The last New York Review to arrive in my mailbox includes an essay, "Without God" (subscription required), by the physicist Steven Weinberg, whose book Facing Up I admire. He sets out four sources of conflict between science and religion.
(1) As time goes on, and science keeps accounting in convincing fashion for previously mysterious phenomena that were generally regarded as supernatural events, organized religion retreats and gathers up its defenses at a more remote location. By now it has retreated a long way and inhabits quite a remote outpost. The tendency is to begin suspecting that religion explains nothing.
(2) Science gives a different answer than does religion to the question, "What is a human being?" The idea of religion is that we are at the center of things, the "crown of creation" and the focus of God's interest in his world. But in fact we are not at the center of things. Why such a vast auditorium in order to stage, in one inconsequential corner, a human drama that appears, against the backdrop of geologic time, measly and fleeting? Not to mention that we are continuous with all the other creatures.
(3) Much religion denies the very concept of laws of nature, which are regarded as incompatible with God's sovereignty. In this view, the object of scientific inquiry is chimerical. What scientists call "nature" is just decisions God has made.
(4) Religion relies on authority. The basis of science is inquiry and evidence. Religion says, "This is true, for it is written" and "Thus and so, as the Church teaches." Science says, "Let us test it and see what we can find out." We are now back at (1) above, since, in the effort to understand, the scientific approach works better. It actually does find things out.
I'm on his side but Weinberg strikes some notes that to me seem too gravely portentous. "Living without God isn't easy," he concludes. He recommends, among other things, a sense of humor--though his essay betrays no sign of one. In that regard, at least, you might say he exhibits a Christian sensibility. You don't laugh your way through the New Testament, either. It's all very portentous. "I set before you life and death: choose life," says Jesus, who, though by doctrine "truly human," never laughs.
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