The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [12]
It’s true that scientism asks us to surrender a lot of complacent beliefs in exchange for the correct answers to the persistent questions. If this seems hard to take, the last chapter cushions the blow, showing that we can surrender all the illusions of common sense, religion, and new-age and traditional mystery mongering, along with the meretricious allure of storytelling; indeed, physics, chemistry, biology, and neurology have shaped most of us to survive very nicely without them. And just in case, there’s always Prozac.
Chapter 2
THE NATURE OF REALITY:
THE PHYSICAL FACTS
FIX ALL THE FACTS
IF WE’RE GOING TO BE SCIENTISTIC, THEN WE HAVE to attain our view of reality from what physics tells us about it. Actually, we’ll have to do more than that: we’ll have to embrace physics as the whole truth about reality.
Why buy the picture of reality that physics paints? Well, it’s simple, really. We trust science as the only way to acquire knowledge. That is why we are so confident about atheism. The basis of our confidence, ironically, is the fallibility of scientists as continually demonstrated by other scientists. In science, nothing is taken for granted. Every significant new claim, and a lot of insignificant ones, are sooner or later checked and almost never completely replicated. More often, they are corrected, refined, and improved on—assuming the claims aren’t refuted altogether. Because of this error-reducing process, the further back you go from the research frontier, the more the claims have been refined, reformulated, tested, and grounded. Grounded where? In physics.
Everything in the universe is made up of the stuff that physics tells us fills up space, including the spaces that we fill up. And physics can tell us how everything in the universe works, in principle and in practice, better than anything else. Physics catalogs all the basic kinds of things that there are and all the things that can happen to them.
The basic things everything is made up of are fermions and bosons. That’s it. Perhaps you thought the basic stuff was electrons, protons, neutrons, and maybe quarks. Besides those particles, there are also leptons, neutrinos, muons, tauons, gluons, photons, and probably a lot more elementary particles that make up stuff. But all these elementary particles come in only one of two kinds. Some of them are fermions; the rest are bosons. There is no third kind of subatomic particle. And everything is made up of these two kinds of things. Roughly speaking, fermions are what matter is composed of, while bosons are what fields of force are made of.
Fermions and bosons. All the processes in the universe, from atomic to bodily to mental, are purely physical processes involving fermions and bosons interacting with one another. Eventually, science will have to show the details of how the basic physical processes bring about us, our brain, and our behavior. But the broad outlines of how they do so are already well understood.
Physics is by no means “finished.” But the part of it that explains almost everything in the universe—including us—is finished, and much of it has been finished for a century or more. This includes all the physics that we are going to need. Nothing at the unsettled frontiers of physics challenges the parts we’re going to make use of. What’s more, the physics we need is easy to understand, certainly far easier than quantum mechanics, general relativity, or string theory.
WHY TRUST PHYSICS?
Before getting to the physics that we need, we should get clear about our reasons for attaching so much confidence to it. Why suppose that all the other facts about the world are just complex combinations of physical facts?
For the