Albert Einstein’s “God Letter” for Sale for 1 Million Dollars

A letter written by Albert Einstein on his views and thoughts about God, religion and his search for the meaning of the inner world is going for sale in New York with the cost above $1 million.

The letter was written in 1954 a year before the world famous physicist died. The letter is written in German, where Albert Einstein writes to his German philosopher friend Eric Gutkind from Princeton in New Jersey.

The scientist, best known for his theory of relativity writes, “The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change anything about this”.

The one and half page letter will up for sale on 4rth December and according to auction house Christie, the letter it is going to fetch between $1 million and $1.5 million. The letter was previously offered at an auction in the year 2008, which was bought by a private collector for $404,000.

According to Peter Klarnet, a book and manuscript specialist at the auction house Christie, the letter “is one of the definitive statements in the religion vs science debate”.

Einstein who was forced to flee Germany after Adolf Hitler came to power, but he never exclude Judaism from his critique, as he writes to Gutkind, “For me the unadulterated Jewish religion is, like all other religions, an incarnation of primitive superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and in whose mentality I feel profoundly anchored, still for me does not have any different kind of dignity from all other peoples. As far as my experience goes, they are in fact no better than other human groups, even if they are protected from the worst excesses by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot perceive anything 'chosen' about them”.

Though people are of the opinion that many important correspondences by the physicist are still away from the public domain. In October last year, a note that Albert Einstein had given to a courier in Tokyo, where he briefly described his theory on happy living was sold at auction in Jerusalem for $1.56 million.

Peter Klarnet also says, “While Einstein letters and manuscripts appear with some frequency at auction, those of great importance and significance do not. In the broadest sense, it is similar to Einstein's 1939 letter to (US president) F.D.R. warning of German efforts to build the bomb that we sold for $2 million in 2002”.

The letter, which was already on show in Shanghai, goes for the public view in New York from November 30 to December 3, before it was sold.