In February I announced the publication of physicist Steven Weinberg’s new book on the history of science, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, and included two excerpts he sent us to give an idea of the contents.
Now, for one day only, the Times Literary Supplement is offering a free look at its long (and laudatory) review of Weinberg’s book, a review written by Canadian philosopher John Leslie.
I’m only a few pages into Steve’s book, which is good but not by any means a light read. Do not read it before bedtime, as it demands full attention. Leslie, however, gives it high marks:
To Explain the World, [Weinberg’s] twelfth book, tells of the long, hard struggle to arrive at modern science, which started to take something like its present form only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book is a magnificent contribution to the history and philosophy of science.
Leslie’s review is really a mini-lesson in itself in the history of science, and is worth reading just for that. It falls down in only one bit, though, and that bit is about religion. First, Leslie seems to take issue with Weinberg’s famous statement, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” That statement, of course, has angered believers, who regularly mistake it as saying that there is no point to life. What Weinberg meant, of course, was that the more we understand about the universe, the less evidence we see for supernatural “design” or any meaning conferred by a deity. I’m sure Weinberg doesn’t see his own life as pointless!
Leslie apparently doesn’t like the pointlessness, and so he has to offer what comfort he can to religious people. Why, oh why, must philosophers regularly affirm, after religion takes a drubbing, “Look, believers, I’ve found you some consolation!” Michael Ruse, for example, regularly engages in this kind of shenanigan. And so Leslie assures worried religious readers that perhaps God lives in the interstices of our understanding, that is, in The Gaps:
Some items, though, in To Explain the World could give comfort to believers. Weinberg is certain that science will never explain every single law of nature. It can explain any one law only by pointing at some other, more fundamental law, as when we show why gases expand when heated: it’s that hotter particles strike their prison walls more violently. Further, he offers no answer to why the cosmos exists. Could God be the reason both for this and for nature’s laws? In the television series Closer to Truth, in episodes initially broadcast in 2008 and 2009, Weinberg stated: “Whatever our final theory of physics, we will be left facing an irreducible mystery. For perhaps there could have been nothing at all. Not even empty space, but just absolutely nothing. If you believe God is the creator, well, why is God that way? The religious person is left with a mystery which is no less than the mystery with which science leaves us”. Some philosophers, however, view the mystery of God as something on which they can throw light.
I don’t see how a believer can find much consolation in that. That would be the case only if you find consolation in the fact that science may never explain everything, as is certainly the case. Then, if you’re a diehard goddist, you can simply declare our igorance as God. As the great atheist Robert G. Ingersoll said, in one of my favorite quotes (which heads a section in Faith vs. Fact):
“No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”
Further, Weinberg raises a question that forever eludes the theist: Why is God that way? (And “where did he/she/it come from?”). For the theist, God is just a label for ignorance, for it has no predictive value at all; if it did, we’d be able to infer evolution from scriptures alone. And different religions would converge on the same understanding of God, which of course they don’t.
Finally, maybe, as Leslie avers, “some philosophers view the mystery of God as something on which they can throw light,” but I don’t know what light has been shed, and believe me, I’ve looked.
And, at the very end, Leslie has a Theistic Alternative to Weinberg’s solution of the mystery of why “dark energy” is so weak:
Why is the dark energy so very weak, a property without which the universe would be utterly hostile to life? Weinberg suggests a solution. It is that “what we call the expanding universe is just a small part of a much larger ‘multiverse,’ containing many expanding parts like the one we observe, and that the constants of nature take different values in different parts of the multiverse”; “only a tiny minority of the subuniverses in the multiverse would have physical constants that allow the evolution of life”, but “of course any scientists will find themselves in a subuniverse belonging to this minority”.
That’s to say, what could be at work is Observational Selection, the fact that nobody can make observations inside subuniverses whose dark energies are too hostile. Still, we might instead be seeing Divine Selection of a life-friendly physical world.
What the bloody hell is “divine selection”? Does Leslie mean “divine creation”? To paraphrase Big Daddy, “Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of the numinous in this room?”
Perhaps it’s unfair to dwell on Leslie’s peroration about religion, which after all is only two paragraphs in a long review, but he chose to end this way, and I think the ending paints not a consoling picture for theists, but a bleak one. If you have to look for your God in science’s ignorance—indeed, to rejoice in that ignorance, as Leslie seems to—you’re in bad shape indeed!
Anyway, you have until tomorrow to read Leslie’s review. (By the way, I’m not sure whether Leslie’s a believer; a few places—one is here—suggest that he’s a pantheist.
h/t: Mark
