A child in the sixth
grade in a Sunday School in New York City, with the encouragement of her
teacher, wrote to Einstein in Princeton on 19 January I936 asking him whether
scientists pray, and if so what they pray for. Einstein replied as follows on
24 January 1936:
I have tried to
respond to your question as simply as I could. Here is my answer. Scientific
research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by
laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the actions of people. For this
reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events
could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural
Being.
However, it
must be admitted that our actual knowledge of these laws is only imperfect and
fragmentary, so that, actually, the belief in the existence of basic
all-embracing laws in Nature also rests on a sort of faith. All the same this
faith has been largely justified so far by the success of scientific research.
But, on the other hand, every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of
science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe
— spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with
our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to
a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the
religiosity of someone more naive.
It is worth mentioning that this letter was written a
decade after the advent of Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy and the
probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics with its denial of strict
determinism.
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