The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [112]
By fixing all the facts, physics excludes purpose from physical reality. Since physical reality is the only kind of reality there is, it has also excluded purpose from the biological domain. Darwin made good physics’ claim to banish purpose from nature. The process he discovered underlies the appearance of purpose wherever it emerges, even in the human mind.
Not only are the individual acts of human beings unguided by purpose; so are their thoughts. Combine the purposeless but well-adapted thoughts and behavior of a lot of people over a long time, and the result is history. Could history have purpose, meaning, or a direction even when people lack them? Sure, it could, if there were any purposes. But physics has already ruled them out. Science excludes God’s designs, or some purpose operating in the universe to navigate events into some safe harbor hidden in the future. There is no alternative to blind variation and environmental filtration in human history, so there is no source for meaning or purpose in our history.
As we shall see, science can do more than just deduce the purposelessness of the past and future from physics. It can provide detailed diagnosis. But it is important to remember why scientism can be so confident about science’s answers to the persistent questions about history.
Philosophers of history—Christian ones, Hegelian ones, Marxian ones—have all claimed to make sense out of history by disclosing its end point: judgment day for the first, the triumph of reason for the second, the withering away of the state for the third. Physics tells us those hopes are all in vain. Most historians are less ambitious. Many seek only to explain events or epochs by making sense of the actions of people—either groups of them or individuals like Napoleon or Martin Luther. At its best, what they produce often has as much entertainment value as a good historical novel. But it is not much more likely to produce useful information than what we got from the teleological philosophers of history.
To see why, consider biography—history one life at a time. Once it’s realized how crude our best guesses are about the meaning of anything that individual people do, the problem of biography becomes manifest. We’ll never know the meaning of any individual human action—the particular motives expressed in thoughts about ends and about the means that led to the action. That’s not because we can’t get inside people’s heads to mind-read their thoughts. The reason is much more profound. It’s because the human brain is not organized into thoughts about anything at all. Our best guesses are not even approximations. They are at best rough indicators. This makes biography a blunt explanatory instrument at best and mostly just storytelling.
Add together enough biographies to produce a history, and the result may be an increasingly accurate description of what happened: who did what to whom. But as you pile on the biographies, the explanation of what happened—the historical event—becomes much blunter by several orders of magnitude. The more people involved in the event, the more inaccurate the explanation is bound to be. This wouldn’t much matter if history were judged on the same standards as historical fiction—as stories. But it’s supposed to tell us why things really happened the way they did. For all we know, this is something that historical explanation never provides. The reason starts with its reliance on folk psychology. But the problems facing history don’t end there.
THOSE WHO LEARN THE LESSONS OF HISTORY ARE IN DANGER OF
FOLLOWING THEM
Historians are fond of quoting the American philosopher George Santayana, who admonished us thus: “Those who do not learn the lessons of history are suffered to repeat them.” In a similar vein, Winston Churchill justified his own obsession with history: