The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [6]
Let’s expropriate the epithet. In the pages that follow, we won’t use the label “Bright” as a variant on atheist. But we’ll call the worldview that all us atheists (and even some agnostics) share “scientism.” This is the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything; that science’s description of the world is correct in its fundamentals; and that when “complete,” what science tells us will not be surprisingly different from what it tells us today. We’ll often use the adjective “scientistic” in referring to the approaches, theories, methods, and descriptions of the nature of reality that all the sciences share. Science provides all the significant truths about reality, and knowing such truths is what real understanding is all about.
Most people don’t understand science, and most Americans don’t even believe its findings. They place the persistent questions in the hands of their pastors and try not to think about them. The trouble is, depositing these questions with your priest, vicar, imam, or rabbi never works. The questions persist. In America, every year you can find a new best-selling book devoted to answering these questions, usually in the Christian bookstores. They are published by people eager to make a buck on the combination of gullibility and anxiety that Americans seem to have so much of. A good example of the sort of book I mean is The Purpose Driven Life, written by a now very rich preacher who provides the pat Christian answers to the persistent questions. These answers, and their packaging, have made organized religion the most successful long-term growth industry in America since before the republic was founded. But the fact that there is a market for a new Christian self-help book every year shows that the pat answers don’t really scratch the itch.
There are two differences between the real answers to the persistent questions and the ones religion keeps trying to get people to buy into. First, the answers that science provides are not particularly warm and fuzzy. Second, once you understand them, they stick. You are unlikely to give them up, so long as you insist that evidence govern your beliefs.
To answer these unavoidable questions correctly, we have to be scientistic. Being scientistic doesn’t mean giving up anything we like to do—singing in a choir, volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, even enjoying literary criticism. It certainly doesn’t require we become scientists. We don’t even have to be scientific if that means being dispassionate, unemotional, number-crunching nerds. Being scientistic just means treating science as our exclusive guide to reality, to nature—both our own nature and everything else’s.
HOW MOTHER NATURE MADE THINGS DIFFICULT FOR SCIENCE
The most serious obstacle facing atheists when we set out to answer the persistent questions for ourselves is one erected by Mother Nature herself. Ironically, this barrier to scientism results from the very Darwinian evolutionary process that theism has to reject (as we’ll see in Chapter 3). It’s actually worse than ironic because the same Darwinian process that made it hard for anyone to understand science’s answers to these questions made it easy to be seduced by religion’s answers to them!
The big obstacle to accepting science’s answers to life’s relentless questions is deep, subtle, insidious, purely psychological, and probably hardwired into our genes. It’s a problem that even the most scientistic among us must grapple with. It’s not that some people will find the answers science gives scary or hard to follow. The problem doesn’t even look like a problem. It has to do with the way we—educated or uneducated, atheist or theist, agnostic, deist, scientist—in fact, all human beings—like our information to be “packaged.”
We are suckers for a good story—a description of events in the form of a plot with characters driven by motives. If information doesn’t come