theory was named die
Invariantentheorie (Theory of Invariance), following Felix Klein’s term, but
it was already too late to renaim it.
Soon
after the publication of his famous “field equations” of the General Theory of
Relativity (GTR), Einstein wrote to Willem de Sitter (1916): “I am driven by my
need to generalize (mein
Verall-gemeinerung-bedürfnis; the word is written in the original German
without hyphens!).”
This need to generalize is principal for all Einstein’s scientific search and
for his philosophical world-view. The quest for die Einheitlichkeit is the basic motive also for his later
endeavors to formulate the “Unified Field Theory” (UFT), which would unite
gravity and electromagnetism. Einstein was not successful in his final search,
however, he was indeed a visionary, since the quest for a unified theory has
become the “Holy Grail” of modern physics. Nowadays, the search of unification
of all four basic forces in nature (gravity, electomagnetic force, weak and
strong nuclear force) is going on other lines, following mainly quantum
theories. The best candidate for the “Final Theory”,
which would unite microcosmos
(quantum forces) and macrocosmos (gravity),
is supposed to be some “string theory” (there is a set of different string theories):
very tiny “strings”, which vibrate in many dimensions, are introduced to replace
particles, in order to resolve the incompatibility between quantum mechanics (QM)
and (GTR). Ways are different, but the main motive for this unification is
still the same as Einstein’s: the quest of die
Einheitlichkeit of physics, and consequently of the whole natural science.
We may say that Einstein’s epistemological ideal
was such a theory of nature, which would not only connect (GRT) and (QM), but
also resolve all contingencies (presumably also constants in presently known
physical equations) into lawful necessities.
This would be indeed the final Theory (T),
the “Universal Equation”.
Spinoza’s
Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata
was for Einstein the highest ideal of unity of philosophy and religion, of
reason and faith, based on necessity, culminating in Spinoza’s amor dei intellectualis. From this philosophical
and scientific belief we can also understand Einstein’s famous dictum (1941), a
paraphrase of Kant:
“Science without religion is lame, religion without
science is blind.”
or a
similar thought in Einstein’s earlier paper (1930):
“I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the
strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. […] What a deep
conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to
understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world,
Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor
in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics!”
But
here we have to add something essential: yes, Kepler had indeed very deep
conviction in the rationality of the universe, since without this conviction he
could not formulate the laws of planetary motions – however, his Platonic
metaphysical beliefs were almost too deep for a break-through in science, when
he tried in his early work Mysterium
cosmographicum (1597) to explain the orbits of planets with five Platonic “ideal
geometrical bodies”; so his later scientific success was the result of having
abandoned the “ideal circles” in favor of empirically founded ellipses. (Of
course this does not mean that
Platonism is a wrong philosophical basis for scientific investigations – on the
contrary: I am inclined to think that Platonism in some “refined” sense is the
ultimate ground of scientific laws and the best foundation of the scientific
quest of truth.)
Comparing
Kepler with Newton,
we may say that the latter’s belief in the rationality of the universe is more
independent of his religious feelings and reflections as former’s. True, Newton’s
Pantocrator, Universal Ruler, “God of
a working day” (if we use Alexandre Koyré’s term), is always and everywhere
present “behind” or even “in” nature, since space is His sensorium, yet Newton’s God is practically absent in the physical
calculus of the “celestial mechanics”: from the scientific point of view,
circles and ellipses are equally right, the only thing which matters in modern
science is the consistency of the mathematical system and its adequacy for the
description of physical facts; the world “outside” is supposed to be ontologically real, objective, however, its reality is
not a matter of science, but of philosophy and/or theology. – Anyway, Einstein
was probably right, when he said that some
“religious feeling” (whether pantheistic or theistic or deistic) is needed for
great achievements in science, especially in cosmology, but on the other hand
we must not overlook that such “religious” attitude
in science is, from the methodological point of view, actually a deviation from
the conception of modern science, let us say from the “Galilean science”, which
is based only on empirical facts and mathematical tools. So we may say that Niels
Bohr with his “Copenhagen interpretation” of (QM) was in some deeper
philosophical sense a closer follower of Galilean “antirealism”, compared with
Einstein’s “realism” concerning the equations of (GTR) – namely, Bohr argued
that science has to limit itself to phenomena, and he defined the word phenomenon as referring “exclusively to
observations under specified circumstances, including an account of the whole
experiment”;
of course, considering the second part of the quoted phrase, which is a variant
of the “Complementarity Principle” (Bohr, 1928), the method of (QM) differs very
much from the Galilean science. For Einstein this new “phenomenological” attitude in science was unacceptable, since it ignores
the “objective reality”. And the reality is for him in some fundamental way
connected with his religious feeling of God who does not “play dice”.
