Tag Archives: Atheist’s Guide to Reality

A Guide to Reality, Part 4

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Chapter 2 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is probably the key chapter in the book. That’s where Professor Rosenberg lays out his view of physics and the nature of reality. He doesn’t mince words:

Everything in the universe is made up of the stuff that physics tells us fills up space, including the spaces that we fill up. And physics can tell us how everything in the universe works, in principle and in practice, better than anything else. Physics catalogs all the basic kinds of things that there are and all the things that can happen to them (21).

According to Rosenberg, “we should embrace physics as the whole truth about reality”. Why? Because science is a cumulative process, in which findings are confirmed, corrected or refuted, resulting in a solid foundation. Physicists are still learning things, but the “part of [physics] that explains almost everything in the universe – including us – is finished, and much of it has been finished for a century or more” (21).

Physicists, in particular, have discovered that everything in the universe is composed of either fermions (such as quarks, electrons and neutrinos) and bosons (like photons and gluons), and combinations thereof (like protons and molecules). Fermions are usually associated with matter, while bosons are usually associated with fields and forces. Rosenberg says that’s all there is:

All the processes in the universe, from atomic to bodily to mental, are purely physical processes involving fermions and bosons interacting with one another…Physical theory explains and predicts almost everything to inconceivably precise values over the entire body of data available…From a small number of laws, physics can neatly explain the whole trajectory of the universe and everything in it…The phenomenal accuracy of its prediction, the unimaginable power of its technological application, and the breathtaking extent and detail of its explanations are powerful reasons to believe that physics is the whole truth about reality (21-25).

But what about the other sciences? Surely, chemistry and biology, for example, say something true about reality. Rosenberg, however, argues that physics explains chemistry and chemistry explains biology. Everything that happens in your body is a chemical process, and every chemical process is a physical process:

The only causes in the universe are physical, and everything in the universe that has a cause has a physical cause. In fact, we can go further and confidently assert that the physical facts fix all the facts … including the chemical, biological, psychological, social, economic, political and other human facts (25-26).

He left out the geological and cosmological, but you get the idea. Higher-level sciences are in principle reducible to lower-level sciences. Philosophers call this view “reductionism”. Rosenberg is clearly a “reductionist” of some sort. A similar claim is that all higher-level facts depend or “supervene” on lower-level facts (this principle is called “supervenience”). Rosenberg asks us to imagine two regions of space-time, our own plus another millions of light-years away, in which every fermion and boson is arranged exactly the same way. In such a case, everything else in the two regions would be the same too. Regardless of the regions’ respective histories, if all the sub-atomic particles are arranged the same way, the two regions will contain the same rocks, the same birds and bees, the same political institutions, the same music, the same people with the same memories and thoughts. Physics fixes all the facts.

Next time, before continuing with chapter 2, we’ll consider whether it’s reasonable to “embrace physics as the whole truth about reality”.

A Guide to Reality, Part 3

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Continuing to work through The Atheist’s Guide to Reality by Alex Rosenberg:

Professor Rosenberg begins chapter 1 by explaining why he’s not going to spend much time arguing for atheism: others, especially David Hume, have already done that quite well; such arguments, even very good ones, don’t convince true believers; and anyway, it’s more important to understand how science can help us live without illusions than to keep talking about religion.

Instead, Rosenberg is going to discuss a view called “scientism”. As he notes, “scientism” is usually applied in a negative way to people who supposedly worship science, or try to extend it beyond its natural borders, or simply take it too seriously. Rosenberg welcomes the term, defining it this way:

[Scientism] 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 (6-7).

The idea that the current scientific description of the word is fundamentally accurate is known among philosophers as “scientific realism”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines it as “a positive epistemic attitude towards the content of our best [scientific] theories and models, recommending belief in both observable and unobservable aspects of the world described by the sciences”. In other words, science is a highly reliable way to acquire knowledge of the world. Science allows us to learn about the world as it is, independent of our minds. Science even allows us to find out about things we can’t directly observe, like the Big Bang and sub-atomic particles.

Rosenberg is clearly a scientific realist. Not all philosophers are (they, in fact, disagree to some extent about what science is). But Rosenberg’s scientism goes beyond simple scientific realism when he asserts that “the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything”.

Maybe he’s exaggerating on purpose (not something philosophers ordinarily do), but are you and I doing science when we look out the window and agree that it’s snowing? Is a student doing science when she concludes that Socrates was mortal if Socrates was a man and all men are mortal? As Rosenberg knows, of course, science relies on occasionally unreliable activities like seeing and hearing in order to gather evidence. Even though scientists don’t rely on a single person’s observations, they do use the same perceptual abilities the rest of us employ to acquire knowledge. In addition, most of us would agree that people clearly know lots of things that aren’t “scientific” in the usual sense (including math, logic, historical facts, cultural practices and whether the Ford is in the driveway).

Perhaps it’s enough that an adherent of scientism believes that, when applied correctly, the various methods of science are by far the best ways we have to get at the truth about many or most features of the world. Those methods include classification, observation, experimentation, measurement, replication, discussion, publication and other things physicists, chemists, biologists and psychologists regularly do.That seems right to me, but I don’t think it’s enough for Rosenberg.

