[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that science challenges and undermines religious beliefs, which the author views positively.
Steven Weinberg's statement emphasizes the idea that scientific inquiry and reasoning can dismantle superstitions and unverified beliefs often associated with religion. By promoting a more empirical and rational understanding of the world, science contributes to intellectual progress and the search for truth, which Weinberg argues is beneficial for society.
In practice
In a public debate about science and religion, this quote can highlight the importance of questioning established beliefs.
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.
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?
How strange it would be if the final theory were to be discovered in our lifetimes! The discovery of the final laws of nature will mark a discontinuity in human intellectual history, the sharpest that has occurred since the beginning of modern science in the seventeenth century. Can we now imagine what that would be like?
They [scientists of centuries past] call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.
You stop planetary exploration, those people who do that extraordinary work are going to have to go do something else.
If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.
It was like a new world opened to me, the world of science, which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty.
A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado.
I can easily conceive, most Holy Father, that as soon as some people learn that in this book which I have written concerning the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, I ascribe certain motions to the Earth, they will cry out at once that I and my theory should be rejected.
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