Steven Weinberg

On 4 August 1993 a Nobel physicist from Texas sat before a Senate committee and tried to save the Superconducting Super Collider, a giant particle accelerator planned near Waxahachie. "We are not really after the particles," he told the senators; "we are after the principles."¹² Then the chairman, Senator J. Bennett Johnston, asked about the Big Bang. Some Americans, he said, even some senators, were reluctant to ask the question, because they saw religious significance in the theory:

I personally think it is entirely significant—I mean, entirely consistent with Genesis, if that is your concern³⁴

Steven Weinberg answered that nearly all working astronomers, cosmologists and particle physicists had come round to it:

some of us with some reluctance, because in fact I used to prefer a different theory myself—to the feeling that the experimental evidence for this is overwhelming, and we would be dopes not to take it as true.⁵⁶

The collider never received the money to be finished, and it was cancelled.⁷ This chapter asks how a physicist with no faith on record to lose came to argue, in public and in print, that the universe has no purpose built into it, that religion had done more harm than good, and finally that living without God has real costs and can still be done well.

The Bronx and Cornell

He was born in New York City on 3 May 1933, the only child of Frederick Weinberg, a court stenographer, and Eva Weinberg, born Israel, a homemaker.⁸⁹ His parents were Jewish; the press in 1979 called him the grandson of Jewish immigrants.¹⁰ His father encouraged his early interest in science, and a cousin's discarded chemistry set started it.¹¹ At the Bronx High School of Science his classmates included Sheldon Glashow, with whom he would one day share a Nobel Prize, and by fifteen or sixteen he had settled on theoretical physics.¹² He was the first in his family to go to college.¹³ No source read for this chapter shows any religious practice in his childhood, any Hebrew schooling or bar mitzvah, or any belief to lose.¹⁴ On the belief timeline, this is the formation.

He went to Cornell, where he met Louise Goldwasser; they married in 1954, the year he graduated.¹⁵¹⁶ At Cornell, he wrote in 2008, he knew the theologian Will Herberg, who worried about his lack of religious faith. Herberg warned him that people must worship God, or they would start worshipping each other. Weinberg thought Herberg right about the danger but proposed a different cure: to get out of the habit of worshipping anything.¹⁷¹⁸ (In 2008 he first called Herberg a rabbi, then corrected himself: Herberg was a theologian and a religious figure, but not a rabbi.¹⁸) It is the earliest sign of his unbelief in the record, dated only by "when I was an undergraduate," and the timeline marks it as the beginning of his unbelief.

A model of leptons

After a year in Copenhagen and a doctorate at Princeton in 1957 he taught at Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard and MIT.¹⁹²⁰ In 1967 he published "A Model of Leptons," the paper for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 with Glashow and Abdus Salam.²¹ In 1982 he moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where Louise had joined the law faculty two years before.²²

"Pointless"

In November 1973 he gave a talk at the opening of Harvard's new science centre, and an editor urged him to make it a book. What, he asked himself, could be more interesting than the problem of Genesis?²³ The First Three Minutes was written in 1976 and published in 1977.²⁴ Near its end he described looking down from an aeroplane at 30,000 feet, over Wyoming, on an earth that looked soft and comfortable, and then reminded himself that it was a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe.²⁵²⁶ People found it almost irresistible, he wrote, to believe they had a special relation to the universe; but human life might be the more or less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents. And then came the sentence for which the book is remembered: the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.²⁷²⁶

It is often quoted without its next paragraph. Men and women, he went on, are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants; and the effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.²⁸²⁹ This is the first part of his declaration on the timeline. It is a conclusion about the cosmos, not yet an attack on faith.

The collider

He testified for the Super Collider twice, in April 1987 and in August 1993.³⁰ It was there, in 1993, that he admitted he had once preferred another theory to the Big Bang. Wikipedia and a later critic attribute to him the remark that the steady-state theory was the most attractive because it least resembled Genesis, but no primary source for that sentence has been found; the Senate record shows only that he once preferred "a different theory."³¹⁶

Not a constructive dialogue

In April 1999 the American Association for the Advancement of Science held a conference on science and religion in Washington, paid for largely by the John Templeton Foundation; accounts differ on its name.³² Weinberg told it that he did not want a constructive dialogue with religion; the two, he thought, should remain at odds.³³³⁴ To his old friend John Polkinghorne, a physicist who had become an Anglican priest, he said that he was in the more vulnerable position, since he could be proved wrong. Polkinghorne answered that physics might tell us music is vibrations, but could not do justice to being moved by great music.³⁵³⁶³⁷

That October he printed the talk as "A Designer Universe?" in the New York Review of Books.³⁸ He asked whether the universe showed signs of a designer with a special concern for human life, and said that he did not see them. He listed his own reasons: he had seen his mother die painfully of cancer, his father's personality destroyed by Alzheimer's disease, and scores of his cousins murdered in the Holocaust. The signs of a benevolent designer, he wrote, were pretty well hidden.³⁹⁴⁰ He did not believe in a cosmic designer, he said, and he was taking the trouble to argue about it because he thought that on balance the moral influence of religion had been awful. He named pogroms, crusades and jihads, the murderers of Sadat, Rabin and Gandhi, and the long ease of Christianity with slavery.⁴¹⁴² It was here, in a passage on slavery, that he wrote the sentence that has been quoted ever since: that with or without religion good people can behave well and bad people can do evil, but that for good people to do evil, that takes religion.⁴³⁴⁴ The spoken version reported in April had different wording, and the line "Religion is an insult to human dignity," often attached to it, has not been found in any source read for this chapter.

