In a letter written in 1950, Albert Einstein described to a religious teacher Martha Munk what religion meant in relation to the nature of existence of god. Martha Munk had asked Einstein whether he thought it was possible ‘for a modern scientist to reconcile the idea of the creation of the world by God, a higher power, with his scientific knowledge.’
The letter, written from Brooklyn, New York, has been put for sale with the US autograph dealer The Raab Collection. The bidding price starts at $125,000 or over ₹1.02 Crore.
The letter written by Einstein, widely regarded as the father of Modern Physics, was acquired from Munk’s descendants and will be put out on auction.
What did Einstein say on question of ‘creation of world by God’?
In an answer to Munk’s question, Einstein said: “As long as the stories in the Bible had been taken literally, it was obvious what kind of faith was expected from the readers.”
Einstein added that upon a different interpretation of the Bible, it remains unclear if God can be thought of as a person analogous to humans.
“If you are however to interpret the Bible symbolically, it is not clear anymore whether God is in fact to be thought of as a person, which is somehow analogous to humans,” Einstein wrote.
“In that case it is difficult to assess what remains of the faith in its original sense. I think, however, that the person who is more or less trained in scientific thinking is alien to the religious creation of the cosmos, because he applies the standard of causal conditionality to everything.”
When Einstein wrote this letter, he had been a US citizen for a decade. The father of modern physics had fled Germany shortly after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.
The scientist initially lived in Belgium and then spent six weeks in Britain before moving to the US.
Also watch | Albert Einstein relativity theory notes sold for a record 13 million
Einstein discovered that mass and energy are different forms of the same thing and expressed this in the neat little formula E=mc2. Later, in what he described as “the greatest satisfaction of my life” — the theory of general relativity proved that energy and mass distort space and time.
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