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Science tells us that the only thing that really is fated is the heat death of the universe. The second law insists that all roads lead to maximal disorder in the universe at the end of time. In fact, the second law says that maximal disorder is the end of time, since after that point, there won’t be any asymmetries, any one-way processes left in nature. Physics tells us that state of completely evened-out flatness without any energy differences is about 100 billion years off. So, scientism doesn’t have to worry about it. Almost everything else in the history of the universe, including our histories, will be determined but not fated. (This is important for any chance this book has of climbing up the best seller list.)

Everything that happens in your life is determined. That doesn’t mean that reading this book can’t make a difference to your happiness, well-being, or adjustment to reality. That you bought, borrowed, or otherwise acquired this book was determined. So was its effect on you, if any. If your brain is organized in roughly the same way mine is, there are neural circuits that have produced disquiet in you, along with the illusion of thoughts about the persistent questions. Reading this book has rearranged a large number of neural circuits in your brain (though only a very small proportion of the millions of such circuits in your brain). If those rearranged neural circuits change their outputs in certain ways when triggered by inputs seeming to pose the daunting questions, then this book will have worked. The process will be the same one psychotherapy employs when it works. It will have changed your neural circuitry, unconscious and conscious. You will acquire the correct information about the matters that keep you up at night. You will almost certainly undergo the conscious illusion of thinking about these questions in a new way, as finally having been answered.

Don’t take narratives too seriously. That is the most obvious moral of our tour through science’s version of reality. By now you can see why this advice is important and also hard to follow. After all, the human brain has been shaped by millions of years of natural and cultural selection to be addicted to stories. They are almost the only things that give most of us relief from the feeling of curiosity. Scientism has nothing against stories. It just refuses to be an enabler. Stories are fun, but they’re no substitute for knowledge. In fact, the insistence on packaging information into narratives is an obstacle to understanding how things really work. Scientific findings, along with the models, laws, and theories that explain them, can’t be squeezed into the procrustean bed of a good detective story, or any other kind of story for that matter.

When politicians or political commentators try to sell you on a narrative become suspicious. Even if their stories are sincere, the plot is probably distracting them and you from the real issues. Things are always more complicated than any story we can remember for very long, even if the story happens to be true. Being able to tell a story that voters can remember is almost never a good qualification for elective office.

This advice goes double for anyone trying to sell you on religion. But if you have read this far, you don’t need to be warned off stories with spooky plots that always end well for the good guys and badly for the bad guys. Religion and some of those who make their living from it succeed mainly because some of us are even more given to conspiracy theory than others. But none of us is entirely immune. We need continually to fight the temptation to think that we can learn much of anything from someone else’s story of how they beat an addiction, kept to a diet, improved their marriage, raised their kids, saved for their retirement, or made a fortune flipping real estate. Even if their story is what actually happened, the storytellers are wrong about the real causes of how and why it happened. Learning their story won’t help you figure out the real causal process