The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [7]
Science has three things going for it that religion doesn’t have. First, the facts that make any story true, when it is true, are to be found in equations, theories, models, and laws. Second, most of religion’s best stories are false. Third, and most important, science shows that the stories we tell one another to explain our own and other people’s actions and to answer the persistent questions are all based on a series of illusions. That should be enough to forestall our innate penchant for stories.
We won’t spend any time showing that religion’s most important stories are false, but the chapters that follow will build the case against stories teaching us anything important about reality, history, or ourselves. By the time you get to the last chapter, you will understand why, no matter how enjoyable a story is, it’s never much more than a story. Scientism requires that we be able to see through the superficial charms of narrative, the specious sense of closure provided by happy (or even sad) endings, the feeling of relief from curiosity when dots are connected into a plausible conspiracy. We need to begin to disentangle ourselves from our species’ love affair with stories. That’s the first challenge for scientism.
We prefer our information to come in a package with a natural starting place, an exciting, tension-filled middle, topped off by a satisfying finish. We prefer stories with plots that make sense of the order of events by revealing their meanings. The plot reveals how the outcome resulted from the motives, plans, and purposes of the heroes and heroines, the villains, and the bystanders that strut across the story’s stage. It’s not just that we find stories easy to remember or that they excite our emotions or even that they satisfy the psychological itch of curiosity better than anything else. Our attachment to stories is much stronger and more mischievous. Experiments show that when information comes to us any other way, we have trouble understanding it, remembering it, and believing it. When we have a choice between buying into a story versus believing anything that can be expressed as a lab report or a computer program or a mathematical model, we’ll take the story every time. Think about humanity’s greatest hits (they also used to be among the Humanities’ greatest hits before “the canon” took a hit): the Odyssey, Hamlet, War and Peace, Middlemarch, Sophie’s Choice—great narratives, sources of meaning and wisdom, because they are stories that move us emotionally. Stories, and only stories, “sell.”
Why are we suckers for stories? Why is it that despite their appeal, stories—even true ones—never really convey any deep understanding of anything? The answer requires some of the story-free science that is so hard to keep in mind—Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the most basic laws of physics. Chapter 2 will provide some of the details, and Chapters 6–9 the rest. But we can sketch some of them here.
Everyone loves narratives, across all cultures and all times, and all that is needed is language—any language at all that humans speak. As we’ll see in Chapter 5, our brain was shaped by natural selection to take on board very early in life, or maybe even innately, a set of guesses about how other people operate. The guesses eventually take the shape of a sort of theory about what people want, what they think is going on around them, and how those wants and beliefs work together to determine people’s choices and actions. One reason to think that this “theory of mind” is almost innate is that infants begin to use it when they are only 6 or 7 months old. If it is not innate, then we are primed to learn it early in life with