Steven Weinberg on "Without God"

Physicist Weinberg offers some extended reflections ($) on science and religion before concluding that "there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and wishful thinking". Sensible advice, especially in the wake of David Foster Wallace's grim demise. (Carroll has posted a Wallace passage on Cantor.)

On a lighter note, Weinberg offers an amusing analogy with religion without religious belief:

To compare great things with small, people may go to college football games mostly because they enjoy the cheerleading and marching bands, but I doubt if they would keep going to the stadium on Saturday afternoons if the only things happening there were cheerleading and marching bands, without any actual football, so that the cheerleading and the band music were no longer about anything (75).