
Albert Einstein's 'God letter' reflecting on religion auctioned for $3m - pseudolus
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/04/physicist-albert-einstein-god-letter-reflecting-on-religion-up-for-auction-christies
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>“Einstein offers scant consolation to either party in this debate. His cosmic
religion and distant deistic God fits neither the agenda of religious
believers or that of tribal atheists.

This is wrong. Spinoza's god is not deistic god, transcendent being. Spinoza's
god is "a dynamic nature in action", or substance. Closer to pantheism than
deism. The problem arises because Einstein renounced atheism because he never
considered his denial of a personal God as a denial of God. Einstein also said
that "Mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all." and it helps
to clarify why he did reject atheist label.

>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 arrangement of 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. We see the universe marvelously
arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our
limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am
fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism, but admire even more his contribution to
modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and
body as one, and not two separate things.

G. S. Viereck, Glimpses of the Great (Macauley, New York, 1930), quoted by D.
Brian, Einstein—A Life, p. 186.

