In developing the theory of
relativity, Einstein realized that the
equations led to the conclusion that the universe had a beginning. He didn’t like the
idea of a beginning, because he thought
one would have to conclude that the
universe was created by God. So, he
added a cosmological constant to the
equation to attempt to get rid of the beginning. He said this was one of the
worst mistakes of his life. Of course, the
results of Edwin Hubble confirmed that the
universe was expanding and had a
beginning at some point in the past. So,
Einstein became a deist - a believer in an impersonal creator God: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals
himself in the orderly harmony of what
exists, not in a God who concerns himself
with fates and actions of human beings.” However, it would also seem that Einstein
was not an atheist, since he also
complained about being put into that camp: “In view of such harmony in the cosmos
which I, with my limited human mind, am
able to recognize, there are yet people who
say there is no God. But what really makes
me angry is that they quote me for the
support of such views.” “I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can
call myself a pantheist. We are in the
position of a little child entering a huge
library filled with books in many languages.
The child knows someone must have
written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in
which they are written. The child dimly
suspects a mysterious order in the
arrangements of the books, but doesn’t
know what it is. That, it seems to me, is
the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”
www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/quotes_einstein.html
I think a short answer is that he was offended
To be called an atheist, he believed in a creator,
and did not believe in an afterlife.
True. Also, the problem of infinite regress. Any “beginning” initiated by an entity in a timeless paradigm won’t be able to summon the moment of the beginning, since the reference to the beginning cannot be achieved, as the past to that entity is infinite (no finite time implies no beginning and therefore no reference to any “moment of the present”).
This is partly why the Cyclic Model of the Universe was proposed, and recent revelations in Dark Energy and Dark Matter are its strongest support-points.