Now,
there are two main problems (among others) of pantheism – problems, which are
radically solved in the “pure” pantheism of Spinoza, but which remain problems
in Einstein’s pantheistic “cosmic religion”:
I.
Does Einstein’s “cosmic religion”
necessarily imply the negation of God as Person?
II.
What has Einstein really meant with
determinism?
In
the following, I discuss these two questions, which are mutually connected.
Ad I.:
Einstein’s open critique of the “personal God” of Christianity and Judaism is present
in the second part of his essay Science
and Religion, which he presented in the “Conference on Science, Philosophy,
and Religion”, held at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, in New York,
1940, and which was published the same year in the famous journal Nature (№ 146), and it is,
incidentally, the only Einstein's paper on religion, published in a scientific
journal; a year later this text was included into the proceedings of this symposium (1941).
Let us see some passages:
“It seems to me that what is important is the force of
the superpersonal content and the depth of the conviction concerning its
overpowering meaningfulness, regardless of whether any attempt is made to unite
this content with a divine Being, for otherwise it would not be possible to
count Buddha and Spinoza as religious personalities.”
The
phrase “superpersonal content” refers both to human superpersonal (or
superindividual) attitude towards
God and also to God’s own superpersonal nature. Then Einstein goes on with his
reflection on religion and science:
“… a conflict [between religion and science] arises when a
religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements
recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into
the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the
doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of
science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with
respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way
have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung
from fatal errors.”
This
strategy of distinction between religious (“moral”) and scientific level of
discourse has been known from Middle Ages on, from Abelard and Ockham, to
Copernicus and Bruno, Galileo and Spinoza, up to Hume and Kant. Einstein’s
specific point in this ancient dispute between science and philosophy on the
one side and religion or theology on the other is his insisting – which is not
present in such sharpness neither in Spinoza – that the main source of trouble
is the theistic concept of a “personal God”, with whom man can have personal
relations (in prayer, rituals etc.). It is interesting that Einstein insists
that the “anthropomorphic character” of the “personal God” is even nowadays (i. e., in 20th
century) the heaviest obstacle for collaboration between the established
religion(s) and science(s):
“The idea of God in the religions taught at present is
a sublimation of that old concept of the gods. Its anthropomorphic character is
shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers
and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes. […] The main source of the
present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in
this concept of a personal God.”
We
may ask: why? What is wrong with the “personal God” in relation to science?
Einstein is convinced that every personal God must have a free will, namely
such that He can interfere in the processes of nature with miracles,
revelations, prophecies etc. – and that
is, following Einstein, in direct opposition with science, with natural laws,
for which “absolutely general validity is required”. Spinoza’s opinions about
miracles were very similar, and we may agree with both on this point,
nevertheless we can doubt in Einstein’s presupposition that every idea of a “personal God” implies
His intervening into the presumably fixed “order of nature”. For example, one
of the most famous philosophical theists, Leibniz, does not think of God in
this way; and neither Newton’s
Pantocrator performs miracles, He
just “guarantees” the proper functioning of the “world mechanism”. Even
Spinoza, in spite of his negative attitude
to miracles in Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus, does not explicitely negate the biblical “personal
God”; his main point is that the Bible has to be understood as symbolic, “moral”
discourse, not as a scientific treatise. Although Einstein agrees with such a
moderate attitude towards the Holy
Script, yet he goes on in his critique of a “personal God”, and in the above
mentioned conference delivers a rather unrealistic proposal for “teachers of
religion”:
“In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of
religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that
is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast
power in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail
themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True,
and the Beautiful in humanity itself.”
