As an aside, I think Einstein's religious attitudes are underreported and understudied. There are a couple great sections in The World as I See it [1]: > I as

As an aside, I think Einstein's religious attitudes are underreported and understudied. There are a couple great sections in The World as I See it [1]: > I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research. > A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man > I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. > I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. Here's a longer quote that is a little more substantive: > there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. Indications of this cosmic religious sense can be found even on earlier levels of development—for example, in the Psalms of David and in the Prophets. The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism, as, in particular, Schopenhauer's magnificent essays have shown us. The religious geniuses of all times have been distinguished by this cosmic religious sense, which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man's image. Consequently there cannot be a church whose chief doctrines are based on the cosmic religious experience. It comes about, therefore, that we find precisely among the heretics of all ages men who were inspired by this highest religious experience; often they appeared to their contemporaries as atheists, but sometimes also as saints. This is the conception of Mysticism I've tried to describe a bit in the past [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_I_See_It_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_I_See_It_(book) [2] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/what-is-mysticism https://superbowl.substack.com/p/what-is-mysticism