American Scientist

I AM A PART OF INFINITY: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein. Kieran Fox. 336 pp. Basic Books, 2025. $30.

Many physicists have achieved fame within their fields. A few have achieved fame among the general public. But none has ever risen to the kind of multi-hyphenate celebrity status enjoyed by Albert Einstein. Even now, 70 years after his death, Einstein retains a unique status as an icon of physics-cosmology-imagination-humanism-pacifism-spiritualism authority.

The last of those isms is the focal point of I Am a Part of Infinity, Kieran Fox’s exploration of the rich belief system behind Einstein’s pat-sounding epigrams such as “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” It’s an ambitious undertaking, especially considering that Fox is neither a physicist nor a theologian, but a neuroscientist and physician by training, with a strong interest in meditation, psychedelics, and spiritual practice. He is currently a research track resident in psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. That unusual background helps explain his equally unusual, concept-driven approach, which largely avoids the conventional structures of both science history and personal biography.

Einstein’s ideas about God and religion began to attract widespread attention almost as soon as he rocketed to international fame in 1919, after a high-profile study of a solar eclipse that year confirmed the validity of general relativity. A century later, many of his pithy quotes about science and God remain embedded in pop culture. In 1921, Einstein ridiculed the possibility that other evidence might contradict general relativity, insisting that “the Lord is subtle, but malicious he is not”; that line became the title of a renowned Einstein biography. Later that decade, Einstein argued against statistical models of quantum physics, famously citing divine authority when he claimed that “I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.”

In I Am a Part of Infinity, Fox strives to make sense of those views and to distill them into a coherent spiritual philosophy. Einstein became increasingly overt in developing and sharing his thoughts about science and God, starting in the 1930s and continuing up to the end of his life in 1955. Most notably, Einstein penned a 1930 essay in The New York Times, titled “Religion and Science,” where he outlined what he saw as the three phases of human faith. The first phase was fear-based religion; the second, moral religion; the third and highest was “cosmic religion,” a sense of connection to the rational universe and a deep desire to understand it. All three phases still existed widely in the world, in Einstein’s view, meaning that anyone could succumb to the pit of fear, but also that anyone could aspire to the summit of ecstatic reason. Fox boils down the concept of cosmic religion to the aphorism that gives his book its title: “I am a part of infinity.”

But the key to understanding the book is found in the telltale word “journey” in its subtitle. All his life, Einstein was a restless explorer. With the development of the special theory of relativity in 1905, he merged the concepts of space and time; with general relativity a decade later, he added gravity into the mix. He then spent decades in a fruitless search of an even grander theory that could describe all the forces of nature with a single set of equations. Often, Einstein’s intellectual instincts led him to question the meaning of his own equations. He doubted the physical reality of gravitational waves and black holes, even though both are described by the laws of general relativity. After Einstein uncovered the basic principles of quantum physics, he relentlessly sought to overthrow the standard interpretation of quantum theory and preserve his notions of cause and effect.

In his religious conceptions, too, Einstein was constantly testing new ideas and reconsidering old ones. It’s easy enough to identify what he did not believe: Einstein was outspoken in his disdain for the concept of a punitive God that responds to prayer, and he dismissed the Bible as a set of “primitive legends.” As for what Einstein did believe, Fox makes a naked confession early in his book: “What Einstein did believe still remains to be discovered.” I Am a Part of Infinity does not describe Einstein’s definitive spirituality for an excellent reason: His views were complex, ever shifting, and sometimes self-contradictory. Although Einstein did not consider himself traditionally Jewish, his process of continuous investigation and reconsideration intriguingly resembles the methodology of Talmudic scholars.

Fox mostly ignores the famous Einstein quotes, insisting (implausibly) that “the spiritual side of history’s greatest physicist has been all but forgotten.” In the process, he misses an opportunity to address a major misconception: The meme-friendly image of Einstein as a pious scientific saint is sharply at odds with his actual religious views, which ran much closer to pantheism than to mainstream Judaism or Christianity.

Einstein was eloquent in describing the feeling and motivations behind his beloved cosmic religion, but he struggled to define it and to articulate how to apply it in everyday life. Fox predictably struggles with these issues as well. Einstein called himself an “agnostic” and renounced the concept of a personal God, but he also spoke about God in deliberately personal terms and included “religious geniuses of all ages”—from the authors of the Tao Te Ching to Mohandas Ghandi—within his tent of cosmic religion. At one point the reader can practically hear Fox throw up his hands in frustration, sputtering that some of Einstein’s comments “border on the incoherent.”

Despite the book's considerable breadth, there are some surprising gaps in Fox’s discussion of other scientists who influenced Einstein’s spiritual notions. For instance, Fox acknowledges the eccentric religious speculations of physicist Wolfgang Pauli, but ignores the work of mathematician Emmy Noether, whose investigations of symmetry and conservation laws were foundational to Einstein’s concept of scientific unity. I Am a Part of Infinity also lapses into simplistic thinking when Fox compares Einstein’s views with those of traditional faiths. Early on, Fox breezily claims that whereas Einstein sought out unity, “mainstream religions have always been enamored with dualism.” A lot of theologians and religious leaders would surely dispute that statement, which brushes aside the entire legacy of Jewish monotheism, to name one example.

Perhaps the biggest omission here is that Fox sidesteps the ways that people experience and practice religion in their lives. Einstein spoke out about cosmic religion in the hope that more people would be able to let go of the destructive effects of religions rooted in fear and retribution. “The human race finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking,” he said. Fox likewise seeks to inspire a “radical alteration of perspective” and an “inner metamorphosis” in the reader. But religion is not merely a tool for finding personal meaning. It is also a source of group identity, cultural connections, shared rituals, storytelling, artistic inspiration, and moral teachings. In the end, Fox concedes that a sense of the divine infinite “can only be experienced on an individual level,” which may explain why cosmic religion shows no sign of displacing the more “primal” (to use Einstein’s term) versions of religious belief.

The tentative nature of Fox’s plea for blending science and spirituality is a flaw, but it’s also what makes his book a compelling read. We all, in one way or another, spend our lives searching for bridges between ourselves and the world around us. We all look for ways to break down the barriers between the individual and the whole. Einstein’s journey (and Fox’s as well) therefore inevitably echoes our own. And, as happens to all of us, Einstein died with his work incomplete, his journey unfinished.

Einstein never succeeded in replacing quantum mechanics with a more absolute, deterministic description of physics. He never realized his unified field theory. He even had to soften his pacifism, one of his moral absolutes, in the face of Nazi atrocities in his German homeland. Nevertheless, he remained steadfast in his belief that we can find meaning and morality through the study of nature, without any need for an angry creator showing us the way. Fox admiringly quotes Einstein’s challenge to us all: “My God may not be your idea of God, but one thing I know of my God—he makes me a humanitarian.”