How To Be An Agnostic
universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless,’
he’s written, adding: ‘We ourselves could invent a point for
our lives, including trying to understand the universe.’ Indeed,
a key source of his commitment to science is found in replac-
ing supernatural explanations with naturalistic ones. The maps
of old used to feature dragons at the edge of the world. Now,
though, we have maps that show no dragons on the boundaries
of the unknown. There’s no cosmic religion. Any meaning must
come from us humans ourselves. It’s up to us.
Weinberg feels this is self-evidently true. The story of twen-
tieth century physics is the story of convergence. Theories
that once seemed separate have been combined: it was for his
work on the integration of two of the fundamental forces in
nature, the weak and the electromagnetic, that he won a Nobel
prize. He believes that this trend points towards the possibility
of arriving at a theory of everything. ‘Our deepest principles,
although not yet fi nal, have become steadily more simple and
economical,’ he refl ects. They’ve achieved that convergence as
a result of the materialist assumptions physicists have made.
There is a humility in this view. It’s demonstrated well in
the writings of another physicist who falls into this camp, the
Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, Martin
Rees. He is highly conscious of the millennia that stretch ahead
of us human beings, disaster notwithstanding. Given that
humankind only has 8000 years of intellectual history to its
credit, and that we only know of a tiny patch of the possible
universe – which may elsewhere be inhabited by minds immea-
surably superior to ours – this should instil two attitudes. First, a
modesty about our achievements. Second, a consciousness of the
possibility that our minds may ultimately not be up to grasping
much about meaning and reality. As Montaigne warned: ‘Man is
quite insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a maggot, and he
creates gods by the dozen.’ Cosmic caution, rather than cosmic
religion, is the response natural to this mindset.
Rees is happy talking about the mystery of things too, though
he means it in a natural sense: science can articulate questions