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Richard,
Einstein was rather vague about his concept (probably intentionally so). He certainly didn't identify God with the mechanical laws of physics as Alex does. Rather, he often alluded to a cosmic superpersonal intelligence behind it all.
Where he is often misunderstood in his theism is that he rejected a personal God that answers prayers and pays attention to human activities. He thought that this view was too anthropomorphic and childish.
Here's a few relevant Einstein quotes and comments on his views elaborated by Thomas Torrance at the Center of Theological Inquiry in his paper 'Reflections':
Count Kessler once said to him, "Professor! I hear that you are deeply religious." Calmly and with great dignity, Einstein replied, "Yes, you can call it that. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious." (Einstein quote)
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior Spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. The deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning Power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God." (Einstein quote)
"Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. The firm belief, which is bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind revealing himself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God, which may, therefore be described in common parlance as `pantheistic' (Spinoza)" (Einstein quote)
Einstein was often asked, "Do you believe in God?", to which he sometimes replied "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all being". "By God", Spinoza wrote at the very beginning of his Ethica, "I mean a being absolutely infinite-that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality". Proposition XV of the Ethica stated: "Whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived." (quoted verbatim from Thomas Torrance paper 'Reflections')
Einstein wrote to a child who asked him whether scientists prayed. Einstein replied as follows: "I have tried to respond to your question as simply as I could. Here is my answer. Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural Being. However, it must be admitted that our actual knowledge of these laws is only imperfect and fragmentary, so that, actually the belief in the existence of basic all-embracing laws in nature also rests on a sort of faith. All the same this faith has been largely justified so far by the success of scientific research. But, on the other hand, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive." (Einstein quote)
"The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those elementary universal laws from which the cosmos can be built up by deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them...There is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles; that is what Leibnitz described so happily as a 'preestablished harmony.'" (Einstein quote)
Einstein said "God does not play dice". This seems to have been suggested by one of the propositions of Spinoza's Ethics, "In the nature of things nothing accidental is granted, but all things are determined by the necessity of the divine nature for existing and working in a certain way. In short, there is nothing accidental in nature." (quoted verbatim from Thomas Torrance paper 'Reflections')
"In insisting that 'God does not play dice', Einstein was accused, for example by Max Born, of being a hardline determinist, but as Wolfgang Pauli showed, writing to Born in Edinburgh from Princeton, 47 Einstein was not a determinist but a realist, with the conviction that, in line with Clerk Maxwellian field theory and general relativity theory, nature is governed by profound levels of intelligible connection that cannot be expressed in the crude terms of classical causality and traditional mathematics. He was convinced that the deeper forms of intelligibility being brought to light in relativity and quantum theory cannot be understood in terms of the classical notions of causality–they required what he called Übercausalität–supercausality. And this called for "an entirely new kind of mathematical thinking", not least in unified field theory–that was a kind of mathematics he did not even know, but which someone must find." (quoted verbatim from Thomas Torrance paper 'Reflections')
"The scientist is activated by a wonder and awe before the mysterious comprehensibility of the universe which is yet finally beyond his grasp". (Einstein quote)
"The way that Einstein so often connected the notion of Order with God reflects the fact that order is one of the ultimate beliefs which, while rational, cannot be proved–for we have to assume order either in trying to prove or disprove it–all rational order points beyond itself to an ultimate ground of order. That is why Einstein could not be an atheist, if only because apart from God the transcendent ground of all order, there could be no rational thought, let alone any science." (quoted verbatim from Thomas Torrance paper 'Reflections')
"To introduce the question Why? back into the inner structure of natural and physical science was to reject the rationalistic dualism of the Enlightenment between the how and the why to which are to be traced the damaging splits in western culture, but it was also to point to God as the ultimate ground of all rational order and the transcendent reason for all the laws of nature. What a startling light that throws upon what Einstein himself really meant by "God"! It is only from God that we can understand the why or the fundamental purpose of the created universe." (quoted verbatim from Thomas Torrance paper 'Reflections')
I hope this helps.
Warm regards, Harv
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