Greg Gutfeld’s “Agnosticism”

RE-POST/Fixed Media & Links

(Originally Posted In April of 2016, then in 2020)

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT

You describe yourself as agnostic atheist. What does that mean?

That means I don’t know. That’s all it means. I don’t […] I’m not arrogant enough to say that I am an atheist and I’m not arrogant enough to know that there is something out there, so I am happy to say that I don’t know.

And I think about it, I often say that I am an atheist in the daytime and terrified at night. And you wake up and you’re like […] ah, is this all there is? And then you wake up in the morning and it kind of goes away. […] I am in in the I don’t know party, which technically that might be agnostic or atheist. But I don’t know. I leave that to whatever happens, it’s the big practical joke. We’ll never know. Nobody comes back to tell what.

In his book, How To Be Right: The Art of Being Persuasively Correct (p.96), and in an article in NATIONAL REVIEW, as well as intimating the same in the above video, Greg Gutfeld said this:

This is important because it removes the sweaty veneer of ideological excess. While I love it when I’m certain about something, I realize those are rare moments in life. You cannot be certain about all things. As an agnostic, I do not call myself an atheist, because, to put it simply, “I don’t know.” For all I know there is a god, and it’s some dude in Jersey named Ned. True, I’ve pretty much discounted this theory — Ned has bad skin and a Beatle-do, qualities rarely associated with the divine. But the point is: I can’t be 100 percent sure. So I punt.

I will comment on his “agnosticism” in a bit, but first…

While I have enjoyed his contributions to Conservatarian thinking and much needed humor, I have to say this is one of the worse positions I have seen him take. Logically that is. And let me be clear… I am NOT saying this because he merely rejects “God” [read here Ned], but that he anthropomorphizes the big “G” — the classic theistic understanding of God.

Making wise decisions always depends on various factors even though it does not provide us with 100% guarantee. In this case, what is missing is a correct definition of God. So since we are primarily dealing with evidences garnered from history, science, philosophy, fulfilled prophecy, and the like… there is no silver bullet. Nothing is assured 100%

BUT…

There is a way to approach this as almost all person’s do (in their personal life or professional life). Just like a case in court so-to is the cumulative gathering through reason and logic evidences in a way that a strong case for God is made.

Even in a court situation, a case is made that sways a jury one way in order to not make a life-or-death ruling (in the case of a 1st degree murder trial), but to make a choice “beyond reasonable doubt.” Here is a great comment in an article on STAND TO REASON’S site:

The jury is asked if the evidence shows that the defendant is probably guilty.

It is to the evidence introduced in this trial, and to it alone, that you are to look for that proof.

The standard of probability is not “100% certainly guilty”; it is “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

A reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the defendant may arise from the evidence, conflict in the evidence, or the lack of evidence.

If you have a reasonable doubt, you should find the defendant not guilty. If you have no reasonable doubt, you should find the defendant guilty.

Evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s it. That’s all. Nothing about faith.

In life, not just in the jury box, we are forced to make decisions with incomplete information, but we are never forced to go beyond evidence.

Andy Banister explains this concept with a walk through the woods:

It is easy to see that Mr. Gutfeld is creating an impossible plateau for one to reach that no field of study, whether the sciences or law (except maybe mathematics), can ever dream to attain. Perfection ~ something Greg should be familiar with rejecting and warning others about. That is, Utopian ideals and goals. In making this impossible 100% claim he defines God in such a way that evidence for His existence — not Ned, but the real Creator of the space-time-continuum — is defined out of existence. Greg essentially presupposes that God out of existence.

To wit, I will turn my attention to Greg Gutfeld’s “agnosticism.” He has repeatedly said “I don’t know.” In the video at the top of this post he says right after the “practical joke” comment “that we will never know.” That is not an agnostic position. Professor Budziszewski explains:

“To say that we cannot know anything about God is to say something about God; it is to say that if there is a God, he is unknowable. But in that case, he is not entirely unknowable, for the agnostic certainly thinks that we can know one thing about him: That nothing else can be known about him. Unfortunately, the position that we can know exactly one thing about God – his unknowability in all respects except this – is equally unsupportable, for why should this one thing be an exception? How could we know that any possible God would be of such a nature that nothing else could be known about him? On what basis could we rule out his knowability in all other respects but this one? The very attempt to justify the claim confutes it, for the agnostic would have to know a great many things about God in order to know he that couldn’t know anything else about him.”