Before moving on, I should mention that Rosenberg also considers this question: if science is such a reliable method of determining the truth, why do so many people reject scientific conclusions? One reason, of course, is that scientific results are often revised. Another is that scientists often disagree among themselves, especially on topics that make the news, in some cases because they are influenced by un-scientific factors, like working for Exxon. Yet another big reason why many are skeptical about science is that scientific conclusions often make people uncomfortable (as in the case of climate change, for example).

Rosenberg, however, mainly discusses the human need for “stories”, by which he means our tendency to understand the world in terms of personalities and purposes. He argues that our ancestors became good at recognizing and interpreting purposeful behavior because that skill made it much easier to live and prosper among other people. Evolution, however, overshot the mark. People heard thunder and concluded that Someone was angry. Today, according to Rosenberg, people have trouble understanding math and physics because their subject matter doesn’t include human beings or other creatures doing things. In other words, science is especially hard because most people haven’t been built (through evolution) to understand it. Religion, on the other hand, often involves stories, which we generally find more easy to understand than science.

In the next installment: physics and the nature of reality.

A Guide to Reality, Part 2

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A couple days ago, I stated my intention (you might even say I promised) to work through Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without IIlusions right here at WOCS. That was in part 1. Believe it or not, this is part 2.

In his preface, Professor Rosenberg explains that he wrote the book for people who are ready to face reality. By that he means people who believe there is no God (atheists) or have serious doubts (agnostics) and who want to know what science has to say about a few perennial questions that keep some of us awake at night. He thinks the scientific view of reality has certain consequences:

The book is about those consequences. It provides an uncompromising, hard-boiled, no-nonsense, unsentimental view of the nature of reality, the purpose of things, the meaning of life, the trajectory of human history, morality and mortality, the will, the mind and the self (ix).

Rosenberg scoffs at attempts to reconcile science and religion. He holds that “an unblinking scientific worldview requires atheism” (viii), which explains why most of America’s leading scientists are atheists and those who aren’t atheists are mostly agnostics.

I don’t think it makes any difference to Rosenberg whether science leads us to atheism or atheism leads us to science. He started out in physics, ended up in philosophy, branched out to biology and economics, and somewhere along the way became an atheist. But someone might proceed in the other direction: doubting God’s existence and then looking to science to explain why the world is the way it is. His contention is that science and atheism are compatible, while science and religion (or theism) aren’t.

In my opinion, however, he exaggerates the conflict. You don’t have to deny God’s existence in order to be an excellent scientist. Instead, what you need to do is put thoughts of God aside when you’re doing science. Science is the search for natural explanations, not supernatural ones. Invoking God as the explanation for the existence of the human eye, for example, amounts to throwing up your hands and choosing a different subject. If you want to speculate about some god or other creating the universe and initializing the fundamental constants (like the mass of an electron) to values supportive of life, you’re not doing science. In this methodological sense, a scientist has to be an atheist.

But despite what Rosenberg says, nobody knows why or how the universe came into existence; or if it’s always existed in some form or other; or whether our universe is one of many. Even if scientists eventually figure out the answers to those questions, we’ll never be able to rule out the possibility that some creator or creative force beyond our universe got the cosmic ball rolling. Nor will we ever be able to prove that God, Zeus or Santa Claus isn’t watching right now to see if we’ve been naughty or nice. What evidence could there be to prove that kind of negative?

What we can say is that, historically speaking, science has shown a vast number of previously mysterious phenomena to be natural processes. There is no reason to think we need an entity outside space and time to explain why there are stars and galaxies, or why there are birds and bees, or why the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth. As fewer phenomena have seemed to require a supernatural explanation, it has seemed less and less likely that there is Anyone Up There. As we’ve learned more about our world, ancient stories have become much less plausible. So far as science is concerned, God is a dead letter.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean God is dead, however implausible that he, she, it or they either are or ever were “alive”.

Next time: stories and scientism.

A Guide to Reality, Part 1

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Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy and chairman of the philosophy department at Duke University. He’s published more than 100 articles and reviews. Among his books are Microeconomic Laws: A Philosophical Analysis, Hume and the Problem of Causation, The Structure of Biological Science and Darwinian Reductionism. Like most philosophers these days, he writes for an academic audience. In 2011, however, he published a book for a general audience: The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions.

The title is a little misleading, since Rosenberg derives his atheism from a more fundamental belief called “scientism”. That’s the view according to which, in Rosenberg’s words, “the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything”. Unfortunately, there is no word for a person who accepts scientism other than “scientist” and you can be a scientist without believing in scientism. For that matter, you can be an atheist without believing in scientism. 

On the other hand, if you’re sure of God’s existence, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality probably won’t change your mind. It’s a book for people who are willing to take science extremely seriously, even to the point of concluding that many of humanity’s most common beliefs are wrong. Since I’m one of those people, I enjoyed the book, even while disagreeing with some of Rosenberg’s conclusions.

Because The Atheist’s Guide is well-written and covers so much ground (for example, physics, evolution, perception, consciousness, free will, history and morality), I thought it would be an interesting exercise to work through it, explaining and responding to Professor Rosenberg’s views right here on this blog (while continuing to write about other things, like class warfare and mowing the lawn). 

If you want to consider the professor’s views first-hand and be able to correct my account of what he has to say (assuming you want to participate), the paperback and electronic versions are going for less than $15 online.

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Next time:  the relationship between science and atheism.