I love irony and to hear Stephen Weinberg tell us the “we know better” is a gem. In his book “The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next” physicist Lee Smolin singled out Weinberg’s inversion of the scientific method to try to avoid the fact that this now dominant theory of how the universe is put together cannot produce any results that are testable under conventional scientific means. Weinberg has declared (I don’t have the exact quote with me) that string theory is so obviously true that we need to change the way we do and prove theories. I can see no better example of a religious statement then this. Perhaps we need a corollary to the quote attributed to G. K. Chesterton, When a Man stops believing in God he doesn¹t then believe in nothing, he believes anything that says when man stops believing in God he invents his own substitute religion. For Weinberg it is String Theory, for Dawkins it is Darwin. Whatever the intrinsic truth of either theory, it has now become something more transcendent then mere science. Perhaps Dawkins is on to something when he claims that the false belief in God is an evolutionary event that is part of our genetic makeup. I would praise him for honesty if he were merely to claim that evolution has become his transcendent religion that satisfies this biological mandate.
