Albert Ein­stein endeav­ored to express his view of God as forth­right­ly as pos­si­ble to a pub­lic eager to know where he stood in the pop­u­lar con­flict between sci­ence and reli­gion. In 1936, a sixth-grade girl named Phyl­lis wrote him a let­ter on behalf of her Sun­day School class. “We have brought up the ques­tion,” she wrote, “Do sci­en­tists pray? It began by ask­ing whether we could believe in both sci­ence and reli­gion.” Einstein’s reply is some­what equiv­o­cal. He is clear enough in stat­ing that a sci­en­tif­ic fideli­ty to the “laws of nature” means that “a sci­en­tist can­not be inclined to believe that the course of events can be influ­enced by prayer, that is, by a super­nat­u­ral­ly man­i­fest­ed wish.” This would seem to set­tle the ques­tion. How­ev­er, he goes on to invoke the philoso­pher Spinoza’s god and dis­tin­guish between intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty and won­der, on the one hand, and a more pop­u­lar, super­nat­ur­al faith on the oth­er.

How­ev­er, we must con­cede that our actu­al knowl­edge of these forces is imper­fect, so that in the end the belief in the exis­tence of a final, ulti­mate spir­it rests on a kind of faith. Such belief remains wide­spread even with the cur­rent achieve­ments in sci­ence.

But also, every­one who is seri­ous­ly involved in the pur­suit of sci­ence becomes con­vinced that some spir­it is man­i­fest in the laws of the uni­verse, one that is vast­ly supe­ri­or to that of man. In this way the pur­suit of sci­ence leads to a reli­gious feel­ing of a spe­cial sort, which is sure­ly quite dif­fer­ent from the reli­gios­i­ty of some­one more naive.

This is prob­a­bly not the response that Phyl­lis and her class had hoped for, and they (or their teacher) may have tak­en offense at the descrip­tion of their faith as “naïve.” But Einstein’s care­ful reply also express­es a kind of sci­en­tif­ic awe that acknowl­edges the lim­its of rea­son and leads to a kind of sub­lime feel­ing that can legit­i­mate­ly be called “reli­gious” (much as Carl Sagan would do decades lat­er). This, I believe, is not a casu­al or cal­lous dis­missal of Phyllis’s faith, some­thing that so-called “New Athe­ists” are often accused of (just­ly or not). Instead it’s a con­sid­ered response in which the great physi­cist shares his own ver­sion of “faith”–his faith in Nature, or the “laws of the uni­verse,” which he con­cedes are “vast­ly supe­ri­or to man.” I think it’s a mov­ing exchange between two peo­ple who couldn’t be fur­ther apart in their under­stand­ing of the world, but who just may have found some small com­mon ground in con­sid­er­ing each other’s posi­tions for a moment.

Ein­stein’s cor­re­spon­dence comes to us via the always illu­mi­nat­ing Let­ters of Note

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Just yes­ter­day, I sat across from a fel­low wear­ing a t‑shirt embla­zoned with the image of a gun-wield­ing Jesus blow­ing away Charles Dar­win above the words “EVOLVE THIS!” At first I assumed he wore it to emphat­i­cal­ly sig­nal his belief that reli­gion, specif­i­cal­ly Chris­tian­i­ty, refutes sci­ence, specif­i­cal­ly bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion. Then, remem­ber­ing that Jesus prob­a­bly would­n’t have used a hand­gun even had they been avail­able in his day, I took the shirt as a mock­ery of the blunter vari­eties of cre­ation­ist rhetoric. Look­ing it up lat­er, I found out that the shirt comes from the movie Paul, so the wear­er prob­a­bly meant noth­ing more than to express his appre­ci­a­tion for what I under­stand to be one of 2011’s most under­rat­ed come­dies. Yet the ques­tion lingers: has sci­ence refut­ed reli­gion, or is it the oth­er way around? The inter­net age pro­vides us access to a vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed num­ber of these debates, although you’ll often search in vain for match­es of cogent, well-artic­u­lat­ed argu­ments. Just take a look at the sci­ence-reli­gion squab­bles cur­rent­ly roil­ing in YouTube com­ment sec­tions. Keep out of the com­ments, then, and stick to the videos, such as the debate above. In two hours com­pris­ing short seg­ments of argu­ment, rebut­tal, cross-exam­i­na­tion, and audi­ence ques­tions, the pro­gram pits Skep­tic mag­a­zine pub­lish­er Michael Sher­mer and Cal­tech cos­mol­o­gist Sean Car­roll against MIT physi­cist Ian Hutchin­son and King’s Col­lege pres­i­dent Dinesh D’Souza. In an unusu­al­ly order­ly, well-dis­ci­plined debate of this type, all four weigh in on one cen­tral propo­si­tion: “Has sci­ence refut­ed reli­gion?” Car­roll says that sci­ence, a “real­i­ty check” on human bias­es, offers the only expla­na­tions that work. Hutchin­son blames not sci­ence but some­thing he calls “sci­en­tism,” a belief in the absolute suprema­cy of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge, for a vari­ety of social and intel­lec­tu­al ills. Sher­mer describes reli­gious belief as an evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly deter­mined char­ac­ter­is­tic of human beings, and an increas­ing­ly use­less one at that. D’Souza upbraids sci­ence for fail­ing not only to find answers to ques­tions about human pur­pose and life’s mean­ing, but for throw­ing up its hands when pre­sent­ed them. All this offers a good bit of human dra­ma as well, but in good fun; when I inter­viewed Sher­mer, a habitué of such debates, he men­tioned often enjoy­ing tak­ing his osten­si­bly sworn intel­lec­tu­al ene­mies to beers and piz­za after­ward. Relat­ed Con­tent: Richard Dawkins & John Lennox Debate Sci­ence & Athe­ism Does God Exist? Christo­pher Hitchens Debates Chris­t­ian Philoso­pher William Lane Craig Ani­mat­ed: Stephen Fry & Ann Wid­de­combe Debate the Catholic Church Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.