The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions [Hardcover]

Alex Rosenberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2011

A book for nonbelievers who embrace the reality-driven life.

We can't avoid the persistent questions about the meaning of life-and the nature of reality. Philosopher Alex Rosenberg maintains that science is the only thing that can really answer them—all of them. His bracing and ultimately upbeat book takes physics seriously as the complete description of reality and accepts all its consequences. He shows how physics makes Darwinian natural selection the only way life can emerge, and how that deprives nature of purpose, and human action of meaning, while it exposes conscious illusions such as free will and the self. The science that makes us nonbelievers provides the insight into the real difference between right and wrong, the nature of the mind, even the direction of human history. The Atheist's Guide to Reality draws powerful implications for the ethical and political issues that roil contemporary life. The result is nice nihilism, a surprisingly sanguine perspective atheists can happily embrace.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This eccentric, funny treatise on "scientism,"...takes a perverse delight in "nice nihilism." Rosenberg doesn't believe in free will, morality, or secular humanism, and apparently you shouldn't either, dummy...this dismemberment of mainstream worldviews abounds with clever barbs and dry one-liners.” (Village Voice )

“I enjoyed The Atheist's Guide to Reality. Full of daring moves, it takes the sin of scientism as the ultimate virtue. Alex Rosenberg has sheared the nature of things down to the bedrock, and exposed our common vanity.” (E. O. Wilson The Ants )

“The Atheist’s Guide to Reality will, like the best scholarship and science, remove you from your comfort zone. And that is the only way to gain new and better perspectives on our place in the cosmos.” (Lawrence Krauss A Universe From Nothing )

“For those of us who have pondered what David Hume might have said, were he to have had the benefit of all the scientific knowledge that succeeded his death, Alex Rosenberg’s wonderful new book perfectly satisfies.” (Rebecca Goldstein 36 Arguments for the Existence of God )

About the Author

Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at Duke University and the codirector of the Duke Center for Philosophy of Biology. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st ptg edition (October 3, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393080234
• ISBN-13: 978-0393080230
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1.2 x 8.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #323,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy (with secondary appointments in the biology and political science departments) at Duke University. Rosenberg has been a visiting professor and fellow of the at the Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota, as well as the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Oxford University and a visiting fellow of the Philosophy Department at the Research School of Social Science, of the Australian National University. He has held fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. In 1993 Rosenberg received the Lakatos Award in the philosophy of science. In 2006-2007 he held a fellowship at the National Humanities Center. He was also the Phi Beta Kappa-Romanell Lecturer for 2006-2007.

Rosenberg's books include

The Structure of Biological Science (Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Philosophy of Social Science (Westview Press, 2012)
Economics: Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? (University of Chicago Press, 1992)
Instrumental Biology, or the Disunity of Science (University of Chicago Press, 1994)
Darwinism in Philosophy, Social Science and Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Approach (Routledge, 2011)
Darwinian Reductionism or How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology (University of Chicago Press, 2006)
The Philosophy of Biology: A Contemporary Introduction (with Daniel McShea, Routledge, 2007)
and
The Atheist's Guide to Reality (Norton, 2011).

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 74 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I would rate this a very good book if there were such a thing as good October 24, 2011

By B. Tipling

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

You are not actually reading a review, and I am not actually writing about anything in this review. That is just an illusion the chemistry in our brains create to animate the falsehood that at least hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection can be blamed for. The physical facts explain all the facts, and in this case they explain how some neurons and synapses in the brain of this reviewer now represent a little bit less incorrect of a state than before. Though common sense would lead me to think that I chose to read this book, a scientistic view requires us to recognize that I could have done no such thing and that the pursuit of improving my understanding of reality is ultimately pointless, at least in the grand scheme of a universe where entropy is always increasing. What was I about to do, oh that's right, go cry in the corner for the rest of my meaningless life. This book is devastating, and I couldn't put it down. No really, I couldn't, I have all the free will of a banana slug.

65 of 86 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Guide for the Reality-Driven Life! September 24, 2011

By CKent

Format:Hardcover

After The God Delusion, Letter to a Christian Nation, and God is not Great, I thought there was not much more to say about Atheism.

But, as the author says, it turns out that atheism is more just one big No!

It was science that made me an atheist, that and the problem of evil, for course. And this is where the Atheist's Guide comes in.

What it shows is that by driving to atheism science drives us to a lot of other powerful, unexpected, and important insights about reality too: For example, there's the fact that what Darwin discovered comes right out of physics. The book explains why there isn't even any room for stupid design, let alone intelligent design in the process that makes things look like God put them together.

I wasn't sure I'd be able to live with the author's Nice Nihilism till I got to the last chapter and realized that science makes my politics unavoidable. The road from the biology to the politics goes right through neuroscience, history, economics and the humanities. What a ride!

I was really surprised, as an atheist, after reading The Atheist's Guide I really do end up enjoying life more.

44 of 58 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but problematic November 3, 2011

By Carlos

Format:Hardcover

Rosenberg presents what he calls "scientism", building on his previous work on what he calls "the disenchanted naturalist's guide to reality". In brief, Rosenberg describes what the world (including ourselves) looks like from the 'scientistic' point of view. The central idea of scientism, as he presents it, is that "the physical facts fix all the facts": physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains everything else.

More problematic, perhaps, is his view that if something cannot be explained in terms of biology (chemistry, physics), then it isn't real. What I found disappointing here isn't that view itself, but the absence of arguments for it. For example, he advocates eliminativism about intentionality: that there isn't really any such thing as intentionality or 'aboutness'. But he doesn't argue for this view, from what I could tell. He just stipulates that intentionality cannot be naturalized, and that all the various attempts to naturalize intentionality (or normativity, or autonomy) have failed. He doesn't demonstrate (at least not to this reader's satisfaction) that they have failed. Speaking as someone who favors naturalizing intentionality and agency, rather than doing away with them or endorsing non-naturalism, I was frustrated by the absence of clear rebuttals of the approaches that I favor.

There are, moreover, certain problems in his account of scientism that I would have liked to have seen taken more seriously. For one thing, Rosenberg doesn't distinguish between scientism and reductive physicalism. But presumably one could take one's metaphysics from natural science, and so be scientistic in a broad sense, without taking any position on the reducibility of biology to physics. Whether or not biology is reducible to physics is a contentious issue about philosophers of science, and in any event, whether or not biology is reducible to physics does not seem to be itself a scientific question.

Finally -- and here is the big problem -- how is science possible? The question, "how is science possible?" certainly seems to be a good question, and if we're going to rule it out on the grounds that it's not itself a scientific question, then we'd also have to rule out questions such as "is biology reducible to physics?", which Rosenberg thinks we have a perfectly good answer for ("yes"). Here Rosenberg makes a vague gesture towards science as common sense as refined by trial and error. Well and good! But having spent so much of the book describing all the ways in which common sense is wrong, one wonders: how common sense could even be right enough to ground the process of trial and error that culminates in the nearly-complete description of reality that scientism provides?

Put in history-of-philosophy terms: what happens to science in light of science itself? We could say, "natural selection has selected against cognitive accuracy whenever cognitive accuracy is maladaptive, and we have no reason to believe that our own cognitive capacities are accurate, so science itself becomes one more illusion" or we could say, "science is a self-correcting enterprise that has slowly emerged from the complicated feedback-mechanisms at work in how bacteria respond to sucrose levels". In other words, Darwin leads to both Nietzsche and to Dewey. Rosenberg seems to want to have it both ways, but he doesn't do the hard work to show that he can.