Einstein,
with his unexpected address to “teachers of religion” that they have to give up
“the doctrine of a personal God”, provoked many Jewish and Christian clerics,
as well as other too pious people of America, and raised some quite intolerant
and anti-Semitic feelings. However, there were also some very interesting
philosophical and/or theological reactions, among them the most known and
important is the critique of the famous Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, himself
exiled in 1933 from Germany by the Hitler regime as the first non-Jewish
professor, because of his close affiliation with the Social-Democratic party
and his opposition to Nazism. Two great men, Einstein and Tillich, have known
each other from their Berlin days in the early twenties, and they both felt not
only respect to each other, but also had much in common, especially their quest
for Einheitlichkeit, Unity or
Sythesis of all knowledge. However, after Einstein’s “provocation”, Tillich in
his commentary Science and Theology: a
discussion with Einstein (1941) wrote sharply that “no criticism of this
distorted idea of God can be sharp enough”, but on the other hand he also tried
to be sympathetic, offering “a solution in which [Einstein’s argument] is
accepted and overcome at the same time”.
This alleged solution was based on Tillich’s symbolic reading of the Holy
Script – Einstein had presumably not taken into account that the term “personal
God” was a symbol for expressing “the
experience of the numinous” (in the sense of Rudolf Otto), so that “the
predicate ‘personal’ can be said to the Divine only symbolically or by analogy,
or if affirmed and negated at the same time.”
Tillich believes and argues that “the symbol of the personal God is indispensable
for living religion.”
And Jammer further explains Tillich’s point: “One should not use a primitive
pattern of the concept of the personal God in order to challenge the idea
itself,” since the mature idea “need not, and in fact cannot, interfere with
science and philosophy.”
He adds that “Tillich’s statements converge toward Einstein’s ‘cosmic religion’
as much as is possible for a theistic theologian.”
A similar critique was addressed to Einstein by the famous Catholic (and also “heretical”)
theologian Hans Küng: “If Einstein speaks of cosmic reason, this must be
understood as an expression of reverence before the mystery of the Absolute, as
opposed to all-too-human ‘theistic’ ideas of God. […] God is not a person as
man is a person.”
– I quite agree with Küng’s remark, I am more sceptical of Tillich’s critique,
but here I cannot enter into the discussion about complicated relations between
afirmative, negative and symbolic (or mystical) theology. I would just say that
the hermeneutical as well as theological problem of symbolic reading of the
Bible is far from being definitively solved; to see it we have to consider just
a simple question: are the miracles, performed by Jesus, meant (only)
simbolically? And His very Resurrection – is it just a symbol? Tillich would
probably answer that symbol is not less but more
than empirical reality.
However, this attitude is hard to
accept, since it implies quite o strong version of epistemological antirealism.
Anyway,
Tillich’s critique of Einstein’s maybe too simple refusal of a personal God (at
least at that conference) is partly justified – especially having in mind
Tillich’s later theological reflections in his main work Systematic Theology (1951), where he writes that “the God who is a person is transcended by the God who
is the Person-Itself, the ground and abyss of every person …”
– yet, on the other hand, Einstein’s critique of a personal God as a source of
“vast power in the hands of priests” is surely justified too. I could not but
agree with Einstein in his concluding sentence of his paper on Science and Religion:
“The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances,
the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not
lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but
through striving after rational knowledge. In this sense I believe that the
priest must become a teacher if he wishes to do justice to his lofty
educational mission.”
The
refusal of a personal God has several important (and not all pleasant)
consequences, among them especially these two:
a)
disbelief in the immortality of the
individual soul
b)
senselessness
of prayer as human invocation of God’s favors.
