A Feast of Steven’s

In June, Nobelist Steven Weinberg, a special favorite of ours, gave the Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard. A few excerpts follow. These don’t do justice to his main subject, which is a look ahead to the possibility of a post-religious society, but the full text is available in the September 25 New York Review (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21800).

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So far in my life, in arguing for spending more money on scientific research and higher education, or against spending on ballistic missile defense or sending people to Mars, I think I have achieved a perfect record of never having changed anyone’s mind.

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Then there are the ordinary pleasures of life, which have been despised by religious zealots, from Christian anchorites in the Egyptian deserts to tday’s Taliban and Mahdi Army. ….. We who are not zealots can rejoice that when bread and wine are no longer sacraments, they will still be bread and wine.

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….. very great poetry can be written without religion. Shakespeare provides an example; none of his work seems to me to show the slightest hint of serious religious inspiration. Given Ariel and Prospero, we see that poets can do without angels and prophets.

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I do not think we have to worry that giving up religion will lead to a moral decline. There are plenty of people without religious faith who live exemplary moral lives (as for example, me), and though religion has sometimes inspired admirable ethical standards, it has also often fostered the most hideous crimes.

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