“Years ago I wrote a book about cosmology, and near the end I tried to summarize the view of the expanding universe and the laws of nature. And I made the remark – I guess I was foolish enough to make the remark – that the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it seems pointless. And that remark has been quoted more than anything else I’ve ever said. It’s even in Bartlett’s Quotations. I think it’s been the truth in the past that it was widely hoped that by studying nature we will find the sign of a grand plan, in which human beings play a particularly distinguished starring role. And that has not happened. I think that more and more the picture of nature, the outside world, has been one of an impersonal world governed by mathematical laws that are not particularly concerned with human beings, in which human beings appear as a chance phenomenon, not the goal toward which the universe is directed…
I believe that what we have found so far, an impersonal universe in which it is not particularly directed toward human beings, is what we are going to continue to find. And that when we find the ultimate laws of nature they will have a chilling, cold impersonal quality about them…
Science cannot give us what religion gives those who believe in it. Science can’t give us the consolation of knowing that when we die we are going to continue in some sense to exist. It leaves us with a much bleaker view of our own future…
I think in many respects religion is a dream – a beautiful dream often. Often a nightmare. But it’s a dream from which I think it’s about time we awoke…”