The success of multiple recent books advocating for a kind of “new atheism” has been something of a phenomenon in American popular culture. The latest entry, courtesy of Duke’s very own Professor Alex Rosenberg, is “The Atheist’s Guide to Realty: Enjoying Life without Illusions.” As its sanguine title might suggest, this book aims to develop a positive, prescriptive account of atheism to complement the more typically offered and often tiresome and unproductive arguments against religion. Sure, the “a-theist” must deny theism, but what ought he to affirm?
Professor Rosenberg’s answer is the world-view he calls “scientism,” a tribute to the scientific understanding which, evidently, necessitates atheism. Followers of scientism already know the “truth” that “theism is not a serious alternative that still needs to be refuted.” Scientism instead “trusts” science as the only “way to acquire knowledge.” More strongly, it holds that “all of the processes in the universe, from atomic to bodily to mental, are purely physical processes involving fermions and bosons interacting with one another.”
One is thus asked to take for granted not only that everything in the universe is, in principle, scientifically intelligible to the human brain, but also that it is now intelligible on the basis of two distinct statistical distributions developed less than a hundred years ago. Moreover, all of this is based in part on scientism’s admiration for the intellectual rigor and honesty of science, in which “nothing is taken for granted.”
As soon as one subscribes to this remarkable version of “physicalism,” a number of pesky illusions, e.g., purpose, subjectivity—and even thought itself—vanish necessarily as a matter of tautology. Such matters of introspection evidently do not fall under scientism’s current understanding of the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein statistics, and therefore must be dispensed with post-haste.
Take, for example, the experience of pain. Even the greatest conceivable expert on fermions and bosons, if he were totally numb, would not know what it is like to have a toothache. This is because a heap of physical stuff cannot be pain anymore than it can be “about” something. One can only form an idea of pain and other such qualia from the inside—precisely the inside that scientism pretends to dispense with. Do such examples then pose a problem for physicalism?
It would appear not. Scientism “already knows [the examples] have to be wrong,” and that science will eventually show this. Indeed, “it will probably take less than 2,000 years for science to show what type of a neurological phenomenon consciousness is,” and we physicalists can be confident that this account will rest on an essentially unmodified theory of how fermions and bosons interact. Such is a faith that makes angels weep.
Such troublesome thought experiments make the mistake of taking conscious introspection—i.e., the stuff we actually experience—seriously. Morality also suffers from this defect, and we are simply mistaken to speak of a certain belief or practice as right or wrong from a moral point of view. There is no scientific basis for morality, and, as a follower of scientism, one is constrained to accept such “nihilism.”
Fortunately, scientism posits a “core morality” shared by “all cultures, and almost everyone in them.” This “core morality” is a byproduct of human evolution—we couldn’t get rid of it even if we wanted to. As such, regardless of their beliefs, people will essentially behave nicely—hence Professor Rosenberg’s palliative term “nice nihilism.” The Nazis, who obviously were “right to think that they... shared our core morality,” simply had some wildly wrong “factual beliefs about Jews, Roma, gays.” Science cannot affirm this core morality, but it can affirm facts, and these facts will interact with the moral core to produce a “fairly left-wing agenda” that is “redistributionist and egalitarian.” But of course!
In addition to supporting the public option and free day care, interactions between fermions and bosons apparently have strong preferences about what they would like to study in college. Indeed, disciplines in the humanities are sadly quiescent in their embrace of scientism’s revelation that “there is no such thing as wisdom,” and therefore no great reason for humanistic study other than trivial entertainment. Practitioners of the humanities will persist in their foolish preference for narratives, stories, intentionality and perhaps even soulfulness, but scientism reveals such illusions for what they are—an evolutionary crutch. Plus, science is so much harder than the humanities, relying on “formulas... systems of equations and geometrical proofs” (i.e., stuff only smart people get), rather than delusional storytelling.
Come to think of it, what does scientism have to tell us about the status of these vaunted mathematical results? There is no reason, based on the arguments in this book, to privilege faith in the ingrained, evolutionarily determined rules of logical inference, and the strong subjective experiences with which they’re associated, over faith in the so-called “core-morality.” There is no reason to convince oneself that thought and free will and subjective experience are meaningless, but that what one observes in a lab coat is epistemologically sacrosanct.
Ultimately, though I do not find scientism’s arguments against purpose convincing, I am still less impressed by the consolation the book attempts to provide for those who do. Dr. Rosenberg somewhat seriously suggests Prozac, proving that atheism, too, must sometimes offer opiates to the masses. In short, scientism’s solutions seem worthy of just the sort of person who would buy into the seriousness of its problems.
Darren Beattie is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in political science. His column runs every other Monday.
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