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But why are “believers” supposed to need “comfort”?

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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.

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Comments
Unprofitable? Christian belief , for many of the original scientists, was a guiding light. in fact they justified what they did in figuring things as coming from a desogn concept in the universe. It can be figured out because its a design. not the roll of the device. I think Weinberg is Jewish. Judaism was most probably irrelevent to science. However Christianity was very important. I suspect also Islam was a little motivating in the old Islamic world when they were accomplishing things relatively. Look for design and one is looking for accuracy in how the universe works. I think things have stalled in all branches of science because of not seeing design. Its relative. I think we should be further ahead.Robert Byers
May 22, 2015
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ppolish - very witty indeed. :-)Silver Asiatic
May 22, 2015
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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?
Good point. Weinberg is blinded by scientism and sees everything through that narrow filter. I admire you for reading all of that and pulling out the choice quotes. Thank you.
Weinberg stated: “...The religious person is left with a mystery which is no less than the mystery with which science leaves us”.
Weinberg feels confident to speak for the religious person's quality and certainty of knowledge. He tries to claim that religion leaves as much mystery as science does. Aside from being entirely wrong on that point, it's the arrogance of scientists like this to speak about religion, which they take no effort to understand. To understand religious truths, one really has to 'practice' the religion. It requires faith and prayer - it's not merely an intellectual exercise that can be judged on academic terms.Silver Asiatic
May 22, 2015
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Atheists can take comfort in the Pope's proclamation that good Atheists can go to Christian Heaven. "That would be Hell" snaps the Atheist. I suppose it would be. Smart Pope:)ppolish
May 22, 2015
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