Epigraph

الَّذِي خَلَقَ سَبْعَ سَمَاوَاتٍ طِبَاقًا ۖ مَّا تَرَىٰ فِي خَلْقِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ مِن تَفَاوُتٍ ۖ فَارْجِعِ الْبَصَرَ هَلْ تَرَىٰ مِن فُطُورٍ

ثُمَّ ارْجِعِ الْبَصَرَ كَرَّتَيْنِ يَنقَلِبْ إِلَيْكَ الْبَصَرُ خَاسِئًا وَهُوَ حَسِيرٌ

He is the Mighty, the Forgiving; Who created the seven heavens, one above the other. You will not see any flaw in what the Lord of Mercy creates. Look again! Can you see any flaws? Look again! And again! Your sight will turn back to you, weak and defeated. (Al Quran 67:3-4)

Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times

Albert Einstein’s religious beliefs have been a subject of extensive debate, often leading to misconceptions about his stance on spirituality and the concept of God. Einstein consistently rejected the notion of a personal God involved in human affairs, a view he considered naive. In a 1954 letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind, he wrote, “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.”

Despite his dismissal of a personal deity, Einstein was not an atheist. He identified with Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy, believing in a God revealed through the harmony of the universe. He stated, “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”

Einstein’s perspective has often been misinterpreted. Some religious groups have claimed his views align with their doctrines, while certain atheist circles have cited his rejection of a personal God as support for their beliefs. However, Einstein’s nuanced position doesn’t fit neatly into conventional religious or atheistic categories. He expressed a profound sense of wonder about the universe, referring to it as a “cosmic religious feeling,” which he deemed essential for scientific inquiry. Einstein often pledged allegiance to Spinoza’s presentation of God.

Baruch Spinoza’s pantheism posits that God and Nature are one and the same, asserting that everything that exists is in God, and nothing can be conceived without Him. In his seminal work, Ethics, Spinoza writes, “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.” He further elaborates that “God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things,” indicating that God is inherent within the universe rather than existing apart from it. This perspective challenges traditional views of a personal, anthropomorphic deity, presenting instead a vision of divinity as the infinite, self-sustaining substance of reality. Spinoza’s philosophy suggests that understanding the natural world is tantamount to understanding God, as they are fundamentally identical.

Albert Einstein often spoke about his profound sense of awe toward the natural world. He emphasized the beauty and mystery of nature, as well as the remarkable order that makes the universe comprehensible. Below is a collection of direct quotes from Einstein that reflect these themes, along with their original sources or context:

• “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility… The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”[1]
• “The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.”[2]
• “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man.”[3]
• “I want to know how God created this world. … I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”[4]
• “My feeling is insofar religious as I am imbued with the consciousness of the insufficiency of the human mind to understand deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as ‘laws of nature.’”[5]
• “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.”[6]
• “The important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when contemplating the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of the mystery every day. The important thing is not to stop questioning; never lose a holy curiosity.”[7]

Each of these quotes reveals Einstein’s reverence for the beauty and mystery of nature and his belief in an underlying order in the universe. They capture how he saw science not just as a pursuit of facts, but as a journey sparked by wonder — a quest to glimpse the profound coherence in the cosmos. Each statement is tied to a specific context, showing that Einstein’s sense of awe informed both his personal philosophy and his scientific outlook.

Einstein’s quotes completely resonate with the verses of the Quran quoted as the epigraph of this article. But, even if they are equated with pantheism, the story does not end there.

Pantheism is the view that God is the universe, identifying the divine with the whole of nature. In classical terms, pantheism holds that the universe conceived of as a whole is God and that there is no God beyond the substance and laws of the cosmos. At first glance, this equation of God with the immanent universe seems to reject God’s transcendence (since nothing exists outside or above the universe). However, many philosophers and theologians have argued that pantheism can support a concept of divine transcendence, albeit in a nuanced way. Below, we explore key arguments on how a pantheistic worldview might accommodate transcendence, examine the coherence of the universe as evidence of a higher order or the Divine.

