If you Google ‘Einstein and Christianity’ you will discover an unseemly squabble between Christians wanting to claim Einstein was a Christian, and atheists who want to insist he was an atheist. Each wants Einstein, and his brilliance, to be on their side to lend them credibility.

The truth concerning Einstein is actually much more interesting—and, I submit, significant.

Einstein was a brilliant scientist. He was not, however, a brilliant theologian… and it is perhaps unfair for people to expect him to be one. Theology was not his area of study. What is significant is that science took Einstein as far as it could toward God. Einstein’s scientific study convinced him of God’s existence. It gave him good reasons to believe in a higher being. However, that was as far as he was able to go. Although he was firmly convinced of the historical reality of Jesus Christ, theology was not his forte. As such, he was not able to give a conventional Christian definition to the God he’d discovered. 

Einstein’s parents were atheistic Jews, so he didn’t have a Christian heritage. He had also observed some overbearing behaviour from church institutions, and this did nothing to endear him to conventional Christianity. As such, Einstein contented himself in being a theist (someone who believes in a god). Why? Because that’s where the science took him. He did not believe in a god who was interested in us personally. As such, his brand of theism could best be described as “Deism.” Sometimes, in his uncertainty, he described himself as an agnostic (someone who isn’t sure about God’s existence.) But he made it quite clear that he was not, and never had been, an atheist (someone who is convinced that there is no God.)

The significance of Einstein’s story is that science took one the greatest minds of modern history to God. Therefore, to suggest that science must inevitably do the opposite is quite wrong.

Here are some of his quotes:

I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.

In 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 really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.

I want to know how God created this world … I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.

So… if you wish to be influenced by one of the greatest scientific minds in history, let Einstein introduce you to God.