The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [45]
There isn’t any rhyme or reason to the universe. It’s just one damn thing after the other. Real purpose has been ruled out by physics. And Darwinian natural selection is simply physics at work among the organic macromolecules. Many of us will treat this nihilism as a good thing. Remember the idea of God being responsible for the twentieth century?
Recognizing the fact of purposelessness in a world that is screaming design at us out of every niche and every organ is not easy. Even among people who accept scientism, the complete purposelessness of things is difficult to keep firmly in mind. That’s because the teleological worldview is the second strongest illusion nature foists on us. We shall see that it does so as the side effect of an even deeper illusion, one that has itself a thoroughly Darwinian explanation. Exploring and exploding this last illusion is by far the biggest challenge scientism faces.
We’ll start the task in the next chapter by asking where exactly this nihilism about purpose leaves human nature. Surely there is meaning and purpose in our lives, our actions, our history and institutions? We put it there. Surely we don’t countenance nihilism about personal morality and social justice? If we did, others might rightly be anxious about our impact on culture and politics. And yet, doesn’t nihilism about the physical and biological worlds put us on the slippery slope down to nihilism about the social and the psychological worlds, as well as the moral and the political ones?
Yup. But there’s nothing to worry about.
Chapter 5
MORALITY:
THE BAD NEWS
IF YOU ARE LIKE MOST PEOPLE CONTEMPLATING scientism, it’s the persistent questions about morality and mortality that grip you, not trivial topics like the nature of reality, the purpose of the universe, or the inevitability of natural selection.
After all, the trouble most people have with atheism is that if they really thought there were no God, human life would no longer have any value, they wouldn’t have much reason to go on living, and even less reason to be decent people. The most persistent questions atheists get asked by theists are these two: In a world you think is devoid of purpose, why do you bother getting up in the morning? And in such a world, what stops you from cutting all the moral corners you can? This chapter and the next deal with the second question. The first one, about the meaning of our lives, we’ll take up in Chapter 9.
Scientism seems to make the unavoidable questions about morality even more urgent. In a world where physics fixes all the facts, it’s hard to see how there could be room for moral facts. In a universe headed for its own heat death, there is no cosmic value to human life, your own or anyone else’s. Why bother to be good?
We need to answer these questions. But we should also worry about the public relations nightmare for scientism produced by the answer theists try to foist on scientism. The militant exponents of the higher superstitions say that scientism has no room for morality and can’t even condemn the wrongdoing of a monster like Hitler. Religious people especially argue that we cannot really have any values—things we stand up for just because they are right—and that we are not to be trusted to be good when we can get away with something. They complain that our worldview has no moral compass. These charges get redoubled once theists see how big a role Darwinian natural selection plays in scientism’s view of reality. Many of the most vocal people who have taken sides against this scientific theory (for instance, the founders of the Discovery Institute, which advocates “intelligent design”) have frankly done so because they think it’s morally dangerous, not because it lacks evidence. If Darwinism is true, then anything