Hassabis is coy when asked if he believes in God. “I do feel there’s mystery in the universe,” he says. “I wouldn’t say it’s like traditional God.” He says that Albert Einstein believed in “the God of Spinoza, and maybe I’d give a similar sort of answer.” Baruch Spinoza was a seventeenth-century philosopher who proposed that God was effectively nature and everything that existed, rather than a separate being. It was a pantheistic view. “Spinoza thinks of nature as the embodiment of whatever God is,” Hassabis says. “So doing science is exploring that mystery.”
