A Designer Universe?

Where religion did make a difference, it was more in support of slavery than in opposition to it. Arguments from scripture were used in Parliament to defend the slave trade. Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil--that takes religion.

In an e-mail message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science I learned that the aim of this conference is to have a constructive dialogue between science and religion. I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has 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 religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.

Steven Weinberg is professor of physics and holds the Josey Regental Chair of Science at the University of Texas at Austin. His research has spanned a broad range of topics in quantum field theory elementary particle physics, and cosmology, and he has been honored with numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize in Physics and the National Medal of Science. His books include the prizewinning The First Three Minutes, Gravitation and Cosmology, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, and most recently Dreams of a Final Theory. He is a CSICOP Fellow. This article was first published in The New York Review of Books, October 21, 1999, and has been reprinted in The Best American Science Writing 2000, ed. by J. Gleick (HarperCollins, New York, 2000) and in The Best American Essays 2000, ed. by A. Lightman (Houghton Miflin, Boston, 2000). It will also appear in Facing Up, a collection of the author's essays, to be published in the fall of 2001 by Harvard University Press.

Notes

(1.) This article is based on a talk given in April 1999 at the Conference on Cosmic Design of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

(2.) This was pointed out in a 1989 paper by M. Livio, D. Hollowell, A. Weiss and J.W. Truran ("The anthropic significance of the existence of an excited state of [C.sup.12]," Nature, Vol. 340, No. 6231, July 27, 1989). They did the calculation quoted here of the 7.7 MeV maximum energy of the radioactive state of carbon, above which little carbon is formed in stars.

(3.) The same conclusion may be reached in a more subtle way when quantum mechanics is applied to the whole universe. Through a reinterpretation of earlier work by Stephen Hawking, Sidney Coleman has shown how quantum mechanical effects can lead to a split of the history of the universe (more precisely, in what is called the wave function of the universe) into a huge number of separate possibilities, each one corresponding to a different set of fundamental constants. See Sidney Coleman, "Black Holes as Red Herrings: Topological fluctuations and the loss of quantum coherence," Nuclear Physics. Vol. B307 (1988), p. 867.

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