An extremely rare letter written by legendary physicist Albert Einstein on the creation of the universe is going on sale for the very first time. It is being sold by US autograph dealer The Raab Collection and is valued at $125,000. Written on April 11, 1950, the letter was penned in German to the wife of a well-known rabbi and religious studies teacher, Mrs. Martha Munk, in which he debunked the Biblical creation story of the universe and implied that God could not have created it. In the letter, Einstein shares his opinion that a scientist cannot believe in the Torah’s creation story of Genesis, claiming science “replaces and supersedes” such religious notions.
The letter was written by the father of modern physics in response to one sent by Mrs. Munk asking a question on behalf of a group of Jewish students in America. Sent in late March of 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.”
“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,” Einstein responded in the letter. “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.” The letter was written from Brooklyn, New York, a decade after Einstein had become a US citizen, having left Germany in 1933 shortly after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party started persecuting the Jews.
According to a statement by the Raab Collection, the letter was acquired from descendants of Mrs. Munk and has never been sold publicly. “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. Back in 2018, a 1954 letter from Einstein addressed to philosopher Eric Gutkind, often referred to as the “God Letter,” was auctioned for a whopping $3 million. In that letter, Einstein penned his thoughts on God, the Bible, and Judaism.
