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I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.

Steven Weinberg

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Steven Weinberg
Age: 88 †
Born: 1933
Born: May 3
Died: 2021
Died: July 23
Cosmologist
Physicist
Theoretical Physicist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Hold
Religion
Science
Great
Thing
Weaken
Good
Contributions
Think
Contribution
Thinking
Historical

More quotes by Steven Weinberg

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I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute ... it may be the most important contribution that we can make.
Steven Weinberg
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[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
Steven Weinberg
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If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers.
Steven Weinberg
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Premature as the question may be, it is hardly possible not to wonder whether we will find any answer to our deepest questions, any signs of the workings of an interested God, in a final theory. I think that we will not.
Steven Weinberg
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As you learn more and more about the irrelevance of human life to the general mechanism of the universe, the idea of an interested god, becomes increasingly implausible.
Steven Weinberg
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My advice is to go for the messes - that's where the action is.
Steven Weinberg
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Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.
Steven Weinberg
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It is almost irrestible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning.
Steven Weinberg
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The universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups.
Steven Weinberg
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For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.
Steven Weinberg
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Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough.
Steven Weinberg
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A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death, he drew some consolation from the reflection that he would never again have to look up the word hermeneutics in the dictionary.
Steven Weinberg
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This doesn't mean that they commit themselves to the view that this is all there is. Many scientists (including me) think that this is the case, but other scientists are religious, and believe that what is observed in nature is at least in part a result of God's will.
Steven Weinberg
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They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it's a good thing.
Steven Weinberg
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How strange it would be if the final theory were to be discovered in our lifetimes! The discovery of the final laws of nature will mark a discontinuity in human intellectual history, the sharpest that has occurred since the beginning of modern science in the seventeenth century. Can we now imagine what that would be like?
Steven Weinberg
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There is now a feeling that the pieces of physics are falling into place, not because of any single revolutionary idea or because of the efforts of any one physicist, but because of a flowering of many seeds of theory, most of them planted long ago.
Steven Weinberg
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In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.
Steven Weinberg
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As for me, I have just enough confidence about the multiverse to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees’s dog.
Steven Weinberg
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In our universe we are tuned into the frequency that corresponds to physical reality. But there are an infinite number of parallel realities coexisting with us in the same room, although we cannot tune into them.
Steven Weinberg
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I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn't start with an invocation!
Steven Weinberg