physics

With the passing last month of Steven Weinberg, the world lost a great theoretical physicist. Born to Jewish parents in New York in 1933, Weinberg received the Nobel Prize in 1979 for unifying two of the four fundamental forces of physics, the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces. His proposed unification, later confirmed by experiment, proved key to the development of the Standard Model of particle physics, the best current theory of fundamental physics and our guide to the strange world of elementary particles. In addition, Weinberg made seminal contributions to quantum theory, general relativity and cosmology.

His death also marks the twilight of an increasingly dated view of the relationship between science and religion. Though Weinberg was a friend to the State of Israel, he was not sympathetic to Judaism or any theistic belief. Weinberg wrote many popular books about physics in which he often asserted that scientific advance had undermined belief in God – and, consequently, any ultimate meaning for human existence. The First Three Minutes, his most popular book published in 1977, famously concluded: “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”

Weinberg’s aggressive science-based atheism now seems an increasingly spent force. Since 1977, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Victor Stenger, Lawrence Krauss and many other scientists have published popular anti-theistic broadsides. Many of these stalwarts have since passed from the scene. Others have so overplayed their hands with overt attacks on religion that they have provoked even fellow atheists and agnostics to recoil.

Stephen Meyer discusses whether the laws of cosmology, physics, and biology exhibit evidence for Intelligent Design. Does Fine-Tuning imply a “Mind” behind the Cosmos, or was the appearance of design inevitable thanks to random fluctuations due to the capaciousness of the Multiverse? Meyer, author of the NYT Bestseller Darwin’s Doubt”, and Keating debate whether we can intuit the existence of Read More ›

Stephen Hawking’s new book, The Grand Design, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow, contends that God is not necessary to create the universe because the laws of physics can do it alone. The “new atheist” crowd will cheer this message, but their credulity is a matter more of fiery sentiment than of coolheaded logic. Mr. Hawking asserts that “as recent advances in Read More ›

Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, Ph.D., and co-author of New Proofs for the Existence of God, waslks through some of the new arguments for God’s existence as reasoned from astrophysics. Listen in as he talks about universe expansion, anthropic fine-tuning, and other novel arguments from the past decade.

Intelligent design (ID) is a scientific theory that employs the methods commonly used by other historical sciences to conclude that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. ID theorists argue that design can be inferred by studying the informational properties of natural objects Read More ›

Although much of the public controversy over intelligent design has centered on biology and Darwinian evolution, the evidence for intelligent design goes far beyond biology. There’s especially intriguing evidence of design in cosmology, physics, and astronomy. To say that ID has merit in cosmology and physics, I mean that there is positive evidence for ID in those parts of nature Read More ›