"Can Science Explain Everything? Anything?" by Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg is a Nobel laureate in physics, and the author of ten books, at least some of which are aimed at an intelligent lay audience. (It is possible that all of them are, but the only one I have read is his The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe. Here's the link to the Amazon page on the book, and here is a link to a service I am not familiar with, namely Questia, through which, apparently, you can read the entire book on-line.) My impression is that Weinberg has been a highly qualified scientist, and also one who has thought deeply about the relationship between science and society. As nearly as I can figure out, he is a liberal Jew. I don't know whether he is a religious Jew or not.

On May 31, 2001, an article that Weinberg had written for the New York Review of Books was published. I saved that article at about that time. As far as I can determine, it is no longer available freely on-line. The article has the title given in quotes in the title of this blog post. The article is available, at cost, or with a proper membership, here.

I wish to muse about the article.

Early in the article, Weinberg asserts that "There is no purpose revealed in the laws of nature." Soon after, he indicates that science declines to discuss the question of purpose in nature, although theology claims to look for such.

Much of the article is given to a discussion of the meanings of the words "explanation," "fundamental," "deduced," "principle," and "description." This is an important discussion, and Weinberg brings considerable insight, and, I believe, even some clarity to this discussion. He concludes that science can, indeed, explain some things. Then he moves to the question of whether science can explain everything.

Weinberg claims that there are some types of phenomena that science, or scientists, cannot explain. These include the following:

The results of accidents, wherein we cannot know all the initial conditions that led up to the accident. (Weinberg indicates, that, in these cases, if we did know all the initial conditions, we could explain the phenomenon.) He gives some examples, one of which is a comparison between the assassination of President Lincoln and the attempted assassination of President Truman. Weinberg says that we will never be able to explain completely why one assassination attempt resulted in a murder, but the other didn't.

He says that we cannot explain moral principles: "The moral postulates that tell us whether we should or should not do [some particular action] so cannot be deduced from our scientific knowledge."

He further says that we will never be sure how good our current explanations are.

Finally, Weinberg says that we cannot explain the most basic scientific principles, and does not believe that we will ever be able to do so.

He does not say so, but I would add to his list that we cannot explain why there is something, rather than nothing. This relates to the first statement from the article that I quoted, and it seems that Weinberg believes that that is another question that science is not going to be able to explain, although he doesn't say so explicitly.

Weinberg has by no means given up on science. He thinks that we should work toward finding a Theory of Everything. He does not seem to believe that, even if such a theory is found, it will explain everything. That is, we will only know that, whatever the equations of such a theory might be, we won't know why they are as they are.

Thanks for reading.

Islamic anti-science philosophy?

I am not an expert in the subject of this post, which is the result of an hour or so of searching and reading in the Internet. The subject is important, and was an eye-opener to me.

Steven Weinberg, author and Nobel Prize-winning physicist, supports the atheism of Richard Dawkins, except that Dawkins' attacks on Christianity are misplaced, he says -- he really should be attacking Islam, because Christians don't usually act as if they really believe what they say they do. (If they did, they would be making more of an effort to convert him, he writes.) Weinberg says that, in the twelfth century A. D., an Islamic philosopher named Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (there are variations on the name -- Weinberg used Ghazzali) did away with the foundation of science under Islam (which had, a few centuries earlier, been the center of developing science) by saying that there could be no laws of nature, because these would tie the hands of the deity. See here for al-Ghazali's website.

* * * *
Added Jan 30th, 2007. See the comment below by Jeremy Pierce, which casts grave doubt on Weinberg's main thesis.
* * * *

Weinberg seems to be correct about one thing, namely that al-Ghazali was an important philosopher. (The Wikipedia article on him says that his influence has been compared to that of Thomas Aquinas in Christianity.) He is also mostly, or entirely, correct about another idea, namely that al-Ghazali attacked the very foundations of science (although he really seemed to have broader aim, at philosophy, or even more fundamentally, at reason itself). Here's what the al-Ghazali web site says about his The Incoherence of the Philosophers (this book has other names):

The so-called necessity of causality is, says al-Ghazali, simply based on the mere fact that an event A has so far occurred concomitantly with an event B. There is no guarantee of the continuation of that relationship in the future, since the connection of A and B lacks logical necessity. In fact, according to Ash‘arite atomistic occasionalism, the direct cause of both A and B is God; God simply creates A when he creates B. Thus theoretically he can change his custom (sunna, ‘ada) at any moment, and resurrect the dead: in fact, this is 'a second creation'.

This web site goes on to affirm what Weinberg stated about al-Ghazali.

This article, in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, presents a more complex picture of al-Ghazali.

The history of the development of science is a complicated subject, and opinions vary. However, it is possible to argue that Christianity has been, at least at some times, and in some ways, friendly to the development of science. (So was Islam.) To me, belief in a God of order and pattern is crucial to the development of science, although perhaps that is a simplistic view. If I really believed that there was no meaning in the universe, no fundamental laws, why try to uncover them? For example, Isaac Newton, although he would probably be classified as belonging to a Christian cult today, believed that science was an enterprise that, by showing what God had done, glorified God. Although the roots of Western Science pre-date Christianity, it grew and matured among civilizations that were, at least nominally, Christian, and I don't think that was an accident.

It seems likely that al-Ghazali really did undercut science for Muslims. If so, he did them a great disservice.

I will not go into the coherence of Weinberg and Dawkins, or that of the late Francis Crick (who is mentioned favorably by Weinberg) except to say that they have denied what I believe to be the source of the laws of nature.

This post is not meant as an attack on Islam.

I write as a Christian, and too much of what Weinberg says about the lack of certitude in Christians rings true.

Thanks for reading.