Concerning
these two points, several Einstein’s sentences are often quoted, among them the
famous concluding passage of The World as
I see It (1930):
“I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his
creatures, or has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. Neither can I
nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death;
let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am
satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a
glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the
devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be ever so tiny, of the Reason that
manifests itself in nature.”
It
is interesting to note that Einstein, in context of his critique of a personal
God, says that a will of the kind we
experience in ourselves is not to
be expected in God – of course, here Einstein follows Spinoza again, yet we may
ask: maybe an implicit presumption is hidden here, that not every kind of will (but
just such as we experience) is inappropriate for God? It seems obvious that Einstein’s
critique of a personal God is directed mainly against the anthropomorphic conception of God’s predicates. However, in the
traditional theology and/or philosophy of religion, God’s Will and human will
are considered only as analogous, so
the essential question is: how far this analogy can be extended? Jammer, for
example, points out that it is not only a question of God’s anthropomorphism, but also of His “anthropopathism”, i. e., whether God can have at
least analogous feelings (pathos) as
human beings.
And even if we give a negative answer also to this question, still the most
difficult question remains: is God’s Mind (that mighty cosmic Logos who does not “play dice”) at least
analogous to our human mind(s)? Jammer
says: “It seems legitimate to ask whether an attribution of thoughts to God
does not imply the notion of a personal God.”
And he quotes a prophet: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your
ways my ways.” (Isaiah 55:8).
The
“anthropomorphic” nature of God is, from Einstein’s point of view, par excellence present in Christianity
where God is incarnated in Jesus, “Son of Man”. Needless to say, in spite of
his great respect for Christianity as the highest form of a “moral” religion
(and in spite of his never forgotten “first paradise”, which he had found in
religion as a boy), Einstein was far from being a Christian, he was closer to
unorthodox Judaism and to the old Indian wisdom.
Yet, it is interesting to note that Einstein himself has often used
anthropomorphic predicates when speaking about his cosmic God. Beside addressing
Him, quite traditionally, in the masculine gender, saying that “He does not
play dice” (not She or It), or speaking of “the old one” (der Alte), Einstein also maintains, for example, that God is “subtle”,
but not “malicious” (Raffiniert ist der
Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist Er nicht). From the theological and/or
philosophical point of view, these linguistic details are maybe not very important,
but it is surely important to distinguish between God as a person and an anthropomorphic
God, since it is not necessary that every possible (conceivable?) God’s person is
“anthropomorphic” in Einstein’s sense. This distinction is introduced also in a
recent article of Alen H. Batten under the title
Subtle are Einstein’s Thoughts, published
in the renowned journal Physics World
(September, 2005). Batten writes:
“But why did Einstein not believe in
a personal God? To answer that question, we have to understand what he meant by
the term. I would define a personal God as a God with whom human beings can
have a relationship, analogous to those they have with one another. Although
this idea might seem to indicate that God has a human form, I think it is
perfectly possible to believe in a personal God who is not anthropomorphic. I
suspect – but cannot clearly demonstrate – that Einstein sometimes confused the
two ideas.”
Of
course, the trouble is, as usually, in details – namely, what is here meant by
“a human form”: just visual, organic form, or also forma mentis? Anyway, I agree with Batten that the distinction
between “personal” and “anthropomorphic” has to be considered when we speak
about Einstein’s God. But next to this distinction I would add the third term: “God as Person” (this term
could be meant also in Tillich’s sense as “God who is Person-Itself”). And if we
introduce this second distinction, the difference between personal God and God-as-Person,
the following question is raised: is God-as-Person indeed incompatible with Einstein’s
“cosmic religion”? Why a “pantheistic” cosmic God would not be Person-Itself,
why He (or She or It) would not have His (or
Her or Its) Will, after all? Not a will akin to ours, not analogous to our
human will, but God’s Will. Let us
remind that also Christian Lord’s Prayer says:
“Let Thine will happen” – not mine, but Thine! And in this sense, pantheism and theism may finally converge. I wonder how
would Einstein comment this idea. I have the impression, together with Alan H. Batten,
that Einstein’s principal in actually the only relevant target in his critique
of a “personal God” was his refusal to accept a “limited God”, a god too much
akin to ourselves. However, the concept of a limited “anthropomorphic” god is
not implied by the concept of a personal God, and not at all by the concept of
a God-as-Person. The latter is not inconsistent with Einstein’s God, who is
“subtle”, but “not malicious”, and who presumably does not “play dice”.
