Einstein CentennialFeature
The Dice Letter at 100: How One Sentence Shaped a Century of Physics
A century ago, Einstein told Max Born that "the Old One" does not throw dice, starting an argument that reshaped physics and is still not finished.
THE QUESTION LIBRARY EINSTEIN CENTENNIAL
What did Einstein actually believe about God?
Einstein’s own letters and essays show a man who rejected a personal God, refused the atheist label, and felt deep awe at the order of nature.
THE SHORT ANSWER
Einstein did not believe in a personal God who answers prayers or judges people. In a 1929 telegram, he said he believed in “Spinoza’s God,” a God seen in the lawful order of nature. Yet he refused to call himself an atheist, and he described a deep, “cosmic” religious feeling of awe. His famous line about dice was about physics, not faith. His own writings show what he believed; whether he was right is beyond science.
- In a 1929 telegram to a New York rabbi, Einstein said he believed in Spinoza’s God, not a God who cares about people’s fates and actions.
- In a 1954 letter, he called the word God “the expression and product of human weaknesses.”
- He still rejected the atheist label, and he called himself religious only in the sense of awe at nature’s order.
- His 1926 remark that “He” is not playing at dice was about quantum physics, and that letter turns 100 on December 4, 2026.
About this picture
Albert Einstein during a lecture in Vienna in 1921, photographed by Ferdinand Schmutzer. Eight years later, a New York rabbi cabled him a blunt question: “Do you believe in God?”
WHERE THE EVIDENCE STANDS
How sure are we?
- Einstein did not believe in a personal God who rewards, punishes or answers prayers.His 1929 telegram (JTA, April 28, 1929), his 1930 essay “Religion and Science,” his 1940 paper in Nature and his 1954 letter to Eric Gutkind all say so in his own words.
- Einstein called himself an atheist.He told the interviewer George Sylvester Viereck “I’m not an atheist” (as quoted by biographer Walter Isaacson), and in a 1941 letter he criticized “fanatical atheists.”
- “God does not play dice” was a statement about religious faith.The December 4, 1926 letter to Max Born is about quantum mechanics and speaks of “the Old One” and “He” (Physics Today translation).
- The best single label for Einstein’s view is pantheist, deist or agnostic.Isaacson calls his view a deism; Einstein told Viereck, “I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist”; Einstein scholar Galina Weinstein calls it “a kind of spiritual naturalism.” Scholars still disagree.
- Spinoza’s God, or any God, exists.Einstein himself wrote in 1940 that science could never truly refute a personal God who steps into natural events. His letters show what he believed, not whether it is true.
WHAT WE DON’T KNOW YET
Einstein never wrote one full, final statement of his beliefs. Some famous lines come from interviews that others reported, and translations of his German differ. Historians still debate which label fits him best.
WHAT WOULD CHANGE THIS ANSWER
A newly found letter could add detail, or show that a famous quote was reported wrongly. The core answer would change only if new papers showed he privately believed in a personal God. That would clash with what he wrote for 25 years.
Einstein did not believe in a personal God. By that he meant a God who hears prayers, rewards and punishes, or steps into human lives. He said so many times, from 1929 until a year before he died. But he was not a simple atheist either. He turned down that label. He spoke instead of a deep awe at the order of the universe, and he was willing to call that feeling religious.
People ask because both sides quote him. Believers point to his line that “science without religion is lame.” Skeptics point to a 1954 letter that calls the word God a product of human weakness. Both quotes are real. Read alone, each one can mislead. The question also has a birthday this year. On December 4, 2026, his most famous line about God and dice turns 100.
The clearest answer came by telegram. In 1929, a New York rabbi, Herbert S. Goldstein, cabled him: “Do you believe in God?” Einstein wrote back that he believed in “Spinoza’s God.” That God, he said, shows himself “in the orderly harmony of what exists.” It is not a God who cares about the fates and actions of human beings. Baruch Spinoza was a thinker from Amsterdam in the 1600s. He wrote of “God or Nature,” as if the two were one.
So Einstein’s “God” was not a person watching over us. It was his word for the deep order of nature, and for the wonder he felt when he tried to understand it. He called that wonder “cosmic religious feeling.” He believed it drove the best science.
His letters and essays survive, so what he believed is Established. Which single word fits him best, such as pantheist, deist or agnostic, is still debated. Whether his view of God is true is a question science cannot settle.
THE LONG ANSWER
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WHERE THE AUTHOR’S RESEARCH TOUCHES THIS
Author’s hypothesis. Ricardo Maldonado, author of GOD PLAYS DICE, borrowed Einstein’s dice image for his book’s title. In the Introduction, he calls the title “a playful act of rebellion, not a religious claim.” In the book, “God” is shorthand for the deep laws of nature. That is close to how Einstein himself often used the word. In Chapter 10, the author notes that Einstein’s remark has been repeated so often that “it has turned into a slogan.” He argues that randomness does not mean chaos: a die can be random and still obey strict rules.
The book’s central idea, HD-Blast, is the Author’s hypothesis that our Big Bang may be the aftershock of an event in a higher-dimensional space. It is a proposal about how our universe began. Einstein never said or predicted it. The book calls the idea falsifiable, which means specific evidence could prove it wrong. The Introduction also says the book does not claim to have proved anything about God.
Keep asking
Next on the path “Can faith and science share a table?” · step 5 of 8
Can you accept evolution and keep your faith?
