After summarizing Weinberg's considerable contributions to physics and our understanding of the universe, Meyer suggests that Weinberg's metaphysics somewhat less brilliant than his physics:
His death also marks the twilight of an increasingly dated view of the relationship between science and religion.... Weinberg wrote many popular books about physics in which he often asserted that scientific advance had undermined belief in God – and, consequently, any ultimate meaning for human existence.Meyer goes on to discuss how such considerations have led a number of prominent scientists and thinkers to conclude that there must be a creator and that this creator must transcend space, time and matter.
The First Three Minutes, his most popular book published in 1977, famously concluded: “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”
Nevertheless, many such religious skeptics have yet to recognize the most important reason to reject science-based atheistic polemics: The most relevant scientific discoveries of the last century simply do not support atheism or materialism. Instead, they point in a decidedly different direction.
In The First Three Minutes, Weinberg described in detail the conditions of the universe just after the Big Bang. But he never attempted to explain what caused the Big Bang itself.
Nor could he. If the physical universe of matter, energy, space and time had a beginning – as observational astronomy and theoretical physics have increasing suggested – it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of an adequate physical or materialistic cause for the origin of the universe.
After all, it was matter and energy that first came into existence at the Big Bang. Before that, no matter or energy – no physics – would have yet existed that could have caused the universe to begin.
Indeed, the only way to avoid that conclusion is to posit that the universe just popped into existence uncaused, a leap of faith and credulity in comparison to which belief in a transcendent creator seems almost axiomatic.
It's interesting that Weinberg's scientific beliefs were often strongly shaped by his aversion to theism. Meyer tells us that the inference to a creator who caused the Big Bang initially repelled Weinberg (and many others) from accepting the Big Bang, opting instead for the spatio-temporally infinite universe entailed by the Steady State theory.
Meyer states that before Weinberg eventually succumbed to the evidence for the Big Bang he embraced the Steady State theory because, in Weinberg's words, “the steady state is philosophically the most attractive theory because it least resembles the account given in Genesis.”
This is a very unscientific reason for a scientist to embrace a theory. After all, if Young Earth Creationists are susceptible to criticism for sinning against science by allowing their view of Genesis to inform their science, why is it not also a sin against science for men like Weinberg to allow their view of Genesis to inform their science?
Weinberg is correct, though, about the implications of the Big Bang. Here's Meyer:
Fellow Nobel laureate and physicist Arno Penzias – whose discovery of the “cosmic background radiation” helped kindle Weinberg’s interest in Big Bang cosmology – noted the obvious connection between the Big Bang and the concept of divine creation. As he argued, “the best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole.”Weinberg's own work led him to discover some of the astonishing fine-tuning of the universe, but once again he sought other explanations to account for this remarkable feature of the cosmos and to avoid the implication that it's the product of a Designer. Meyer again:
To explain such extreme “fine tuning” without recourse to a transcendent “fine-tuner,” Weinberg favored the postulation of a multiplicity of other universes, an idea he acknowledged as speculative. The “multiverse” concept portrays our universe as the outcome of a grand lottery in which some universe-generating mechanism spits out trillions and trillions of universes – so many that our universe with its improbable combination of life-conducive factors would eventually have to arise.Meyer concludes his column with this:
Yet, multiverse advocates overlook an obvious problem. All such proposals posit universe generating mechanisms that themselves require prior unexplained fine-tuning – thus, taking us back to the need for an ultimate fine-tuner.
On his passing, Scientific American’s tribute to Weinberg described how scientifically literate people need to learn “to live in Steven Weinberg’s pointless universe.”
Yet Weinberg’s own research built upon, or helped to make, two key scientific discoveries – the universe had a beginning and has been finely-tuned from the beginning – that do not imply a purposeless cosmos.
Arguably, they point, instead, to a purposeful creator behind it all.
