“The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions,’’ by Duke University philosophy professor Alex Rosenberg, isn’t quite in the same category as Harris’s and Dawkins’s tomes. While he is certainly disdainful of religious belief in many of the same ways as his more well-known colleagues, Rosenberg goes a bit further than they do, making some rather radical arguments about what it means to be a conscious, living being, and about the nature of existence. Some of his claims are more convincing than others, but all are thought-provoking.
Rosenberg argues for scientism, the idea that “the physical facts fix all the facts.’’ In other words, a basic understanding of physics tells us just about everything we need to know about how the universe works at a fundamental level, and we can extend this on up to chemistry and biology, and then, with an appeal to Darwinian processes to everything else. This provides Rosenberg with a framework to argue that almost everything we think has inherent value or meaning - our morality, our sociological theories, even the idea of a self - does not.
Rosenberg wants us to let go of the many illusions that define our conversations about life and science. We impute purpose to things that lack it. We act as though history and culture can be explained in terms of sweeping, general patterns. Everything can be explained in terms of what we know about physical reality. And there is nothing else.
It’s a seemingly simple notion, and one that many scientists and scientific-minded people would claim already to hew to, but it has surprisingly fraught implications. Rosenberg lays them out very early in Chapter 1, in a series of questions and 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.’’ Similarly, there’s no meaning to life; you and I are here because of dumb luck, and there’s no soul.
