"Steven Weinberg,
who died last week at the age of 88, was not only 
a Nobel laureate
physicist.... His most famous (or perhaps infamous) statement can be
found on the second-to-last page of his first popular book, The First Three Minutes,
published in 1977. Having told the story of how our universe came into
being .... he concludes that whatever the
universe is about, it sure as heck isn’t about us. “The more the universe seems comprehensible,” he wrote, “the more it also seems pointless.”
And he specifically criticized what
used to be called “natural theology”—the idea that, as the 19th Psalm
suggests, one could learn about God by studying nature. As the 19th Psalm puts it: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork.”ScientificAmerican