Yes.
See this path: Can faith and science share a table?
New here?
God Plays Dice answers big questions in plain words, with sources and one of six honest labels.
Words worth knowing (6)
- Personal God
- A God pictured as a person who has plans, hears prayers, and rewards or punishes people. Einstein rejected this idea.
- Spinoza’s God
- The philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s idea of “God or Nature”: God as nature and its laws, with no human-like purposes and no miracles.
- Cosmic religious feeling
- Einstein’s 1930 name for awe at the order of the universe, a feeling with no dogma and no God pictured as a human.
- Pantheism
- The view that God and the universe are one and the same.
- Deism
- Belief in a God who made the world and its laws but does not step into events.
- Agnostic
- Someone who holds that we do not, or cannot, know whether God exists.
Sources & further reading
(10) · Checked Sep 26, 2026
- Albert Einstein to Max Born 1 (letter of 4 December 1926, with Born’s commentary) ↗Physics Today (AIP), 2005; translated by Irene Born Newton-JohnFull letter: quantum mechanics “is not yet the real thing”; “the secret of the ‘Old One’”; “I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice.” Born calls the verdict “a hard blow.” From The Born–Einstein Letters (Macmillan, 2005), p. 88.
- Professor Einstein Declares His Faith in Spinoza’s God ↗Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 28, 1929Cardinal O’Connell’s attack on relativity as leading toward atheism; the rabbi’s cabled question “Do you believe in God?”; Einstein’s German reply and translation: Spinoza’s God “who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns Himself with fates and actions of human beings.” (The JTA page spells the rabbi “Hebert G. Goldstein”; Isaacson and Weinstein give Herbert S. Goldstein.)
- Religion and Science (New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1930), reprint ↗Albert Einstein; reprinted in Ideas and Opinions (1954); copy hosted by EPFLThree stages: religion of fear, moral religion, “cosmic religious feeling,” which knows “no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image”; Democritus, Francis of Assisi and Spinoza “closely akin”; ethics based on sympathy, education and social ties, “no religious basis is necessary”; “the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.”
- An Essay by Einstein: The World As I See It ↗American Institute of Physics, Center for History of PhysicsShortened text of the 1930 credo, first published in Forum and Century vol. 84 and in Living Philosophies (1931): “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious”; “In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.”
- Science and Religion (Albert Einstein) ↗Nature 146, 605–607 (November 9, 1940)Nature page shows the opening paragraph; the full text was read in the Ideas and Opinions reprint (archived sacred-texts.com transcription, section II, from Science, Philosophy and Religion, A Symposium, 1941), whose opening matches Nature’s. Lines used: science “can only ascertain what is, but not what should be”; “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”; conflict “lies in this concept of a personal God”; teachers of religion should give up that doctrine; a personal God “could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science”; “profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence.”
- Einstein’s famous ‘God letter’ sold for a record-breaking $2.9 million ↗CNBC (2018), quoting Christie’s and APSold at Christie’s New York for $2,892,500 (estimate $1–1.5 million); dated January 3, 1954, a year before Einstein’s death; reply to Eric Gutkind’s book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt; Christie’s translation: “nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends”; “No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change anything about this.” Also checked: CNN (Dec. 5, 2018) and The Guardian (May 12, 2008), amended Feb. 8, 2023 because an earlier version included words in a quote from the letter “in error”; it also renders the 1926 line “He [God] does not throw dice.”
- Einstein & Faith (excerpt from Einstein: His Life and Universe) ↗TIME, April 5, 2007 (Walter Isaacson); pages 2 and 3 at -2,00.html and -3,00.htmlTelegram wording “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words.”; Cardinal William Henry O’Connell; Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein; the Viereck interview (“I’m not an atheist,” the child in a huge library, Jesus); Einstein “really angry” when quoted in support of there being no God; letter on “fanatical atheists”; Isaacson calls his faith a deism.
- Baruch Spinoza (Steven Nadler) ↗Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (revised 2023)Born 1632 in Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community; July 27, 1656 herem, the harshest ever pronounced by that community, never rescinded; died 1677; God or Nature (Deus sive Natura) acts for no ends; no miracles; talk of God’s purposes “an anthropomorphizing fiction”; Spinoza did not see worshipful awe as the right attitude, understanding was.
- How One Quiet Man Became Everyone’s Sage: The Spiritual Recasting of Einstein ↗Galina Weinstein (Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa), arXiv preprint (2025), not peer reviewedGod-references as rhetorical devices, “not theological affirmations”; Infeld’s “more often than a Catholic priest”; the 1929 telegram as Collected Papers vol. 16, Doc. 508; a 1941 letter (quoted from Max Jammer) on “fanatical atheists” and religious fanatics; Don Howard’s logos reading; quote books detach remarks from context; the Princeton inscription reportedly about Dayton Miller’s experiments; “spiritual naturalism”; the 1936 “miracle” of comprehensibility. Inscription itself confirmed by the Princetoniana Museum page on Fine (Jones) Hall.
- GOD PLAYS DICE, Volume OneRicardo MaldonadoIntroduction: the title is “a playful act of rebellion, not a religious claim”; God is shorthand for the deep laws of nature; not a book that claims to have proved anything about God; “a specific, falsifiable hypothesis about the Big Bang.” Chapter 10: Einstein’s rejection of chance “has turned into a slogan”; randomness does not mean chaos.
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