The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [5]
If you buy into that part of science that is pretty well fixed and not likely to be revised by even the most radical new discoveries, there is really only one challenge for the committed atheist: to understand the science that provides the obviously and irrefutably correct answers to the persistent questions. Understanding the science is a challenge because of the way science packages its discoveries. Our brain just didn’t evolve to be able to unwrap the package easily. This is why most people have never been able to deal with science. And it’s the main reason why there have always been far fewer atheists than believers.
WHAT’S IN A NAME? WOULD ATHEISM BY ANY OTHER NAME SOUND SWEETER?
Before tackling the persistent questions, we need a brief detour to talk about labels. The real problem for atheists is not a matter of what to believe. The real problem is finding a label that describes what we do believe instead of one that only announces what we don’t believe.
Atheists have always faced a public relations problem, especially in the United States. Most Americans won’t trust them. That’s one reason why only one elected official, Pete Stark, the U.S. congressional representative from San Francisco—hotbed of Christian fundamentalism—has ever admitted to atheism. He did it because an atheist group offered a $1,000 reward to the highest-ranking elected official in the country willing to own up to atheism. The problem is less serious in Britain, where the last foreign minister announced he was an atheist without the prompting of a reward.
In recent years, some atheists have tried to deal with the public relations problem by finding a new label. Atheists, they argue, should call themselves “Brights.” The word bright, with its connotations of intelligence and enlightenment, recalls the eighteenth-century period known as the Age of Reason, a time when the natural sciences and scientific philosophy flourished in Europe, before being eclipsed by Romanticism. Of course, there is now a Brights website and a Wikipedia article, too. They even have a logo.
But the label “Bright” has some obvious limitations. It’s precious and self-congratulatory. It also offends theists, who can’t help concluding that we “Brights” must think they are “dim.”
Some atheists will also be unhappy with “Bright” because they are down on the Enlightenment. It ended badly—remember the reign of terror during the French Revolution? If that’s a good reason, or if we worry that the label will provoke needless offense, let me suggest something else:
Scientism—noun; scientistic—adjective.
Scientism has two related meanings, both of them pejorative. According to one of these meanings, scientism names the improper or mistaken application of scientific methods or findings outside their appropriate domain, especially to questions treated by the humanities. The second meaning is more common: Scientism is the exaggerated confidence in the methods of science as the most (or the only) reliable tools of inquiry, and an equally unfounded belief that at least the most well established of its findings are the only objective truths there are.
If we are unhappy with “atheist” because it defines us by what we do not believe, and uncomfortable with “Bright” because it’s too cute or too clever by half, we can take “scientism” away from our opponents. We have at least one good reason for trying.
“Scientism” is the pejorative label given to our positive view by those who really want to have their theistic cake and dine at the table of science’s bounties, too. Opponents of scientism would never charge their cardiologists or auto mechanics or software engineers with “scientism” when their health, travel plans, or Web surfing are in danger. But just try subjecting their nonscientific mores and norms, their music or metaphysics,