Ad II.
What has Einstein really meant with determinism? Why has he insisted that Herr Gott würfelt nicht? Does
determinism in Einstein’s sense necessarity imply the negation of the freedom
of the human will?
On
the level of “practical reason”, namely in ethics and social life, Einstein, as
most other determinists, implicitly presupposed some “compatibilism” between
deterministic laws of nature and human free will, since it is indispensable for
ethical responsibility of our decisions and deeds. On the other hand, Einstein
several times explicitly rejected the philosophical concept of freedom of the human
will, for example in his contribution for Festschrift
für Professor A. Stodola (1929):
“Honestly I cannot understand what
people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a
feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this
has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my
pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What
is behind the act of willing to light
the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: ‘Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will’
(‘Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills’.)”
Einstein
is even more explicit in his already quoted, famous speech The World As I See It (1930):
“I do not at all believe in human freedom
in the philosophical sense. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but
also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘A man can do
what he wants, but not want what he wants,’ has been a very real inspiration to
me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s
hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing well-spring of tolerance. This
realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility
and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people all too seriously; it is
conducive to a view of life which, in particular, gives humor its due.”
From
the point of the so-called “common sense”, which considers the negation of
human freedom as something undesirable and troublesome, it is rather strange
that Einstein finds “consolation” in the “inner necessity”, and even derives
the source of tolerance out of it. Somebody might also remark that Einstein’s
“humor” in taking people not “too seriously” is close to cynism. However, it is
far from that. Einstein follows Spinoza again in this mild and gentle sage’s attitude towards human affairs and life in general. Max
Jammer truly says that Einstein’s “theorethical endorsement of determinism in
no way affects the demands of practical ethics.”
Nevertheless, for rationally based compatibilism of necessity and human freedom
some troubles and worries remain, since the question of compatibility in the
proposed solution, following Schopenhauer, is just transferred tp the
“metalevel”; yet, if we cannot want what we want, isn’t it actually the same as
not doing what we want?
However,
it seems that Einstein was more as in freedom of the human will interested in the
freedom of God’s will, and within this context he usually placed the question whether
determinism obtains or not. In a letter to one of his assistants in Princeton, Ernst Straus, he wrote: “What really interests
me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.”
In the history of philosophy there were different answers to this for our human
brain indeed difficult question – for example, Spinoza’s answer was negative,
while Leibniz’s positive. In order to better understand Einstein’s troubles
concerning God’s choice (i. e., His freedom of Will) in creation of the world,
we have to specify the context a little more.
Einstein
did not ask himself as Leibniz, if the Creator had the free choice to select in
his Mind the world which He was going to create (and, as stands in Theodicy, God allegedly selected the
best possible world), but he asked himself if Herr Gott had the choice to select an imperfect world: im-perfect as un-finished, namely from the
physical point of view, world in whose very depth, in its deepest foundations,
is hidden (and presumably revealed by quantum mechanics) an irreducible contingency, “just chance”, which was in
Einstein’s eyes a terrific gap in God’s creation, an inadmissible absence of the
“objective reality”. This gap can be, in the best but still bad case, ful-filled
only post festum, namely with human (or
“observer’s”) intervention, when that formidably unreal quantum “superposition”
finally “collapses” into some definite, “objective” state. In this sense, also in this sense, we can understand
Einstein’s most famous dictum that God does not – and should not – “play dice”.
