The Half-Baked Thinker

And so it happened that on a day that I was pondering the wonders of atheism’s dismal view of the universe and everything in it, that I came across the erudite elucidations of a Nobel Laureate. As it turns out, Dr. Steven Weinberg[1] appears to be the poster child for atheism’s misanthropy, self-aggrandizing, and ultimate despair. What I had been thinking about, in particular, is how when atheists engages upon, their reinterpretation of, philosophy or science they always end up coming to the conclusion that the universe and everything in it have no purpose, no reason, no hope, nor anything ultimate, except entropy.

We cannot blame a person for thinking of their own worldview as the grand template for utopia. Cannot blame them, that is, unless their worldview is half-baked. Dr. Weinberg credits science for the entire world’s good and blames religion for all its ills.

Dr. Weinberg wonders,

“whether or not we’re headed for another Dark Age when people do start crusades and jihads and pogroms again, or whether the course of rationalism and humanitarianism is going to continue, and religion will gradually dwindle into something much less important. From my own point of view, I can hope that this long sad story will come to an end at some time in the future and that this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas will come to an end, that we’ll see no more of them. I hope that this is something to which science can contribute and if it is, then I think it may be the most important contribution that we can make.”

He further stated,

“The whole history of the last thousands of years has been a history of religious persecutions and wars, pogroms, jihads, crusades. I find it all very regrettable, to say the least.”

Notice how quickly science can turn from an unbiased search for truth that merely considers materialistic processes to its very own crusade, its very own unholy war, to abolish religion of any sort. In fact, did you catch it? Dr. Weinberg, crusader for atheism and science, includes “pogroms” in his list of religiously motivated atrocities. The fact of pogroms actually dismantles his argument. Does he not know that pogroms were mass slaughters carried out in the name of politics and “scientifically” based racism by Communist atheists? He comments on the last thousands of years of religious persecutions. However, a mere century of atheists in power proves that persecution has not so much to do with religion per se but with the evils of human nature. The twentieth century was the bloodiest century in history and the overwhelming majority of its bloodshed was perpetrated in the name of politics, territory, material goods/resources, racism, sexism, wealth and poverty, science, atheism, etc., etc. In fact, Marxism and Communism, based on atheism, carries the blame for the overwhelming majority of it all.

Karl Schleunes:

“Darwin’s notion of struggle for survival was quickly appropriated by the racist…such a struggle, legitimized by the latest scientific views, justified the racists’ conception of superior and inferior peoples…and validated the conflict between them.”[2]

At this point we will point out Dr. Weinberg’s last best hope for mankind:

“the growth of science—a sense of rationality, a scientific view that we don’t really differ that much from one another, that there is no divine right of kings and so on, there is no intrinsic racial difference that should allow us to enslave one race for the benefit of another race.”

Dr. Weinberg appears to have overlooked Charles Darwin’s racism and sexism? We mean the racism and sexism that is inherent in his theory of evolution. Darwin’s theory can hardly be blamed on religion of any sort. These concepts have, without the least bit of misrepresentation, been mixed with atheism and un-religious worldviews of all sorts and have resulted in unconceivable horrors.

Dr. Weinberg states that God has done “a damn good job of hiding evidence of his existence.”
There is a lot to be said for this statement or rather, misstatement.
One is the common sense response that, according to the concept of free will, God allows us to decide whether or not we care to seek Him. He is easily found by those who seek Him but hidden to those who purposefully ignore Him.

Another issue is that even if God appeared personally to an atheist, or to the whole world at once, it would change nothing. This is because the atheists could simply claim that it was all some sort of hallucination.
Moreover, Dr. Weinberg’s very own, allegedly unbiased field, has members who have done a lot to demonstrated that scientists and the science de jour can be manipulated into pushing one particular worldview.

For example, we have the words of Richard Lewontin (Harvard University Professor of zoology and biology):

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural…we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”[3]

Note that he not only identifies the a prior commitment but also admits to tampering with the process, or the premise even, in that they create a system that will deliver the results that they want to see.

Lest we miss just how captivating the infallible declarations of a materialistic worldview are, we present one of the clearest examples of pseudo-science disguised as science in the words of Scott C. Todd (Department of Biology; Kansas State University):

“Even if all the data pointed to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”[4]

H.J. Lipson,

“In fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists accepted it and many are prepared to ‘bend’ their observations to fit in with it.”[5]

In other words, since we have an a prior commitment to materialism, we will purposefully ignore evidence. This is clearly the words of an anti-science faith filled believer.

Dr. Weinberg admits that, “half-baked philosophy has sometimes gotten in the way of doing science.” But apparently his “much-quoted aphorism” is not half-baked, but the erudite elucidations of the very height of both atheism’s philosophy and science’s discoveries:

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

The Skeptic’s Dictionary informs us of the following:

“Naturalism posits that the universe is a vast machine or organism, devoid of general purpose and indifferent to human needs and desires.”[6]

TIME magazine states the following with regards to the universe’s final entropy:

“humanity, and perhaps even biology, will long since have vanished. Yet it’s conceivable that consciousness will survive, perhaps in the form of a disembodied digital intelligence. If so, then someone may still be around to note that the universe, once ablaze with the light of uncountable stars, has become an unimaginably vast, cold, dark and profoundly lonely place.”[7]

Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA structure, wrote:

“The astonishing hypothesis is that you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it, ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’”[8]

In his An Atheist Manifesto, Sam Harris wrote:

“We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by change. Parents lose their children and children their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, never to meet again. Friends part company in haste, without knowing that it will be for the last time. This life, when surveyed with a broad glance, presents little more than a vast spectacle of loss…Only the atheist realizes…how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all…many human beings suffer needlessly while alive.”

Philosopher, Daniel Dennett wrote:

“along comes Darwin, who simply shows how all of that design work, all of that creation, can be done by a process that has no purpose, no intelligence and no foresight. It is a very strange inversion of reasoning and it’s very upsetting to people to see that something that seems so obvious is being denied. Darwin does away with the reason for believing in a divine creator. This doesn’t prove there is no divine creator, but if there is one, it — he — need not have gone to all that trouble because natural selection on its own would have created all the biological diversity we see.”

Richard Dawkins, Is Science a Religion?

“we know from the second law of thermodynamics that all complexity, all life, all laughter, all sorrow, is hell-bent on leveling itself out into cold nothingness in the end. They - and we - can never be more than temporary, local buckings of the great universal slide into the abyss of uniformity.”

Incidentally, a famous person once state, “When understanding of the universe has become widespread…Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.” See our essay Cosmology, Pat I to see who the famous person was.

What more can be said? Dr. Weinberg besmirches religion while having a bloodstained worldview and yet, the very height of his worldview is absolute and utter pointlessness.

[1] Nobel Laureate Dr. Steven Weinberg, Free People From Superstition
[2] Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road To Auchwitz (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1970), p. 30, also see J. Bergman, Eugenics and Nazi Racial Policy, p. 118
[3] Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” New York Times Book Reviews, Volume 44, Number 1 (January 9, 1997) reviewing Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
[4] Scott C. Todd, “A View from Kansas on that Evolution Debate,” Nature Vol. 401, Sep. 30, 1999, p. 423
[5] H.J. Lipson, F.R.S, “A Physicist Looks at Evolution,” Physics Bulletin, Vol. 31, 1980
[6] The Skeptic’s Dictionary, Naturalism - retrieved 11-25-06
[7] “The End,” TIME, 6-25-01, p. 56
[8] John Horgan, “Profile: Francis H. C. Crick – The Mephistopheles of Neurobiology,” Scientific America, Feb. 1992, p. 17