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meaning and value out of both. They treat the core morality we share as true, right, correct, and really morally binding on us, and they think that science can show why it is true, right, and correct. This is something its advocates think secular humanism has to do if it is going to compete with religion for brand loyalty. Consumer satisfaction will also require that science provide a meaning, purpose, or value for people’s lives, something that will make getting up in the morning worthwhile. Finally, some of these secular humanists think that religion provides a sense of community that enables us to work together to ameliorate the human condition. Since this is a good thing, secular humanism has to accomplish at least as much good as religion does if it is going to displace religion.

Scientism recognizes that the ambitions of secular humanism are unattainable. More important, they are mostly unnecessary for leading a perfectly satisfactory individual and community life, the sort of life recommended by the adverts on the London buses.

Long ago, Plato showed that religion has no rational capacity to underwrite core morality. Yet his argument has never loosened the grip of core morality. Science provides the explanation of why we endorse core morality and why it needs no special rationalization—from religion or from science—for us to feel bound by it. Humans evolved to be moral creatures. That’s what makes the nihilism we are committed to nice nihilism. What makes scientism nihilistic is its recognition that when science explains core morality, it also deprives it of any possible justification that will pass scientism’s muster.

The core morality almost all human beings share doesn’t need a justification and it can’t have one. It doesn’t need one to work because we have been naturally selected to act in accordance with it. So much for the secular humanist’s mistaken hope that science can do for morality what religion tries and fails to do.

How about the psychological need to fill the vacuum with meaning and purpose—something religion is supposed to provide? The Purpose Driven Life is not a best seller for nothing. Even so adamant an atheist as Richard Dawkins has succumbed to the delusion that a substitute for religion is required and available from science. People ask Dawkins, “Why do you bother getting up in the morning if the meaning of life boils down to such a cruel pitiless fact, that we exist merely to help replicate a string of molecules?” His answer is that “science is one of the supreme things that makes life worth living.”

Richard Dawkins gets misty-eyed when he thinks of the general theory of relativity or the symmetry of the double helix or how the invisible hand works to make everyone better off. So what? Why should we be like him? More important, does Dawkins have an argument or a reason or a basis to claim that science makes life worth living for everyone, or only for some people, or just for those smitten by science or scientism, or perhaps exclusively for Richard Dawkins?

It’s hard to see how science itself could provide any argument for the supreme or intrinsic value of science or anything else for that matter. That something really is valuable or has meaning is never any part of science’s explanation of why we value it. In fact, its explanation of why we value things also explains away the notion that they have some intrinsic value, independent of our wants, preferences, tastes, and so forth. We saw why this is so in Chapter 5. The argument works just the same for values that are supposed to make life meaningful as it does for norms. That goes for my values as much as yours or Dawkins’s. Science can explain why we value things, but the same goes for values we reject as wrong. That’s why scientific explanations of what we value cannot justify those values or serve as a basis to enforce them on others. Since science is the only possible source of justification, if it doesn’t work to justify values, nothing does.

Nice nihilism undermines all values. This also goes for the silly idea of the existentialist