Our hero

Without God

By Steven Weinberg
The New York Review of Books, September 25, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

A tension between science and religion has been gradually weakening serious religious belief, especially in the West, where science has been most advanced. There are at least four sources of tension:

1 Religion originally gained much of its strength from the observation of mysterious phenomena that seemed to require the intervention of some divine being. But as time passed more and more of these mysteries have been explained in purely natural ways. We have not observed anything that seems to require supernatural intervention for its explanation. There are some today who cling to the remaining gaps in our understanding as evidence for God. But as more and more of these gaps are filled in, their position gives an impression of desperation.

2 These explanations have cast increasing doubt on the special role of man as created by God to play a starring part in a great cosmic drama. The discovery that humans arose from earlier animals through natural selection acting on random heritable variations is the one that continues most to disturb religious conservatives. Both brain activity and behavior are in the same world of objective phenomena, and I know of no obstacle to their being integrated in a scientific theory.

3 Around 1100, the Sufi philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali argued against the very idea of laws of nature, on the grounds that any such law would put God's hands in chains. I wish I knew enough to judge how great was the impact on Islam of his rejection of science. At any rate, science in Muslim countries went into a decline in the century or two after al-Ghazzali. A recent survey of science in Islamic countries found just three areas in which the Islamic world produced excellent science: desalination, falconry, and camel breeding.

4 Traditional religions generally rely on authority, such as a prophet or a pope or an imam, or a body of sacred writings. Scientists rely on authorities of a very different sort. If I want to understand some fine point about the general theory of relativity, I probably would not look up the original papers of Einstein, because today any good graduate student understands general relativity better than Einstein did. Heroes in science are not infallible prophets.

Religious belief is only one aspect of the religious life. For many people, the important thing about their religion is not a set of beliefs but a host of other things. But I wonder how long religion can last when it isn't about anything external to human beings.

For a physicist, it is a great joy to learn how we can use beautiful mathematics to understand the real world. But we know that we will never get to the bottom of things. Worse, the worldview of science is rather chilling. One thing that helps is humor. There are the ordinary pleasures of life. There are also the pleasures brought to us by the high arts.

I do not think we have to worry that giving up religion will lead to a moral decline. Belief in an omnipotent omniscient creator of the world does not in itself have any moral implications.

Steven Weinberg is Jack S. Josey-Welch Foundation Chair in Science and Regental Professor and Director of the Theory Research Group at the University of Texas at Austin. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979.
 

AR  Weinberg deserves immortality not only for his electroweak work but also for
The First Three Minutes.