Einstein believed in Spinoza's conception of God as revealed through the lawful harmony of the natural world, not a God concerned with humanity. Spinoza viewed the universe as operating solely through natural laws without purpose or design, with God equivalent to Nature. Given this view of a noninterventionist God, Spinoza believed individuals and states had responsibility over their own fate. Einstein saw Spinoza as anticipating scientific developments and embracing freedom. While raised irreligiously, Einstein developed a deep religiousness by 12 that ended abruptly. He saw connections between science and religion but did not believe in a personal God, instead expressing admiration for the natural world's structure.

3. "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful
harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself
with the fate and the doings of mankind." Einstein

6. Spinoza posited "a
universe ruled only
by the cause and
effect of natural
laws, without
purpose or design."
The God of this
universe was a
noninterventionist
whose essence and
pervasiveness
might best be
described as
Nature...

7. Given God's noninterference policy,
Spinoza believed the modern state had
the responsibility of looking after the
common man, and the common man
had the responsibility of looking after
himself.
In all this, Spinoza saw freedom and
"anticipated later philosophical and
scientific developments by two and
sometimes three centuries."

8. “The word god is for me
nothing more than the
expression and product of
human weaknesses,

9. the Bible a
collection of
honorable, but still
primitive legends
which are
nevertheless pretty
childish,” he writes
in the 1954.

10. Einstein on religion and God:
I came — though the child
of entirely irreligious
(Jewish) parents — to a
deep religiousness, which,
however, reached an
abrupt end at the age of
twelve.

11. I do not think that it is necessarily the case that
science and religion are natural opposites. In
fact, I think that there is a very close
connection between the two. Further, I think
that science without religion is lame and,
conversely, that religion without science is
blind. Both are important and should work
hand-in-hand.

12. It was, of course, a lie what you read about my
religious convictions, a lie which is being
systematically repeated. 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.

13. He called his religion a "cosmic religious sense."

15. In The World As I See Einstein
wrote:
You will hardly find one
among the profounder sort of
scientific minds without a
peculiar religious feeling of
his own. But it is different
from the religion of the naïve
man.

16. For the latter God is a being from whose care
one hopes to benefit and whose punishment
one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to
that of a child for its father, a being to whom
one stands to some extent in a personal
relation, however deeply it may be tinged
with awe.

17. But the scientist is possessed by the sense of
universal causation. The future, to him, is
every whit as necessary and determined as the
past. There is nothing divine about morality, it
is a purely human affair. His religious feeling
takes the form of a rapturous amazement at
the harmony of natural law, which reveals an
intelligence of such superiority that, compared
with it, all the systematic thinking and acting
of human beings is an utterly insignificant
reflection.