Presented by Zia H Shah MD

When I started making this collection I thought Steven Weinberg is alive and well. I just realized in the middle of my work that he passed away in 2021.

Weinberg was an atheist, but, I hope and pray that as he meets his creator, the All Knowing and the Most Merciful grants him his version of Pascal wager that he mentioned in the two minute video clip below:

Unlike many neo-atheists he was humble enough to not worship his ego in a form of scientism. He did not deem science as sacred and he outlines some of its limitations in the video above.

Weinberg (born May 3, 1933, New York City, New York, U.S.—died July 23, 2021, Austin, Texas) was an American nuclear physicist who in 1979 shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Sheldon Lee Glashow and Abdus Salam for work in formulating the electroweak theory, which explains the unity of electromagnetism with the weak nuclear force.

There is so much to learn from him about philosophy, mathematics, science, physics and more and also some in refuting some of his ideas, for example about fine tuning of our universe for life.

Weinberg and Glashow were members of the same classes at the Bronx High School of Science, New York City (1950), and Cornell University (1954). Weinberg went from Cornell to the Institute for Theoretical Physics (later known as the Niels Bohr Institute) at the University of Copenhagen for a year. He then obtained his doctorate at Princeton University in 1957.

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Unlike Richard Dawkins, Weinberg has a sincerity about him and his profession of his atheism. It is best revealed in the first two video above, when he talks about limitations of science and later on about Pascal’s wager.

In the above video part 2/8 of his interview, Weinberg says that human life is an ultimate tragedy. He does not realize that this arises out of his atheistic perspective. A believer in Abrahamic faiths has a lot to hope for in Afterlife. Now that we know that he passed away in 2021 and is no longer with us makes his point even more poignant.

Additionally, he says that it is a tragedy as a physicist can never find the final answers and he also claims in this very clip that suggesting God as the final cause of our universe does not add anything. I think that is a hollow claim. Claiming God as the Creator may not give us new empirical data or further understanding of scientific steps but it helps in so many different yet very profound ways.

It gives our lives a purpose and something to look forward to in future in Afterlife, a code of ethics and so much more. In a scientific sense also it gives us a clear understanding that He created the universe or our multiverse from nothing by merely His words, as is noted in the Quranic verses:

بَدِيعُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۖ وَإِذَا قَضَىٰ أَمْرًا فَإِنَّمَا يَقُولُ لَهُ كُن فَيَكُونُ

He is the Originator of the heavens and the earth, and when He decrees something, He says only, ‘Be,’ and it is. (Al Quran 2:117)

Have they been created from nothing, or are they their own creators? Have they created the heavens and the earth? In truth they put no faith in anything. (Al Quran 52:35-36)

These verses add further confidence to our understanding of physics that net energy and matter in our universe is zero, when we add up matter and anti-matter and energy and dark energy.

As fine tuning of our universe is the best scientific argument for theism in our age, I want to tackle his 19 minute video about fine tuning and also one of his clips of Richard Dawkins’ interview. Before a more specific refutation let me suggest all the collection we have for our biophilic universe in the Muslim Times from a theistic perspective.

I link here our collection about religion and science theme and atheism as well.

In the above section of interview with Richard Dawkins, Weinberg is tackling fine tuning and multiverse. He firstly tries to minimize the fine tuning and secondly, he claims that multiverse was invoked not to tackle fine tuning but for other reasons. I think he is wrong on both these counts and I will present testimony of other well respected physicists below:

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In this video Stuart Kaufmann makes a good point against multiverse that proposing 10 raised to the power 500 universes is really going against the well known principle of Occam razor.

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