The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [4]
Some people are troubled by immorality almost as much as they are by immortality. (Did you have to read that sentence twice?) Not as many are troubled by it as we might like. But almost everyone wants to know the nature of right and wrong, good and evil, why we should be moral, and whether abortion, euthanasia, cloning, or having fun is forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory.
This book aims to provide the correct answers to most of the persistent questions. I hope to explain enough about reality so that, as the old textbooks used to say, answers to any remaining questions “can be left as an exercise to the reader.”
Here is a list of some of the questions and their short answers. The rest of this book explains the answers in more detail. Given what we know from the sciences, the answers are all pretty obvious. The interesting thing is to recognize how totally unavoidable they are, provided you place your confidence in science to provide the answers.
Is there a God? No.
What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is.
What is the purpose of the universe? There is none.
What is the meaning of life? Ditto.
Why am I here? Just dumb luck.
Does prayer work? Of course not.
Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding?
Is there free will? Not a chance!
What happens when we die? Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us.
What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them.
Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral.
Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes.
What is love, and how can I find it? Love is the solution to a strategic interaction problem. Don’t look for it; it will find you when you need it.
Does history have any meaning or purpose? It’s full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing.
Does the human past have any lessons for our future? Fewer and fewer, if it ever had any to begin with.
The one persistent question not addressed directly in the pages that follow (though we’ll have some fun with it here and there) is the very first one: Is there a God? We already know the correct answer to that one. In the rest of this book, we will take the best reason for atheism—science—and show what else it commits us atheists to believing. There are compelling reasons to deny God’s existence, but those reasons don’t just support a negative conclusion: no God, end of story. They provide everything we need to answer all the other questions that inevitably come along with the God question.
There are many reasons for not spending any more time on the question, Is there a God? Here are three good ones:
First of all, lots of people have been there and done that—so many that most professional atheists long ago began to repeat their own and other people’s solid arguments. In fact, we really haven’t needed one since Hume wrote his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, first published, by his arrangement, three years after his death in 1779. (Is there a lesson here for us atheists?)
Second reason: Atheist tracts don’t work. We all know what’s wrong with the standard arguments for God’s existence. The decisive arguments against God’s existence are also well known. It’s equally evident that the failure of the positive arguments for God’s existence and the force of the negative arguments against it don’t persuade theists. They know the knockdown arguments as well as we do, and still they believe. We are not going to convince them.
The third reason we won’t bother to refute theism is that we have better things to do—like figuring out exactly what we ought to believe about a reality without a God. Once a person has become an atheist, a lot of questions become even more relentless than