Einstein spent quite a lot of time in his later years rebuking those who sought to paint him as a deeply and/or staunchly religious figure.
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
As is usual, there’s much
selective quoting that the religious engage in, augmented by their usual habit of trying to bang square factual pegs into circular evidentiary holes. The big favourite citation is, of course, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind,” something the great man probably regretted in secret saying for the rest of his life if one looks at his subsequent writings on religion.
'Luthon64
