Dr. Al Mohler (President of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, KY) writes on his blog of the letter written by Albert Einstein one year before his death to Eric Gutkind. In that letter, Einstein indicates his lack of faith in a personal God and affirms a vague belief in some unnamed “force” in the universe (and this before George Lucas’ Star Wars).

What are we to make of this? If Einstein rejected faith in God, what does that say about the validity of Christianity? It says nothing. Einstein was blessed with a tremendous intellect and a scientific mind. However, the necessary preconditions for true scientific inquiry and discovery lie within the Christian worldview. The God who made and sustains all things is the true absolute constant in the universe. He is the constant that assures the viability of E=mc2. I believe Einstein HAD a faith- in science. He looked for unifying answers to life in it. His discoveries are no less valuable, though the presuppositions by which he ordered his life are sorely lacking. As Cornelius Van Til put it, Einstein had to borrow Christian “capital” in order to transact business in the scientific realm.

Mohler offers this accurate critique of Evangelicalism’s fascination with celebrity that is evident in some who’ve claimed Einstein as a theist:

Evangelical Christians are prone to over-excitement when any famous person, living or dead, is claimed as a believer in God. This is not an attractive habit, and it often leads to intellectual embarrassment. The truth of the Gospel and the reality of the self-revealing God are not enhanced by vague expressions of a non-theistic spirituality or a sense of nothing more than an inexplicable sense of meaning in the cosmos.

Beyond this, the witness of an honest Christian is far more powerful than a listing of the rich, intelligent, and powerful who may or may not have believed in some kind of God. Attempts to claim Einstein for theism reveal a deep intellectual insecurity.

Our faith rests not on the affirmations of the bright and beautiful but on the self-revelation of the God “in whom we live and move and have our being ” (Acts 17:28). Apart from Him, we have no basis for scientific inquiry, rational thought, or life itself.