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>“Einstein offers scant consolation to either party in this debate. His cosmic religion and distant deistic God fits neither the agenda of religious believers or that of tribal atheists.

This is wrong. Spinoza's god is not deistic god, transcendent being. Spinoza's god is "a dynamic nature in action", or substance. Closer to pantheism than deism. The problem arises because Einstein renounced atheism because he never considered his denial of a personal God as a denial of God. Einstein also said that "Mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all." and it helps to clarify why he did reject atheist label.

>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 arrangement 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. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism, but admire even more his contribution to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, and not two separate things.

G. S. Viereck, Glimpses of the Great (Macauley, New York, 1930), quoted by D. Brian, Einstein—A Life, p. 186.