J. Budziszewski, found in Norman Geisler & Paul Hoffman, eds., Why I Am a Christian: Leading Thinkers Explain Why They Believe, revised ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2001), 58

In other words… Gutfeld is showing arrogance by demanding 100% proof (that no jury demands), and by excluding God by defining Him in a way as to rig the outcome. As much as I respect him and his wonderful work… his position here is very childish. Not a position I would expect him to take… but ideology [his atheism] does tend to blind. And arrogantly so.

Sometimes the smartest skeptics give up what they wrongly view as faith for the most “childlike” reasons. For instance, Lewis Wolpert, who has too many letters after his name and is a very accomplished and respected developmental biologist, explained why he rejects God:

I stopped believing in God when I was 15 or 16 because he didn’t give me what I asked for. (Lewis Wolpert, “The Hard Cell,” Third Way, March 2007, p. 16)

During an interview, he also stated: “I used to pray but I gave it up because when I asked God to help me find my cricket bat, he didn’t help.”

When asked by Justin Brieley (Unbelievable show episode, “What Does Science Tell Us About God?”): “Right, and that was enough for you to prove that God did not exist.”

He replied: “Well, yes. I just gave it up completely.”

(See page 15 of MIDWEST CHRISTIAN OUTREACH JOURNAL)

While one would expect a meaty explanation that reasonable people would think about and come to a conclusion on… his reasoning is commensurate of a child’s reasons. Another well known skeptic, Bart Ehrman, doesn’t reject God because he found textual evidence against the Christian faith. He rejects God because there is suffering in the world:

“If there is an all-powerful and loving God in this world, why is there so much excruciating pain and unspeakable suffering?” He [Ehrman] says this “led me to question my faith when I was older. Ultimately, it was the reason I lost my faith”

(DR. CLAY JONES)

Bart’s way of dealing with this is basically the classical argument against God:

Premise 1: God is all-good (omnibenevolent)

Premise 2: God is all-powerful (omnipotent)

Premise 3: Suffering and evil exist

Conclusion: An all-good, all-powerful God could not exist since there is so much suffering and evil in the world. If he did, he would eradicate this evil.

Charles Darwin as well rejected God not based on evidence, but for theological reasoning:

  • That there is much suffering in the world no one disputesA being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient. It revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent First Cause seems to me a strong one; and the abundant presence of suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection. — Charles Darwin, The Works of Charles Darwin, Volume 29  (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2010), 121-122.)

Darwin was using theological presuppositions to drive his research, here are the precepts:

I have argued that, in the first edition of the Origin, Darwin drew upon at least the following positiva theological claims in his case for descent with modification (and against special creation):

  1. Human begins are not justfied in believing that God creates in ways analogous to the intellectual powers of the human mind.
  2. A God who is free to create as He wishes would create new biological limbs de novo rather than from a common pattern.
  3. A respectable deity would create biological structures in accord with a human conception of the ‘simplest mode’ to accomplish the functions of these structures.
  4. God would only create the minimum structure required for a given part’s function.
  5. God does not provide false empirical information about the origins of organisms.
  6. God impressed the laws of nature on matter.
  7. God directly created the first ‘primordial’ life.
  8. God did not perform miracles within organic history subsequent to the creation of the first life.
  9. A ‘distant’ God is not morally culpable for natural pain and suffering.
  10. The God of special creation, who allegedly performed miracles in organic history, is not plausible given the presence of natural pain and suffering.