He ended with the remark that one of the great achievements of science had 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, and that he was all in favour of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive one.⁴⁵⁴⁶⁴⁷ That year the Freedom From Religion Foundation gave him its first "Emperor Has No Clothes Award."⁴⁸ This is the second part of that declaration.

"No script"

In an interview for the Nobel Foundation in December 2001 he was asked what he had meant by "pointless." He meant, he said, that there is no cosmic plan for us; we are not actors in a drama written with us in the starring role. It was not an entirely happy view of human life; it was a tragic view. But if there is no point in nature, he said, we can make a point for ourselves. For Lear and Othello the tragedy is in Shakespeare's script; our tragedy, he said, is that there is no script.⁴⁹⁵⁰⁵¹ The American Humanist Association named him its Humanist of the Year in 2002.⁵²

He could be harder than that. In a BBC series of 2004, as one newspaper reported it, he called science corrosive of religious belief, "and it's a good thing too."⁵³⁵⁴ A stronger remark, that the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief, is attributed to a conference of 2006, but its primary source has not been found, and it is not, as some obituaries said, in The First Three Minutes.⁵⁵

Living without God

In September 2008 he published "Without God" in the New York Review. He did not mean, he wrote, to argue that the decline of belief was a good thing, although he thought it was, nor to talk anyone out of religion, as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens had tried to do. He wrote for those who had already lost their religious beliefs, or who might be losing them, about how to live without God.⁵⁶ He named the costs. There was the religious poetry of Herbert, Vaughan and Hopkins, which no unbeliever could fully share, and, above all, the promise of an afterlife: as belief weakens, more and more people know that after death there is nothing, and that, he wrote, is the thing that makes cowards of us all.⁵⁷⁵⁸ The remedies were the pleasures of science, the ordinary pleasures of life, and art. Morality did not depend on faith; there were plenty of people without it who lived exemplary moral lives, as, he added, he did himself.⁵⁹⁵⁸ Living without God was not easy, he concluded, but there was a certain honour, or perhaps only a grim satisfaction, in facing our condition without despair and without wishful thinking, "with good humor, but without God."⁶⁰⁵⁸

The letters that followed were from believers. A professor of religion said that his lack of engagement with theology had blinded him to the Christian themes of the plays he admired; a retired Presbyterian minister held that the human spirit's quest beyond itself was not dying out; and an Episcopal priest wrote that, thanks to ancient texts and rituals, he did not fear the nothing of death.⁶¹⁶²⁶³ Weinberg granted that one correspondent's poetry showed religious inspiration and that he liked it, and he wrote of the priest that he had gained, perhaps through his life in the church, a courage and a sweetness of temper that Weinberg could only envy and admire.⁶⁴⁶⁵ On his timeline, this is the revision: not a change of mind, but an unbeliever counting what unbelief costs and conceding what belief can give.

His friend Freeman Dyson, reviewing his essays in 2010, found in them a streak of militant atheism, and yet saw in Weinberg's hope of a final theory of physics a faith of its own, which Dyson respected without sharing.⁶⁶⁶⁷⁶⁸ After Weinberg's death, the intelligent-design advocate Stephen Meyer argued that his own discoveries, a universe with a beginning and finely tuned from the start, did not imply a purposeless cosmos.⁶⁹⁷⁰

He died in a hospital in Austin on 23 July 2021, aged eighty-eight.⁷¹ A colleague remembered him saying, in a conversation about religion, that he knew many atheists with very high moral standards, for instance himself; it is an anecdote, and the nearest thing on record to his own use of the word.⁷²

Did his unbelief change shape?

There was no faith to lose, and no record of one. What changed was what he did with his unbelief. In 1977 it was a physicist's conclusion about the cosmos, softened at once by the grace of the effort to understand it. In 1999 it became a moral charge against religion, made with the evidence of his own family's deaths. In 2001 it was a tragedy without a script, and in 2008 a careful account of what living without God costs, written with respect for a priest's courage. He never seems to have called himself an atheist in print; he described the position instead, and he kept describing it more fully.

Richard Feynman, the physicist whose line about the universe as too large a stage for God to watch man's struggle Weinberg quoted in 1999 and 2008, has his own chapter in this book.