The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions Kindle Edition

Most of the books by atheists such as Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris, seem to be addressed mainly at theists. If you have abandoned religious superstitions you may find their texts somewhat repetitive and perhaps a tad unnecessary. You already know that there is no supernatural domain, no gods, no angels, no demons, no ghosts, no miracles, no soul, no afterlife, no easter bunny, no tooth fairy, etc, etc. It was high time somebody wrote something on atheism for the non delusional, ie, something on atheism for atheists. Alex Rosenberg explores the epistemological, ontological and ethical consequences of atheism. The result is a fascinating book. In the process, he manages to redeem two all-too-often maligned words: scientism and nihilism. Strongly recommended.

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.

It's really a guide to understanding physics, which in turn eliminates god-concepts and/or "spiritual" experiences. It's a stretch for non-scientific types to grapple with how it started and how it's destined to end. Rosenberg's writing is more technical than I expected it to be, however, I was fascinated by his explanations. I'd recommend the book to anyone who is sorting through their inherited faith and reworking their questions about life. His clearest message is there's no purpose to any of it. That's difficult to comprehend, but I get it. I do, however, still have a reason to get out of bed each morning and do meaningful things.

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.

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.

Gave 5 stars for Rosenberg's thesis which highly resonated with me. The book is not that well written, is repetitive, and seems to be in an argument (justifiably so, given what he is saying.) On the other hand, his logic makes sense... By reading the book, I've changed ... I don't chase after, don't worry so much.. and enjoy life more. Highly recommend the book.