“Science without religion is lame”, he said;“religion without science is blind.’

https://beezone.com/1main_shelf/einstein_the_religious.html

Because Albert Einstein, the humble and intensely private seeker of truth, was so reluctant to broadcast his views, few know him as the God-intoxicated man that he was. His writings and spoken words, sprinkled along the path of his 76 years, reveal an intensely religious person. Paradoxically, while he lived, he was reviled as an atheist by some. But they didn’t understand him.

Einstein’s God was not the personal God of Western religions, nor did his theology match religions of the Orient. He spoke and wrote of having a “cosmic religion” – beliefs that he claimed were difficult to describe to anyone who is entirely without them. Central to his religiosity was, in his words, a “rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of humans beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”

He did not believe in a person God: he wrote in his 1931 essay “The World as I See It,” “I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes its 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.”

Mystery, but not mysticism, was to Einstein’s religious sentiment. In words impossible to paraphrase without doing them an injustice he wrote, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which 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.”

Einstein’s God was the Universe itself, not an external “grand puppeteer.” And he had no doubt that there was a Universe a deep, superpersonal reality, beyond the solipsism – the idea that nothing is real but the self – often so deceptively attractive the human mind. He wrote in 1941: “A person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings and aspirations to which he clings because of their superpersonal value.” And, “A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance and loftiness of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require not are capable of rational foundation.”

Einstein was misunderstood by religionists of varied persuasion because, lacking scientific understanding, they could not see that the old-physics world of “simple” matter dispersed in a vacuum had been replaced by a modern physics in which things are “not what they seem.” Atoms are not hard little balls, and the “void” is not dull nothingness.

Physics had grown far beyond rank materialism to embrace a pulsating, labyrinthian quantum world alive with energy and as ethereal as any heaven. In the words of physicist Edward Harrison, “in the impalpable and seemingly inconsequential entities of the quantum world, one finds the true music and magic of nature.”

Einstein did not believe that science would ever know all that could be know about the world. He confided to a friend, “Possibly we shall know a little more than we do now. But the real nature of things, that we shall never know, never.”

So Einstein’s legacy must include not only his physical theories but his cosmic religion – little know and little shared, until perhaps another age. He challenged the future; “I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” And, “In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.”

Einstein’s life ebbed and evaporated in a hospital bed in the early morning hours of April 18, 1955 – victim of an at-that-time inoperable aortic anerurism. His corporeal atoms were seared in the fires of cremation and were scattered, as he wished, were no monument could be built. Yet his curious and lonely human being’s spirit – if we are call it that – lives on in the world. Much cosmic business remains unfinished.