This refers to essentially the same thing as the Principle of Sufficient Reason, namely the ability of human beings to receive comprehensible messages about something that is unknowable in its infinity. Theologians call this principle ‘Revelation’ and study it in a sub-discipline called Fundamental Theology. This is one interpretation of what Enlightenment philosophers have called the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It supplies what human beings need to be able to investigate it. It is here that Einstein seems to make his theological presumption: the universe wants, or at least allows, itself to be known. So Einstein’s epistemological stance in the first instance implies an inherent uncertainty about the world, and with that a requirement for scientific humility.

And even language itself is superpersonal, that is beyond the capacity of individual human beings to comprehend entirely much less control. Words have no logical foundation except in other words.

Even more fundamentally, they must be expressed in language. They first must be perceived by limited human sense capabilities, even capabilities enhanced by technology. They are unknowable for what they are in themselves. In line with Kantian epistemology, these objects, these things, that Einstein refers to are literally everything there is in the universe. And Païs reports him as saying in his later years: “Science without epistemology is-in so far as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled.” The phrase has explicit philosophical import - how we may connect words to things that are not words underlies all 0f human inquiry. Perhaps his most informative was the statement: “A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation.” The phrase ‘superpersonal objects’ is important - not supernatural, or spiritual, or divine, one notices.

Quips about God and dice aside, his scientific ethos can be associated with a theology as nuanced as the quote used as the title of Païs biography: “Subtle is the Lord but malicious He is not.”Įinstein made only a few explicit comments about religion. Yet I am impressed by his intuitive understanding of the subject and its relevance to his scientific work. Although he had a lifelong interest in philosophy, Einstein had a limited background in the subject, mainly Kant and Plato.

Subtle Is the Lord by Abraham Pais