As exemplified in Sean Carroll’s new book, The Big Picture,
From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong:
The last chapter of the book begins with a description of Carroll’s early experiences in the Episcopal church, which he was quite fond of. I also had such experiences (I was an altar boy for several years at an Episcopal church, the American Cathedral in Paris). Unlike Carroll, I was never a believer, but just figured this was one of quite a few mystifying things that adults got up to, and that it seemed I had to go along with it until I got older. Thinking back to those days, I was struck by the realization that I recognized the tone and a lot of the content of Carroll’s writing. It very much sounds like a sermon, one evangelizing the good news not of Jesus, but of science, and is aiming for much the same effect: “I want to shiver with awe and wonder at the universe”.
My own point of view on all of this is that I just don’t think theoretical physicists have anything useful to tell the average person about meaning and morality, other than that it’s a mistake to search for it in our discoveries about physics. I don’t understand why we’re increasingly seeing texts promoting physics as inspiration for how to live (for another recent example among many see here). I’m with Steven Weinberg, and his famous line
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
Given that, the best advice to people who come to physicists looking for the meaning of life seems to me to politely tell them that they’re looking in the wrong place and asking the wrong person. More.
Carroll’s stuff may be nonsense but it is secular superstition – just the kind of nonsense that sells:
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See also: Multiverse cosmology: Assuming that evidence still matters, what does it say?
and
In search of a road to reality
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The reason they look to physics is because they hope to find in physics no evidence for Christ or God. In other words that its not so complicated it could not of created itself.
These tailless primates really think they understand how the universe works and so how it was created.
Until they know how it works/its essence its not reasonable they know how it was created.
A line of reasoning.
My two cents on this.
Woit’s position was a development of the Enlightenment as it emerged from Medieval Synthesis. It had to shake off the remnants of religion in order to operate freely. This is a metastable state of world history, and very difficult to perform. It requires almost a schizophrenia or a cut corpus callosum, to separate material from spiritual.
Carroll’s approach, which turns out to be the default state of human existence, is exemplified by Blaise Pascal’s dictum “There is a God-shaped vacuum in everyone that can only be filled by God himself.” So after the Enlightenment successfully shed religion, Carroll shows how it found a new one.
But both positions are wrong. Woit, because he is schizophrenic and self-lobotomized, and Carroll because he made up his own god. Which as just about everyone realizes, is synonymous with “idol”, and idols consume their creators, because the positive feedback of making something in your own image drives the worship to the rails. What we need, what Pascal understood, is a God who is not us, but outside us, and therefore not susceptible to idolatry.
And that is impossible to do–like not thinking of pink elephants–we only succeed when we aren’t trying. Maybe its time for Woit and Carroll to get reacquainted with the Reformation.
as to:
C S Lewis would counter:
Weinberg, an atheist, also honestly stated this:
of related note to this quote by Weinberg, “Because we can already think of mathematically consistent laws that don’t describe the world as we know it. And we will always be left with a question ‘why are the laws nature what they are rather than some other laws?”, is this:
also of note:
Moreover, when the agent causality of Theists is rightly let ‘back’ into the picture of physics, as the Christian founders of science originally envisioned, (instead of the self refuting ‘blind’ causality of atheists), then a empirically backed unification between Quantum Theory and Relativity is readily achieved by the resurrection of Christ from death:
also of note: