The Reinvestigation of the Wise

The Little Free Library at 207 S. Bullard St, in Silver City, New Mexico. Photographed April 19, 2025. I love the local flavor here.

 

By observation and by reason, the universe appears to obey a permanent fixed set of natural laws on the physical level. The discovery of this principle is the bedrock of western science and its discovery can be considered one of the cornerstone achievements of the human mind.

In fact, it is so fundamental that in the view of many contemporary thinkers, it can be considered the starting point of all other products of the human mind. Standing against this view is the idea that Divine inspiration is the starting point. Yet are these two statements actually in conflict? That they oppose each other is itself an assumption. Such is the difficulty of making even the first step. Yet me make it, over and over, and the elaboration of doing so, we hope to glimpse a little bit more of something we call truth that lurks behind it all, or underneath it all, or whatever prepositional phrase we ascribe as most relevant.

Weinberg was an atheist and had little regard for religion, perhaps beyond the cultural Judaism of his ethnicity. I tend to assume his assertion of the ultimate pointlessness of the universe follows from this atheism. His atheism was typical of men of his generation, who came of age in the 1960s, in an era in which the West, in the wake of the devastations of the two world wars, had come to embrace the idea that a loving God who created a universe of meaning could not exist, given such historical evidence.

Those of us born in the aftermath of this cultural shift have in fact been a reaction to it. I am certainly a product of my time that way.