Premature as the question may be, it is hardly possible not to wonder whether we will find any answer to our deepest questions, any signs of the workings of an interested God, in a final theory. I think that we will not.
Interpretation
The quote reflects skepticism about finding ultimate answers to our deepest existential questions through scientific theories.
Steven Weinberg expresses doubt about the possibility of uncovering profound answers to humanity's most significant queries regarding existence, divinity, and the nature of reality, through the pursuit of a final scientific theory. He seems to suggest that such questions may remain unanswered, despite the progress of science, indicating a limit to what can be known about the universe and perhaps a separation between science and spirituality.
In practice
In a philosophy class discussing the limits of human understanding, this quote can illustrate the tension between science and spirituality.
It was one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant was important. Now of course it's still important, of course, as a practical matter,but we now know that the value it has is a function, that in any fundamental theory you derive the fine structure constant as a function of all sorts of mass ratios and so on and it's not really that fundamental.
Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.
It's very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn't pursue nuclear weapons programs if we ourselves are actively developing a component of a strategic defense system.
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?
Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.
A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes anothers.
When you see the earth from the moon, you don't see any divisions there of nations or states. _x000D_ This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. _x000D_ That is the country that we are going to be celebrating. _x000D_ And those are the people that we are one with.
In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.
Great is the power of steady misrepresentation
That day, I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life would be changed. But insights cannot be held for ever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colours. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting that central inadequacy of soul which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which, paradoxically, may be our surest impetus.
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