(EVOLUTION NEWS & VIEWS)

This seems like a problem, but in fact, many atheists have abandoned this tactic. Why… through the work primarily of Alvin Plantinga. Here, Dr. Ronald Nash formulates WHY this syllogism is no longer a serious threat in philosophy:

Demonstrating the Consistency of the Theistic Set

After our brief detour into the differences between a theodicy and a defense, a short summary may help us get back on track. We have seen that the atheologian’s claim that the theistic set is self-contradictory remains nothing more than wishful thinking because of the atheologian’s failure to produce the missing premise required to show that the set is explicitly contradictory. Rather than rest on our laurels and live with the possibility that some atheologian might discover the missing proposition some time in the future, we have decided to see if we cannot beat the atheologian to the punch and actually demonstrate that the theistic set is consistent. Once done, this will eliminate any possibility of theism’s being shown to be logically inconsistent because of the existence of evil in the world. The method of demonstrating consistency requires that we add a premise (or premises) to the original set that logically entails the other proposition, which, in our case, is “The world contains evil.” In order to do the job, it is not necessary that our new premise be true or even that it be believed to be true. All that is necessary is that it be logically possible.

Consider, then, the following argument:

An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God created the world.

God creates a world containing evil and has a good reason for doing so.

Therefore, the world contains evil.

Numbers 1 and 2 taken together do, of course, entail 3. Therefore, the propositions from our original theistic set that now make up 1 are logically consistent with the existence of evil. The only relevant question regarding 2 is whether it is possibly true. Obviously it is since it is not logically false. Therefore, the theistic set is logically consistent from which follows the impossibility of anyone’s ever demonstrating that it is not.


Ronald Nash, Faith & Reason: Searching for a Rational Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1988), 189.

C.S. Lewis as well argues against this “evil universe” argument:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist–in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless -I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality–namely my idea of justice–was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.


C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1952), 38-39.

So again, Bart’s rejection is dealt with handily, and shows his rejection is merely emotive in nature… devoid of any real substance. Similar to Greg Gutfeld’s position, his rejection is merely emotive in his reasoning. He is not worries about “evidence” per-se, but rather worried about some cosmic killjoy that may have a word with in regards to past or future hedonistic ventures. So his hiding arrogantly behind “I don’t know” is his crutch.

I have some really good books I can recommend to the person seeking good, well-thought-out, reasonable arguments detailing various forms of evidence for “faith”~

Post-Script,

May I also note quickly how a believer views faith as opposed to the faith Greg surely thinks is blind (and granted, some Christians are heppy with their “blindedness”):

Certain words can mean very different things to different people. For instance, if I say to an atheist, “I have faith in God,” the atheist assumes I mean that my belief in God has nothing to do with evidence. But this isn’t what I mean by faith at all. When I say that I have faith in God, I mean that I place my trust in God based on what I know about him.


William A. Dembski and Michael R. Licona, Evidence for God: 50 Arguments for Faith from the Bible, History, Philosophy, and Science (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2010), 38.

AND, unless we forget the bottom line in this discussion through hubris, we should know that which we reject through feigned ignorance:

The Illogical Thinking of An “Agnostic” (RIP Bugliosi)

(Originally posted October 2011, the 2nd reposting was when Vincent Bugliosi died in June 2015. I am reposting this March of 2022 to update the media in the post.)

I am re-posting this because Vincent Bugliosi just passed away. He was a legend in his field who wrote many good books. But even smart people say DUMB things.

INCORRECTLY DEFINING AGNOSTICISM

I was surprised in listening to Vincent Bugliosi in an interview about his book, Divinity of Doubt: The God Question. Surprised because considering his book on debunking pretty much every JFK conspiracy known to man, I would expect him to realize his fundamental mistake that taints his whole view.

So when I heard Mr. Bugliosi quote Gertrude Stein as part of his definition of agnosticism…..

“There ain’t no answer.
There ain’t gonna be any answer.
There never has been an answer.
There’s your answer.”

…. I immediately knew he was a second rate skeptic churning every old cliché over again for a new generation.

PROPERLY DEFINING “SOFT” & “HARD” AGNOSICISM

So here we should define for the layman what an agnostic is and why some say that there are two kinds… one being indistinguishable from an atheist.

✓ Atheism: The belief that there is no God. This is typically the conviction that there is no personal Creator of the universe, and no powerful, incorporeal, perfect being in heaven or anywhere else.

✓ Agnosticism: The state of not-knowing whether there is a God or not. The humble agnostic says that he doesn’t know whether there is a God. The less humble agnostic says that you don’t, either. The least humble agnostic thinks that we can’t ever really know.

