The God Letter

According to Fox News, the letter had “been stored in a temperature-controlled vault since it was last sold for $404,000” in 2008. Dubbed the ‘God Letter’, it was addressed to philosopher Erik Gutkind in 1954, written by Einstein a year before his death. It was a response to Gutkind’s book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt (1952) and contains Einstein’s view on religion, the Bible and challenges the concept of God. We show here the English translation:

Princeton, 3 January 1954
Dear Mr. Gutkind!

Inspired by Brouwer’s repeated suggestion, I have been reading a great deal in your book in the last few days, and I thank you for sending it to me. What particularly struck me was this. With regard to our actual attitude to life and to human society we are broadly similar: an ideal beyond the personal that strives for freedom from self-centred desires, strives to make existence more beautiful and enriched, with an emphasis on the purely humane, where inanimate things are only seen as a means to which no dominant role should be granted. (It is this attitude in particular that unites us as a truly “un-American attitude”)

Still, had it not been for Brouwer’s encouragement, I would never have brought myself to delve into your book in any way, as it is written in a language that is inaccessible to me. For me, the word God is nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable but still exceedingly primitive legends. No interpretation, however subtle, could change that (for me). These rarefied interpretations are by their nature extremely manifold and are in almost no way related to the original text. For me, the unadulterated Jewish religion, like all other religions, is an incarnation of primitive superstition. And the Jewish people, to whom I gladly belong and whose mentality I am deeply embedded in, for me, possess no dignity distinct from all other peoples’. In my experience, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst excesses by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot discern anything “chosen” about them.

In general, I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a human being and an internal one as a Jew. As a human, you claim to a certain extent a dispensation from otherwise accepted causality, as a Jew a privilege for monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza was the first to incisively recognise. And the animistic conception of nature religions is, as a matter of principle, not nullified by monopolisation. Such walls will only lead us to certain self-deceit; but our moral efforts are not advanced by them. Rather the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly expressed our differences in intellectual considerations, it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in what is essential, i.e. in our evaluations of human conduct. What separates us is only intellectual embellishment or “rationalisation” in Freudian language. Therefore, I think we would get along quite well when discussing concrete matters.

With kind thanks and best wishes,
Yours, A. Einstein

(Translation by ‘wimsweden’

It is touching to see that Einstein didn’t care about mistakes in his letter, and chose to simply correct them right away – this makes it a very spontaneous and authentic document indeed!

Osho says in one of his many mentions about Einstein,

This happened to Albert Einstein in his last days. It can happen only to the greatest. The lesser minds on the same road never reach to the cul-de-sac point. They die somewhere on the road believing that the road was leading somewhere, because there was still road ahead of them. The conversion happens only to the greatest. In the last days of Albert Einstein’s life, he started feeling that his whole life had been a wastage. Somebody asked him, ‘If you are born again, what would you like to be?’ He said, ‘Never again a scientist. I would rather be a plumber, but never again a scientist. Finished!’

In the last days, he started thinking about God, or the ultimate meaning of life, the mystery of mysteries, and he said, ‘The more I penetrated into the mystery of existence, the more and more I felt that the mystery is eternal, unending, infinite. The more I came to know, the less I became certain about my knowledge.’”

Osho, The Grass Grows by Itself, Ch 8