As the legend says, Einstein’s main opponent Niels Bohr, the proponent of the “Copenhagen interpretation”
of quantum phenomena, which has become standard, advised Einstein not to tell
God what He should do. However, the great problem of the “objective reality”
has never been adequately solved in (QM), and also some of the main quantum
physicists, especially Schrödinger who discovered the wave-function equation,
were not satisfied with Bohr’s “phenomenological” interpretation.
Einstein’s
worries about indeterminism of (QM)
can be formulated in several ways which are basically equivalent. The classical
formulation can be found also in Abraham Pais’ second monograph. Pais puts the
question: “What did Einstein mean by God not playing dice?”
And he explains that in the classical mechanics, given the initial positions
and velocities of the particles, it is possible to predict their positions and
velocities at any later time for any individual collision – but not so in (QM),
as Einstein’s close friend, quantum physicist Max Born has written:
“One obtains the answer to the
question not ‘what is the state after
the collision’ but ‘how probable is a given effect of the collision’ … Here the
whole problem of determinism arises. From the point of view of quantum
mechanics there exists no quantity
which in an individual case causally determines the effect of a collision … The
motions of particles follow probability laws.”
Probability
laws themselves are of course necessary as well as all other scientific
laws (for example, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or Schrödinger’s wave-function
equation as such are perfectly
necessary, not in the least probable), however, necessity of quantum laws on
their “metalevel” does not solve Einstein’s concern about the absence of “objective
reality” and causation in quantum phenomena, where, as everywhere in nature,
God should not “play dice”. Probability laws express contingency of the physical world, which is, following the Copenhagen interpretation,
only phenomenologically “real”, without some deeper ontological foundation. This
irreducible contingency of quantum phenomena threatens to undermine that
magnificent necessity of the “pillars of creation” whose outlines have begun to
be discovered by Einstein’s “field equations” of (GTR).
Confronted
with quantum mechanics, Einstein reacted in a very rational way, in His way.
Pais quotes one of Einstein’s earliest expressions of dissent with the new
(QM), dating from 1926, contained in his reply to one of Born’s letters:
“Quantum mechanics is certainly
imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The
theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the
‘old one’. I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice.”
Einstein
refers to his “inner voice”, to his deep intuition which enabled him to
formulate his great theory (GTR). And, we may ask: who can state with certainty
that he was not right in an essential sense, after all? Namely, even if strict
determinism does not obtain, was Einstein’s insisting on necessity of causation and objective reality indeed a mistake? Let us remind here of some
other Einstein’s “mistake” which he himself considered as the greatest – the
cosmological constant λ. Cosmological investigations in the last decade
suggest that maybe it was not a mistake at all, but a precious idea, born from
Einstein’s brilliant intuition.
But
let us return to God who does not play dice. What is actually the main Einstein’s
concern here? Determinism or validity of the universal “Law of Causation”? Some
people think that these two terms are equivalent, and Einstein himself does not
distinguish them explicitly, however, from the philosophical point of view, they
have to be clearly distinguished. Consequently, I think that the principal,
albeit somehow overlooked or rather misinterpreted philosophical problem here is
the universal validity of causation,
not just determinism in the strict (Spinozistic) sense. We may see Einstein’s
concern for causality also from his already considered opposition to a personal
God in his first essay on Religion and
Science (1930):
“The man who is thoroughly convinced of the
universal operation of the law of
causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes
in the course of events – provided, of course, that he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously.”
And also in his later years, Einstein never
ceased to stress the importance of causal explanations, as we can see, for
example, in his letter to a close friend Michele Besso (1948): “But for me, the
cogitative basis is the trust in an unrestricted causality.”
It means: seriously has to be taken the universal
causal determination of events, but
it does not mean that eo ipso all
events are determined in advance as far as we go to the future.
Determinism and the universal “Law of Causation” would be equivalent under (at least) two conditions: 1) if we had some well-formed “Final Theory”, some scientific “Theory of Everything”
(TOE) or simply the Theory (T) in Einstein’s ideal sense, and 2) if the causal relation in (T) were well-defined (for example, defined as being transitive, asymmetric
etc.) – but actually we do not have any
well-formed (T), neither we have an exact and
comprehensive scientific concept of
causality … so, we have to ask: what do we actually mean when we talk of strict
determinism in scientific contexts?