One starting point is the philosophical coherence and unity of the universe. Pantheists often emphasize that the cosmos is one integrated whole governed by uniform laws or principles. Historically, the drive for a unified explanation of reality led thinkers away from seeing the world as fragmented or ruled by many gods toward monism, the idea of one underlying reality. Pantheism carries this monistic intuition to its limit, asserting a two-fold identity: the unity of God with nature, and the unity of all things with each other. In other words, if the universe is remarkably coherent, “a single system of interrelated parts,” one might argue it makes sense to think of it as one divine reality rather than a collection of disparate entities.

The very fact that the universe exhibits order and unity can be seen as evidence of something beyond any individual fragment of reality. Pantheists argue this unity just is the divine. The cosmos’s coherent structure (e.g. one set of physical laws across space and time) suggests an overarching principle or mind. Traditional theists take this as pointing to a transcendent Creator beyond the world, but the pantheist instead identifies it with God within the world. Paradoxically, by regarding the whole of reality as divine, pantheism endows the universe with qualities normally attributed to a transcendent God, such as oneness, necessity, or infinity. For example, if the universe (as God) is the only fundamental reality, it exists of itself (aseity) and depends on nothing external. This self-sufficient existence is a trait of transcendence in classical theology, now applied to the universe itself. Thus, the coherence of nature supports a kind of transcendence-from-within: the Whole transcends its parts even while being immanent in them.

Many pantheistic thinkers maintain that when we speak of God as the entire universe, we mean more than just piling up all the pieces of nature. The divine One is not a mere aggregate; it has an emergent or holistic reality that surpasses any individual component. In this sense, the pantheistic God (the cosmos) transcends the limited perspective of its constituent parts. Each element of the universe is only a fragment of the divine, while the totality possesses attributes (unity, life, consciousness, rationality, etc., depending on the philosophy) that no single part has. This idea is sometimes phrased as immanent transcendence, the notion that transcendence can emerge from the immanent unity of all things. The universe’s coherent order and interdependence hint at an underlying reality of a higher order, a reality we might call God, which both includes the world and surpasses how the world appears to finite minds.

Philosophers have often marveled at the intelligibility of the cosmos, its amenability to reason and natural laws. A pantheist can argue that this intelligible order is not a happy accident but a reflection of the cosmic divine nature. For instance, the Stoics, who embraced a pantheistic outlook, taught that an all-pervading Logos (rational principle) orders the universe, making it a single cohesive unit where all parts sympathetically interact. While the Stoic God is fully immanent in nature, it functions like a universal mind or law, effectively transcending chaos and randomness. Similarly, modern scientific pantheists point to the elegant laws of physics or the fine-tuning of cosmic constants as indicative of a deeper rationality, essentially treating the universe itself as the transcendent mind that science glimpses. Here, transcendent means not a separate being handing down laws, but that the rational order of the whole is beyond any human-made system, an object of reverent wonder (as seen in Albert Einstein’s Spinozan admiration for the cosmos’s harmony).

From the theist perspective, this is a verbose and unjustified attribution of divine attributes, to the inert universe as a whole, which every human can easily appreciate that the individual parts do not exhibit.

Pantheism is a compliment in disguise to God’s necessity and other attributes. Perhaps it reflects a deep unconscious desire to deny the transcendent God while realizing the miracle of His creation. Is it an unconscious attempt to deny accountability?

References

1. “Physics and Reality,” Journal of the Franklin Institute (March 1936); later collected in Ideas and Opinions (1954) ​asl-associates.com
2. Einstein’s illustration of scientific wonder in an interview with George Sylvester Viereck, published in Glimpses of the Great (1930) ​asl-associates.com
3. From a letter Einstein wrote to sixth-grader Phyllis Wright (January 24, 1936), discussing science and belief​en.wikiquote.org
4. As quoted in “A Talk with Einstein,” The Listener (London), 1955 ​en.wikiquote.org
5. From a personal letter (December 17, 1952), in which Einstein explains his sense of spiritual awe at the “harmony of the Universe” ​en.wikiquote.org
6. “The World As I See It,” essay published in Forum and Century (1931) ​asl-associates.com
7. Statement to William Miller, quoted in Life magazine (May 2, 1955) ​asl-associates.com