Steven Weinberg 1933-2021
[Steven Weinberg won the Nobel prize in physics. He taught at the University of Texas.]

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

“If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live.”

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”

“Religion is an insult to human dignity.”

“It was essential for the discovery of science that religious ideas be divorced from the study of nature.”

“Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil -- that takes religion.”
[Because each religion teaches a different distorted morality which often goes against common sense, as it cheapens the value of rewards and suffering in "this temporary life." In addition, every religious indoctrination produces a corrupt paradigm of responsible reasoning with too much wiggle room for wishful thinking, selfish credulity, and authoritarian devotion to the patently absurd.]

“We try hard in science to stamp out the influence of wishful thinking. Whereas so much of religious thought seems to be nothing else.”

“I think the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief; and anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

“Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.”

“Either by God you mean something definite or you don't mean something definite. If by God you mean a personality who is concerned about human beings, who did all this out of love for human beings, who watches us and who intervenes, then I would have to say in the first place how do you know, what makes you think so? And in the second place, is that really an explanation? If that's true, what explains that? Why is there such a God? It isn't the end of the chain of whys, it just is another step, and you have to take the step beyond that.”

“Once one invokes the supernatural, anything can be explained, and no explanation can be verified.”

“The "intelligent design" ideology being promoted today is not science--it is rather the abdication of science.”

“What is important in science (I leave philosophy to others) is not the solution of some popular scientific problems of one's own day, but understanding the world. In the course of this work, one finds out what sort of explanations are possible, and what sort of problems can lead to those explanations. The progress of science has been largely a matter of discovering what questions should be asked.”

“Again and again in preparing the lectures for my course I have been impressed with how different the work of science in past centuries was from the science of my own times. As the much quoted lines of a novel of L. P. Hartley put it, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."”

“One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.”

“All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically.”

“Many of the great world religions teach that God demands a particular faith and form of worship. It should not be surprising that SOME of the people who take these teachings seriously should sincerely regard these divine commands as incomparably more important than any merely secular virtues like tolerance or compassion or reason. Across Asia and Africa the forces of religious enthusiasm are gathering strength, and reason and tolerance are not safe even in the secular states of the West. The historian Huge Trevor-Roper has said that it was the spread of the spirit of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that finally ended the burning of the witches in Europe. We may need to rely again on the influence of science to preserve a sane world. It's not the certainty of the scientific knowledge that fits it for this role, but its uncertainty. Seeing scientists change their minds again and again about the matters that can be studied directly in laboratory experiments, how can one take seriously the claims of religious traditions or sacred writings to certain knowledge about matters beyond human experience.”

“It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out all the consequences of the laws we do know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can't always calculate their consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years.”

“I don't need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer.”

“Maybe at the very bottom of it... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who [is] obsessed with the degree to which people worship him and [is] anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him.”

“I have a friend -- or had a friend, now dead -- Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it... and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.”

“I want to show how difficult was the discovery of modern science, how far from obvious are its practices and standards.”

“My physicist colleagues have an overwhelming lack of interest in religion--they don't care enough about it to qualify as practicing atheists. They just regard it as a question that it is silly to raise.”