I think that the term
‘determinism’ can have an exact scientific sense only within some well-formed theory. Several definitions of determinism
which occur in philosophical literature, especially in analytic philosophy,
have to be read only as schemes of
definitions, for example:
“Determinism.
The world is governed by determinism, if and only if, given a specified way
things are at a time t, the way
things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law.”
This is a nice
definition-scheme, but not a proper definition
of determinism itself. In order to obtain it, we have to precise what actually
is the “natural law” in the definiens,
otherwise said, we have to presuppose a well-formed
theory which expresses this law, actually a set or a system of laws – for example Newton’s classical mechanics or
Einstein’s (GTR) etc. Only within some well-formed theory the question of
determinism can have a proper scientific sense. But we do not have any
well-formed “theory of everything” (T),
so the traditional philosophical concept of “universal determinism” (“everything
is determined”, namely in advance, as far as we go) cannot be well-defined as a
scientific concept.
It is interesting to
note that in some Einstein’s late statements “his insistence on the primacy of
an unrestricted determinism somewhat abated”.
Jammer refers to a passage from Wolfgang’s Pauli’s letter to Max Born, dated 31
March, 1954:
“In particular, Einstein does not consider the concept
of ‘determinism’ to be as fundamental as it is frequently held to be (as he
told me emphatically many times), and he denied energetically that he had ever
put up a postulate such as (your letter, para. 3): ‘the sequence of such
conditions must also be objective and real, that is, automatic, machine-like,
deterministic’. In the same way, he disputes
that he uses as criterion for the admissibility of a theory the question ‘Is it
rigorously deterministic?’ – Einstein’s point of departure is ‘realistic’
rather than ‘deterministic’, which means that his philosophical prejudice is a
different one.”
Jammer comments this interesting
passage that “this shift in Einstein’s position was, partially at least, the
result of his failure to disprove the Heisenberg indeterminancy relation, which
form an integral part of the standard version of quantum mechanics.”
We may agree with this statement, however, it has to be added that Einstein’s
polemic with proponents of (QM), especially with Niels Bohr (in Solvay
Conferences) and Max Born (in letters) has been from its beginnings in twenties
more orientated against the “standard” (“Copenhagen”) interpretation of indeterminancy laws than against these laws
themselves.
As it has been already
said, we have to distinguish between determinism in the strict philosophical
sense and the universal validity of the “Law of Causation”, especially from the
point of the epistemology of science. Namely, in spite of the fact that we do
not have any exact and comprehensive scientific
concept of causality (so as we do not have any exact scientific concept of
determinism), the “Law of Causation” – with contrast to the “hypothesis of
determinism” – has a status of a principle
in every scientific investigation. It is supposed
to be valid universally, even if we do not know or cannot prove it in some
occasions, especially in (QM); namely, we cannot disprove it neither. The
universal validity of causation, understood as the general principle that every event should have its cause (even if we do
not know and cannot explain the nature of some presumably causal relations), has not been strictly disproved in (QM),
neither strictly demonstrated as incompatible
with the indeterminancy laws, which, as we know, have very convincing empirical
support. The rational thought presupposes
causality “in principle”, regardless of the specific concept of causality
which may differ in various theories or historical epochs (for example, in
Aristotelian epistéme, the “final
cause”, causa finalis, was included
among the “natural” causes, what is after Galileo and Newton, up to Einstein, of
course not the case).
The principle of
universal causality is by its epistemological
status similar to Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason. Both principles
have to be a priori valid in order to
develop science as rational discourse. Miracles are excluded from science, also
from (QM). Speaking about Einstein’s rejection of miracles, namely from the
scientific point of view, Max Jammer says that Einstein’s belief in an unrestricted
“determinism” (i. e. causality) in science can be understood as his belief that
“an unalternable antecedent–consequent relation is a necessary condition for
the comprehensibility of experience
([that is] essentially a Kantian idea).”
