The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [1]
It was an American public radio humorist, Garrison Keillor, who first called the daunting problems that we all face “the persistent questions.” I have adopted his label to emphasize the fact that they keep bothering us until we find the answers. In fact, science has found the answers—some of them 400 years ago, others in the nineteenth century, and several only quite recently. These answers are provided by the very same facts that atheism itself rests on. That’s why they are a part—the positive part—of the atheist’s worldview.
Science—especially physics and biology—reveals that reality is completely different from what most people think. It’s not just different from what credulous religious believers think. Science reveals that reality is stranger than even many atheists recognize. From the nature of the reality uncovered by science, consequences follow. This book is about those consequences. It provides an uncompromising, hard-boiled, no-nonsense, unsentimental view of the nature of reality, the purpose of things, the meaning of life, the trajectory of human history, morality and mortality, the will, the mind, and the self.
REALITY IS ROUGH. But it could have been worse. We could have been faced with reality in all its roughness plus a God who made it that way. Take, for example, what the British historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the short twentieth century.” It starts in 1914 with the beginning of trench warfare in the First World War and carries on through the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918, the Russian civil war, collectivization, and great purge, the Great Depression of the 1930s, through the Second World War’s Holocaust and the nuclear attacks on Japan, and all the way past the Chinese Great Leap Forward famine of 1958 to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1991—a 73-year century with enough horrors to last Earth a millennium. Now add to those horrors the God of the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and you get an even worse reality; it’s one just as rough as the real world, but it adds a moral monster who arranged for it all to happen.
In recent years, there have been a number of very popular books devoted to disapproving of as well as disproving religious belief. Some of them attack arguments for God’s existence, and others show the harm—intellectual and moral—that religions do in the name of their respective deities. A Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Steven Weinberg, once said, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil, that takes religion.” He had a point.
But it’s not my point. I am not interested in hammering another nail into the intellectual coffin of theism. Enough of those arguments already exist. And the relative lack of originality in the arguments of the recent best sellers attacking religion (The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, Letter to a Christian Nation) shows that the arguments have been around for quite some time and have achieved little effect. The effort to argue most people out of religious belief was doomed by the very Darwinian evolutionary forces that the most fervent of Christians deny. The most sophisticated believers understand the arguments against theism. Yet they are still able to create clever excuses for harboring theistic convictions as logically self-consistent if ultimately unprovable. If they can do it, imagine how much easier it is for credulous people, who are neither as well informed nor as logically scrupulous, to continue to believe. There is little point in preaching to these unconverted.
This book doesn’t preach to the converted either. Instead, its aim is to sketch out what we atheists really should believe about reality and our place in it. The picture painted here is subject to completion and