Tom Morris, Philosophy for Dummies (Foster City, CA: IDG Books, 1999), 238.

Okay, most philosophy texts and dictionaries will at times make this distinction. Again, that there are two types of agnostics. A soft agnostic says: “I do not know. You may. Therefore I may want to dialogue because you may have information I do not.” A hard agnostic says: “I do not know, and neither can you.”

But what about what Vincent Bugliosi said about the impossibility of knowing?

Does he know this possibility?

Let me show how his position is self refuting, incoherent, and illogical. This comes from my “chapter” via my “book” on Reincarnation vs. the Laws of Logic (references at linked chapter):

….To begin, pantheists claim that God is unknowable because it [God] is above and beyond human logic. In other words, we are told that we cannot intellectually comprehend God because he is beyond all understanding. However, this is nonsensical and self-defeating statement. Why? “Because the very act of claiming that God is beyond logic is a logical statement about God.” Also, to say that we cannot know or comprehend God, as do the agnostics, is to say that we know God. How? I will answer this with a response to agnostic claims by the associate professor of philosophy and government at the University of Texas at Austin:

To say that we cannot know anything about God is to say something about God; it is to say that if there is a God, he is unknowable. But in that case, he is not entirely unknowable, for the agnostic certainly thinks that we can know one thing about him: That nothing else can be known about him. Unfortunately, the position that we can know exactly one thing about God – his unknowability in all respects except this – is equally unsupportable, for why should this one thing be an exception? How could we know that any possible God would be of such a nature that nothing else could be known about him? On what basis could we rule out his knowability in all other respects but this one? The very attempt to justify the claim confutes it, for the agnostic would have to know a great many things about God in order to know he that couldn’t know anything else about him.

Although not the time nor place to explain the law of non-contradiction, for those who do not know, a brief perusal may be warranted. The law of non-contradiction is simply this: “‘A’ cannot be both ‘non-A’ and ‘A’ at the same time.” In the words of Professor J. P. Moreland:

When a statement fails to satisfy itself (i.e., to conform to its own criteria of validity or acceptability), it is self-refuting…. Consider some examples. “I cannot say a word in English” is self-refuting when uttered in English. “I do not exist” is self-refuting, for one must exist to utter it. The claim “there are no truths” is self-refuting. If it is false, then it is false. But is it is true, then it is false as well, for in that case there would be no truths, including the statement itself.

You see, Mr. Bugliosi is denying that you know, which means he REALLY KNOWS… which is self defeating.

You can see in this mock conversation how this woks out:

Teacher: “Welcome, students. This is the first day of class, and so I want to lay down some ground rules. First, since no one person has the truth, you should be open-minded to the opinions of your fellow students. Second… Elizabeth, do you have a question?”

Elizabeth: “Yes I do. If nobody has the truth, isn’t that a good reason for me not to listen to my fellow students? After all, if nobody has the truth, why should I waste my time listening to other people and their opinions? What’s the point? Only if somebody has the truth does it make sense to be open-minded. Don’t you agree?”

Teacher: “No, I don’t. Are you claiming to know the truth? Isn’t that a bit arrogant and dogmatic?”

Elizabeth: “Not at all. Rather I think it’s dogmatic, as well as arrogant, to assert that no single person on earth knows the truth. After all, have you met every single person in the world and quizzed them exhaustively? If not, how can you make such a claim? Also, I believe it is actually the opposite of arrogance to say that I will alter my opinions to fit the truth whenever and wherever I find it. And if I happen to think that I have good reason to believe I do know truth and would like to share it with you, why wouldn’t you listen to me? Why would you automatically discredit my opinion before it is even uttered? I thought we were supposed to listen to everyone’s opinion.”

Teacher: “This should prove to be an interesting semester.”

Another Student: “(blurts out) Ain’t that the truth.” (Students laugh)

Francis Beckwith & Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Planted in Mid-Air (Baker Book House; 1998), p. 74.

Do you see? After listening to Bugliosi himself do you understand where he went wrong? If you are a person who thinks like Bugliosi, may I posit that you are just as dogmatic as the most dogmatic atheist.

