A letter written by the famed Jewish scientist Albert Einstein has been advertised for sale by the Raab Collection in Pennsylvania, according to a press release published on July 19 by the Collection.
The letter, which Einstein had written on April 11, 1950, was addressed to a group of Jewish students in the United States. The letter was written in response to Martha Munk, the wife of well-known German Rabbi Michael L. Munk.
In Martha Munk’s initial letter, sent in March 1950, she wrote, “On behalf of the students of a series of lectures on religion, I would like to ask you whether you think that it is possible for a modern scientist to reconcile the idea of the creation of the world by God, a higher power, with his scientific knowledge.”
In the letter, Einstein claims that as a scientist, he cannot believe the Torah’s creation story because science “replaces and supersedes” the ideology.
Einstein responded to Musk by writing “The person who is more or less trained in scientific thinking is alien to the religious creation (in the original sense) of the cosmos because he applies the standard of causal conditionality to everything.”
If you are however to interpret the Bible symbolically (metaphorically), it is not clear anymore whether God is in fact to be thought of as a person.”
How much is the letter worth?
The letter is valued to be work $125,000 USD (approximately 451,500 NIS) but other letters from the great scientist have fetched $3 million USD at auction.
“The feeling that I get when I see something like this, which is so personally and so scientifically evocative of the great 20th-century debate, from the pen of Albert Einstein, is just pure excitement,” said Nathan Raab, president of the Raab Collection, according to Religion News.
“In a sense, I see the letters as complementing each other,” said Raab. “Once people learn we have this, I anticipate great interest.”
“I think it’s really helpful to think of these great thinkers confronting these great issues and put it into context in what we believe,” said Raab. “You can appreciate the effort to better understand and the scholarly effort, and at the same time not agree.”