From this point of view, which is close to mine, causality has the
epistemological status of a category
of reason. Here I cannot go further into discussion if causality is a transcendental category in Kantian
sense, if it is known a priori etc. My
intention here is just to point out that Einstein’s “intuition” that (QM) is
not a complete theory, that it is somehow provisional, “not yet the real thing”,
since (QM) does not yield causal explanations – has a strong philosophical
support, and that it is “in principle” maybe
right, in spite of the well-verified quantum indeterminancy. Otherwise
said, that (GTR) is maybe compatible with the (QM) on some level
which has not been discovered yet.
Let us resume: Einstein’s
principal objection against (QM) is sometimes understood mainly as his
insisting on the strict determinism in science. But things are more
complicated, since the question of “objective reality” is deeper than the
question whether determinism obtains or not. We have pointed out that Einstein
did not want to sacrifice causality, not just determinism as we usually
understand it. Namely, if we give up the “Law of Causation” as a general principle
of science, we come too close to some deficient “agnostic” attitude which only “saves the phenomena” with
successful mathematical models, without really understanding them. (“Saving phenomena …” – it sounds familiar,
like some déjà vu.) That’s why it is
important to take into account the epistemological distinctions between some basic
concepts which we are inclined to confuse.
Of course I do not
think that Einstein’s old “Universal Field Theory” (UFT) is going to prevail
over contemporary (QM). It is more probable that the relativistic “locality” has
to be sacrificed for some new type of “holism” in physics, and maybe also
anisotropy of time has to be reconsidered. For the moment, these are just “queries”,
if we use Newton’s
term. Anyway, it is difficult to imagine that the principle of causation itself
would be given up in science, since human reason cannot be satisfied with “phenomenological”
descriptions only, nevertheless how sophisticated and mathematically elegant
they might be. Let us remind of another Einstein’s well-known remark that “the
most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”.
In the end, I will
quote Einstein’s famous passage concerning his “experience of mystery”. But
before quoting this passage, let me hint the following speculation: in case, if
Einstein indeed found his great final Theory (T) – otherwise said, in case if absolutely no “hidden variables”
remained in explaining our world – would then still be possible our “experience
of mystery”? Could we still admire with “wonder and awe” the magnificent God’s “Design”
of the Cosmos? Or, is it maybe opposite the case: that just then our admiration
of His Subtlety, Beauty and Truth would be perfect? – Of course I have to leave
this dilemma open.
And here is the famous
passage from The World As I See It (1930):
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the
mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art
and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer
marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of
mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of
the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the
profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most
primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this
emotion that constitute true
religiosity. In this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”
References
Einstein, Albert (1954, sd.
ed. 1982): Ideas and Opinions, Three
Rivers Press, New York.
(This edition includes most articles from two original collections: The World As I See It and Out of My Later Years, Philosophical
Library, New York, 1949 and 1950).
Albert Einstein: The Human
Side
(1979), ed. Helen Ducas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University
Press.
Born,
Max (2005): The Born–Einstein Letters 1916–1955, Macmillan Press, New York.
Pais, Abraham (1982): Subtle
is the Lord, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Pais, Abraham (1994): Einstein
Lived Here, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Jammer, Max (1999): Einstein
and Religion, Princeton University
Press, Princeton.
Holton, Gerald: “Einstein’s
Third Paradise”, Daedalus, Fall 2003.
Holton, Gerald (2004): “Paul
Tillich, Albert Einstein, and the Quest for the Ultimate” (from internet).
Batten, Alan H.: “Subtle are
Einstein’s Thoughts”, Physics World, Forum, Sept. 2005.
Hoefer, Carl: “Causal
Determinism”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, in internet.
Petković, Tomislav
(2005): “Albert Einstein – čovjek i djelo”, in: Eksperimentalna fizika i spoznajna teorija, Školska knjiga, Zagreb.
Discover – Special Einstein
Issue,
September 2004.