From John Leslie’s review of Nobelist Steven Weinberg’s new book, To Explain the World:
Experience has shown that seeking goodness, purpose, signs of a divine plan, is totally unprofitable
Despite fine tuning of the universe?
All the same, Weinberg gives a rule for what scientists should avoid. Experience has, he thinks, shown that seeking goodness, purpose, signs of a divine plan, is totally unprofitable. It doesn’t mean that he rejects such statements as “Hearts exist so that blood can be pumped”. They are useful if understood in the way Darwin suggested. God didn’t design hearts benevolently, or give living things “an inherent tendency to improve” that would have “ruled out any unification of biology with physical science”. What Darwin instead proposed was that “evolution acts through the appearance of inheritable variations, with favorable variations no more likely than unfavorable ones, but with the variations that improve the chances of survival and reproduction being the ones that are likely to spread”. Strategies such as those that view nature as created by Goodness are “precisely what scientists have had to outgrow”. “Arab scientists in their golden age were not doing Islamic science. They were doing science.”
Weinberg insists that expert scientists can be religious. He goes so far as to declare that science “has nothing to say one way or the other about the existence of God or an afterlife” (perhaps an exaggeration, because – unless it permits miracles performed by God as a divine person, or maybe by God as the creative principle described by Plato – science does make an afterlife hard to believe in). Yet while joining the rest of us in saying that Galileo shouldn’t have been threatened with torture to force his Sun to behave biblically, Weinberg also thinks something controversial. Even, he thinks, when God is pictured very differently from the deity of biblical literalism who stopped the Sun moving for Joshua, belief in God remains a hindrance to understanding the universe. “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless”, he wrote in The First Three Minutes.
Some items, though, in To Explain the World could give comfort to believers. …
But, in the face of the utter ruin of Darwinism and its offspring, crackpot cosmology, at producing anything but nonsense, why are “believers” supposed to need to “take comfort”—or even care about anything that someone like Weinberg says?
Except for one thing. The biggest problem right now in the Western world is the rampant growth of authoritarian government based on metaphysical naturalism of the sort Weinberg espouses.
You know, “the debate is over,” and that kind of thing.
Make no mistake: They do mean that the debate (whatever it is about) is over. Evidence doesn’t matter any more.
So the big problem for us non-converts is now trundling their trash out of our lives. It’s a house to house job, and often messy.
Follow UD News at Twitter!