Universal Thinker

Really? He doesn’t? Lets look at a couple of the following quotes courtesy of Space and Motion.com Perhaps some analysis of his quotes will bring a frame of reference on which to make judgement.

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism. (Albert Einstein)

It’s not that Einstein does not believe in God, its that he does not believe in the anthropomorphized version of God that the world’s three main religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) espouse. Einstein is not religious, he is spiritual. He feels that organized religion treats humanity as childlike, needing a father figure; needing a being to which they can relate, someone like themselves.

I see a pattern, but my imagination cannot picture the maker of that pattern. I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one? (The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, 2000 p. 208)

I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details. (The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, 2000 p.202)

Try to comprehend all possibility, all potential, everything that is in one moment, and then is not. One cannot. That is why we are human.

In the view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support for such views. (The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, p. 214)

As the Guardian article points out below, once again, they are attempting to put words into his mouth:

In the letter, he states: “The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.”

This is not an affirmation of atheism, rather it is striking out against the concept of a reduction to human stature that organized religion has created for the idea of God. You cannot limit that which is limitless. To limit is to control. Einstein does not believe in organized religion but that does not mean he does not believe in Spirituality. Those are two distinct differences.