The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [3]
I am a philosopher, or if that sounds pretentious, a philosophy professor. I didn’t start out to be one. I wanted to study physics because I really wanted to understand the nature of reality. The more I learned, the more I was disappointed with the answers physics provided. They just didn’t scratch the itch of curiosity that was keeping me up at night. If I was going to stop the itch, I was faced with two choices: therapy or philosophy. With enough psychotherapy, I thought, I might get over worrying about what the nature of reality really was. Psychotherapy was too expensive and philosophical therapy was too interesting.
So I switched to philosophy. I thought that if science couldn’t answer my unavoidable questions, at least philosophy could tell me why not, and maybe it could even answer the questions.
Imagine how troubling it was for me to discover quite soon that the history of philosophy was mainly a matter of great minds wrestling with science! At least from the beginning of the seventeenth century onward, the agenda of every one of the great philosophers has been set by advances in physics and chemistry and later also in biology.
It took a few years, but by reading David Hume (1711–1776), I was able to figure out the mistake preventing science from satisfying me. The mistake, as Hume showed so powerfully, was to think that there is any more to reality than the laws of nature that science discovers.
For the past 40 years, I have been trying to work out exactly how advances, especially in biology, neuroscience, and evolutionary anthropology, fit together with what physical science has long told us. I spent a lot of that time on the foundations of economics and the other behavioral sciences. I even went back to grad school for a couple of years to study molecular biology. The results were a lot of books and papers on technical issues in the philosophy of science, matters of purely academic interest. Nobody gets tenure, in philosophy at any rate, for figuring out the nature of reality. Doing that turned out to be a by-product of all the thinking that went into those academic articles and scholarly books.
Now I have finally seen how all the pieces fit together to settle the daunting, unavoidable, relentless questions we all have about the nature of things and the nature of us. There is only one way all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. But there are lots of different ways in which to figure out that one way. The path I took to put the pieces together was just one path of many, and probably not the most efficient one. I hope this book will help you save a step or two in coming to the same conclusions.
Chapter 1
ANSWERING
LIFE’S PERSISTENT
QUESTIONS:
DO YOU WANT
STORIES OR REALITY?
EVERYONE SEEMS TO KNOW WHAT LIFE’S persistent questions are. Almost all of us have been interested in answering them at one time or another, starting back sometime in our childhood when the lights were turned out and we found ourselves staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. As time goes on, thinking about sex increasingly pushes these thoughts out of adolescent minds. This is fortunate. Otherwise there would be an even greater oversupply of philosophy and divinity students than there is of English majors. But the questions keep coming back, all too often right after sex.
THE PERSISTENT QUESTIONS
These are the questions that always bothered me as I stared at the ceiling after the lights were turned off. Maybe they’re the same ones you’ve entertained in periods of insomnia. Besides Is there a God? (everyone’s favorite), there are lots of other persistent questions about the nature of reality, the purpose of the universe, the meaning of life, the nature of the self, what happens when we die, whether there is free will,