https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...-universe/
EXCERPT: Steven Weinberg, who died last week at the age of 88 [...] most famous (or perhaps infamous) statement can be found on the second-to-last page of his first popular book, The First Three Minutes, published in 1977. ... “The more the universe seems comprehensible,” he wrote, “the more it also seems pointless.”
[...] When I interviewed Weinberg in 2009, he told me about the long shadow cast by that one sentence on a “pointless” universe.
“I get a number of negative reactions to that statement,” he said. “Sometimes they take the form, ‘Well, why did you think it would have a point?’ Other times people say, ‘Well, this is outside the province of science, to decide whether it has a point or not.’ I agree with that. I don’t think that science can decide that there is no point; but it can certainly testify that it has failed to find one.”
And he specifically criticized what used to be called “natural theology”—the idea that, as the 19th Psalm suggests, one could learn about God by studying nature. Natural theology “is now discredited; we don’t see the hand of God in nature. What conclusions you draw from that is up to you.”
Although he never tried to hide his atheism [...] Weinberg was sympathetic to those who yearn for a more intimate conception of God. “I think a world governed by a creator who is concerned with human beings is in many ways much more attractive than the impersonal world governed by laws of nature that have to be stated mathematically; laws that have nothing in them that indicates any special connection with human life,” he told me.
To embrace science is to face the hardships of life—and death—without such comfort. “We’re going to die, and our loved ones are going to die, and it would be very nice to believe that that was not the end and that we would live beyond the grave and meet those we love again,” he said. “Living without God is not that easy. And I feel the appeal of religion in that sense.”
And religion deserves credit for giving us “requiem masses, gothic cathedrals, wonderful poetry. And we don’t have to give that up; we can still enjoy those things, as I do. But I think I would enjoy it more if I thought it was really about something; and I don’t. It’s just beautiful poetry, and beautiful buildings, and beautiful music—but it’s not about anything.”
The philosophy that Weinberg laid out in The First Three Minutes is now echoed in many popular physics books. In The Big Picture (2016), physicist Sean Carroll sees nothing to fear in an amoral universe. Our task, he writes, is “to make peace with a universe that doesn’t care what we do, and take pride in the fact that we care anyway.”
In a similar vein, string theorist Brian Greene is adamant that it’s physics all the way down. In Until the End of Time (2020) he writes: “Particles and fields. Physical laws and initial conditions. To the depth of reality we have so far plumbed, there is no evidence for anything else.”
[...] Weinberg saw science and religion as having nothing constructive to say to one another, a view shared by many (though certainly not all) of his colleagues. But the history of science could have unfolded differently. We can imagine generations of scientists standing with Newton, investigating nature as a path to understanding the mind of God. To be sure, some scientists think of their work in this way even today. ... But they are a minority... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: Steven Weinberg, who died last week at the age of 88 [...] most famous (or perhaps infamous) statement can be found on the second-to-last page of his first popular book, The First Three Minutes, published in 1977. ... “The more the universe seems comprehensible,” he wrote, “the more it also seems pointless.”
[...] When I interviewed Weinberg in 2009, he told me about the long shadow cast by that one sentence on a “pointless” universe.
“I get a number of negative reactions to that statement,” he said. “Sometimes they take the form, ‘Well, why did you think it would have a point?’ Other times people say, ‘Well, this is outside the province of science, to decide whether it has a point or not.’ I agree with that. I don’t think that science can decide that there is no point; but it can certainly testify that it has failed to find one.”
And he specifically criticized what used to be called “natural theology”—the idea that, as the 19th Psalm suggests, one could learn about God by studying nature. Natural theology “is now discredited; we don’t see the hand of God in nature. What conclusions you draw from that is up to you.”
Although he never tried to hide his atheism [...] Weinberg was sympathetic to those who yearn for a more intimate conception of God. “I think a world governed by a creator who is concerned with human beings is in many ways much more attractive than the impersonal world governed by laws of nature that have to be stated mathematically; laws that have nothing in them that indicates any special connection with human life,” he told me.
To embrace science is to face the hardships of life—and death—without such comfort. “We’re going to die, and our loved ones are going to die, and it would be very nice to believe that that was not the end and that we would live beyond the grave and meet those we love again,” he said. “Living without God is not that easy. And I feel the appeal of religion in that sense.”
And religion deserves credit for giving us “requiem masses, gothic cathedrals, wonderful poetry. And we don’t have to give that up; we can still enjoy those things, as I do. But I think I would enjoy it more if I thought it was really about something; and I don’t. It’s just beautiful poetry, and beautiful buildings, and beautiful music—but it’s not about anything.”
The philosophy that Weinberg laid out in The First Three Minutes is now echoed in many popular physics books. In The Big Picture (2016), physicist Sean Carroll sees nothing to fear in an amoral universe. Our task, he writes, is “to make peace with a universe that doesn’t care what we do, and take pride in the fact that we care anyway.”
In a similar vein, string theorist Brian Greene is adamant that it’s physics all the way down. In Until the End of Time (2020) he writes: “Particles and fields. Physical laws and initial conditions. To the depth of reality we have so far plumbed, there is no evidence for anything else.”
[...] Weinberg saw science and religion as having nothing constructive to say to one another, a view shared by many (though certainly not all) of his colleagues. But the history of science could have unfolded differently. We can imagine generations of scientists standing with Newton, investigating nature as a path to understanding the mind of God. To be sure, some scientists think of their work in this way even today. ... But they are a minority... (MORE - details)