BONUS: RELATIVISM



Agnostic (Bart Erhman) Debates Atheist About Jesus’ Existence

Non-Christian agnostic historian, Bart Ehrman, is invited on to an atheist radio show apparantly in the hope that he will argue against Jesus being an historical person. However, much to this atheist surprise and dissapointment Ehrman argues why no serious historian (including himself) denies Jesus’ historicity!

Einstein Was Not an Atheist OR Agnostic ~ Max Jammer

The following comes from the best biographical look at Einstein and religion:

[p. 90>] When the Northwestern Regional Conference of the American Association of Theological Schools convened at the Theological Seminary in Princeton in May 1939, one of the few nontheologians invited to address the meeting was Einstein. The mimeographed transcripts of his lecture car­ried the title “The Goal.” 34 Einstein began his talk by recall­ing that in the last century it was widely held that scientific knowledge and religious belief conflict with each other and that the prevailing trend “among advanced minds” was to replace belief with knowledge. The function of education was therefore confined to the development of rational thinking and knowing. Although “the aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capable… knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations.” Scientific thinking alone, Einstein con­tinued, cannot lead us to the ultimate and fundamental purpose of our existence.

To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the indi­vidual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the au­thority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be [p. 91>] stated and justified merely by reason, one can only an­swer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful tradi­tions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal, which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives us a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations.

Compared with his 1930 essay, this talk had a much more reserved tone and its ideas were acceptable even to orthodox theologians. It should be noted, however, that the topic of Einstein’s 1930 essay differs distinctly from that of his 1939 talk; while the former dealt mainly with the origin and nature of religious beliefs, the latter deals almost ex­clusively with questions related to the purpose and goal of our life, a subject on which agreement is more easily attain­able than on the nature of religion. In fact, Einstein’s 1939 talk was sympathetically received by almost all partici­pants of the conference.

This was probably one of the reasons that Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, a prominent religious leader, president of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and member of the organizing committee of the “Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion,” scheduled to convene on Sep-[p. 92>] tember 9-11, 1940, at the Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, thought it appropriate to invite Ein­stein to address this conference as well. Einstein agreed to write an essay, “Science and Religion,” to be read at this conference.35 Neither he nor Finkelstein anticipated the se­rious controversies and harsh acrimonies that this essay would evoke.

Einstein agreed, not only out of respect for a distin­guished leader of liberal Judaism but also because of his well-known magnanimity to respond to all requests he thought to be ingenuous. Thus, in 1936 when Phyllis Wright, a sixth-grade student in the Sunday school of the Riverside Church in New York, asked whether scientists pray and, if they do, what they pray for, he gave a reply that can serve as an introduction to his essay for the 1940 conference.

“Scientific research is based on the assumption that all events, including the actions of mankind, are deter­mined by the laws of nature. Therefore, a research sci­entist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, that is, by a wish ad­dressed to a supernatural Being. However, we have to admit that our actual knowledge of these laws is only an incomplete piece of work (unvollkommenes Stuck-werk), so that ultimately the belief in the existence of fundamental all-embracing laws also rests on a sort of faith. All the same, this faith has been largely justified [p. 93>] by the success of science. On the other hand, however, everyone who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. The pursuit of sci­ence leads therefore to a religious feeling of a special kind, which differs essentially from the religiosity of more naive people. With friendly greetings, your Al­bert Einstein.”36

EINSTEIN’S CONTRIBUTION to the 1940 conference was pre­sented to an audience of over five hundred participants. The article begins with the question of what, precisely, we understand by science and by religion. Science, says Ein­stein, can easily be defined as “the attempt at the posterior reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualiza­tion”; but to define religion is a much more difficult task. We can reach this definition by inquiring first what charac­terizes the aspirations of a religious person. “A person who is religiously enlightened,” says Einstein, “appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated him­self from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoc­cupied with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings because of their superpersonal value.” What is im­portant, according to Einstein, is “the force of this super-personal content…. regardless of whether any attempt is made to unite this content with a divine Being.” From these presuppositions, Einstein then derived the definition [p. 94>] of religion as “the age-old endeavor of mankind to become clearly and completely conscious of these values and goals and constantly to strengthen and extend their effect.”

