Preparing for the Miraculous

eing human and the copernican principle 137this mentality. Steven Weinberg: “The more the universeseems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. ...The effect to understand the universe is one of the very fewthings that lifts human life a little above the level of farce,and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.” 20 Peter Atkins:“We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure ofchange is decay. At root there is only corruption and theunstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is leftis direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as wepeer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.”21The biologists, eager to insert the various branches oftheir science within the framework of physics, have adoptedthis view with a vengeance. “If the human accepts thismessage of science [actually of Scientism] in its full meaning,then he must wake up from his dream lasting thousandsof years to discover his total solitude, his radicalforeignness. He knows now that, like a Gypsy, his placeis in the margin of the universe where he has to live – in auniverse deaf to his music, indifferent to his hopes as it isto his sufferings and crimes.” 22 This is a paragraph fromJacques Monod’s famous Chance and Necessity, called “abook of desperate metaphysics.”The way scientists like Stephen Hawking have becomesuperstars, whose slightest pronouncements are regurgitatedby the media ad nauseam, is pathetic. About Hawking’slatest bestseller, The Grand Design, one finds in ScientificAmerican of November 2010: “Physics, the book states, cannow explain where the universe came from and why thelaws of nature are what they are. The universe arose ‘from20 Steven Weinberg: The First Three Minutes, p. 155.21 In Richard Dawkins: Unweaving the Rainbow, p. xi.22 Jacques Monod: Le hasard et la nécessité, p. 216.