These definitions enabled Einstein to repeat what he had already said in his essay, “The Goal,” namely, that because science ascertains only what is, but not what should be, no conflict between the two can exist. Only intervention on the part of religion into the realm of science—if, for exam­ple, a religious community insists on the absolute truthful­ness of all statements in the Bible—can give rise to conflict, as has been the case in the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo or Darwin. Even though the realms of religion and science are distinctly marked off from each other, strong reciprocal relations exist between the two. Though religion determines the goal, science, in its broad­est sense, shows the means for attaining this goal. How­ever, “science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion…. I cannot conceive of a gen­uine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

Had this statement been the final conclusion, the article probably would have been acclaimed by all the partici­pants. But Einstein qualified his statements about the com­patibility of religion and science “with reference to the ac­tual content of historical religions.” “This qualification,” he continued, “has to do with the concept of God.” He then mentioned, though more briefly than in his 1930 essay, his theory of the three stages in the evolution of religion and the concept of God and declared that “the main source of [p. 95>] the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God.” Al­though he conceded that the doctrine of a personal God could never be refuted, because such a doctrine could al­ways take refuge where science has not yet been able to gain a foothold, he called such a procedure 

not only unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowl­edge. In this sense I believe that the priest must be­come a teacher if he wishes to do justice to his lofty educational mission.

Some background is necessary to assess correctly the re­action that this article—in particular, its denial of a per­sonal God—evoked among the theologians attending the conference and the wider public. Einstein did not antici­pate that the denial of a personal God would be misin­terpreted as the denial of God. That such a misinterpre­tation was not uncommon can be gathered from a 1945 encyclopedia of religion that defined the term “atheism” as “the denial that there exists a being corresponding to some particular definition of god; frequently, but unfortunately, [p. 96>] used to denote the denial of God as personal.”37 That Ein­stein was neither an atheist nor an agnostic—certainly not in the usual sense of the term coined in 1869 by Thomas Henry Huxley—follows not only from Einstein’s above-mentioned statements concerning his cosmic religion but also from statements made by all those with whom he had intimate discussions about his religious conviction. Thus, for example, his close friend Max Born once remarked, “he [Einstein] had no belief in the Church, but did not think that religious faith was a sign of stupidity, nor unbelief a sign of intelligence.”38 David Ben-Gurion—who visited Einstein in Princeton a year before inviting him to become President of Israel—recalled that, when discussing reli­gion, “even he [Einstein], with his great formula about en­ergy and mass, agreed that there must be something be­hind the energy.”39 With respect to religion, Ben-Gurion and Einstein had much in common. Like Einstein, Ben-Gurion was an ardent admirer of Spinoza. He also de­clared his belief “that there must be a being, intangible, indefinable, even unimaginable, but something infinitely superior to all we know and are capable of conceiving,”40 a belief not much different from Einstein’s belief in the im­personal God of his cosmic religion.

At a charity dinner in New York, Einstein explicitly disso­ciated himself from atheism when he spoke with the Ger­man anti-Nazi diplomat and author Hubertus zu Lowen-[p. 97>]stein: “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 support of such views.”41

Footnotes

[34] A. Einstein, “The Goal,” lecture delivered 19 May 1939, Ideas and Opinions, pp. 41-44; Out of My Later Years, pp. 25-28.

[35] A. Einstein, “Science and Religion,” Transactions of the First Confer­ence on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Demo­cratic Way of Life (New York, 1941); Ideas and Opinions, pp. 44-49; Out of My Later Years, pp. 28-33; Nature 146 (1940): 605-607.

[36] Einstein to P. Wright, 24 January 1936. Einstein Archive, reel 52-337.

[37] V. Ferm, ed., An Encyclopedia of Religion (Philosophical Library, New York, 1945), p. 44.

[38] Born—Einstein Letters p. 203.

[39] M. Pearlman, Ben Gurion Looks Back (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1965), p. 217.

[40] Ibid., p. 216.

[41] Prinz Hubertus zu Lowenstein, Towards the Further Shore (Victor Gollancz, London, 1968), p. 156.

Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 90-97.