Alex Rosenberg is an atheistic naturalist, a philosopher who holds that nature is all there is, there is no supernature. Rosenberg explains in an essay titled The Disenchanted Naturalist's Guide to Reality to provide an overview of what it is that naturalists believe.
He begins with this preface:
This is a précis of an argument that naturalism forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality.Rosenberg wishes to draw "the full conclusion from a consistently atheistic position," as Sartre put it in describing existentialism.
It is one that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify, reinterpret, or recast to avoid its harshest conclusions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the significance of our consciousness self-awareness, and the limits of human self-understanding.
He will have none of the namby-pamby naturalism of those atheists, like Hitchens and Dawkins, who think they can reject God and still cling to belief that life is meaningful, that morality exists, and that truth can be known.
Rosenberg's is a full-blooded naturalism that recognizes that all of those things are contingent upon the existence of a transcendent moral authority. His essay is a call to his fellow atheists to "man-up" and disabuse themselves of their comfortable illusions.
No God, he avers, means no genuine meaning to life, no non-arbitrary morality, and no objective truth.
He divides his essay into eight topics, some of which will be addressed here at Viewpoint over the next couple of days. His first topic is an explication of "scientism," a term that is in some disrepute but which Rosenberg wants to resuscitate. Here's an excerpt:
We all lie awake some nights asking questions about the universe, its meaning, our place in it, the meaning of life, and our lives, who we are, what we should do, as well as questions about god, free will, morality, mortality, the mind, emotions, love. These worries are a luxury compared to the ones most people on Earth address.
But they are persistent. And yet they all have simple answers, ones we can pretty well read off from science....Scientism is my label for what any one who takes science seriously should believe, and scientistic is just an in-your face adjective for accepting science’s description of the nature of reality.
You don’t have to be a scientist to be scientistic.
Scientism is the view that answers to all important questions can be provided through scientific investigation. This is because everything that exists is simply some combination of matter and energy [This is a view called materialism].Rosenberg's claim here that science can answer all the important questions is surely wrong. It can't, for example, answer, or even address, the question whether we have a soul, whether there's life after death, whether altruism is morally superior to selfishness, whether God exists, what truth is, or a host of other very important matters which human beings frequently ponder.
Since science investigates matter and energy it will eventually find the answers to all our questions.
If one embraces naturalism [the belief that nature is all there is] then one is likely also to embrace scientism.
In the next topic, titled The Nature Of Reality? Just Ask Physics Rosenberg gives a pretty clear statement of what materialists believe about the world:
What is the world really like? It’s fermions and bosons [subatomic particles], and everything that can be made up of them, and nothing that can’t be made up of them. All the facts about fermions and bosons determine or “fix” all the other facts about reality and what exists in this universe or any other if ... there are other ones.Ideas have consequences. If Rosenberg is right in saying that all that exists is matter, energy and the forces between them then several conclusions inevitably follow. Those conclusions are the topic of the remaining sections of his paper.
We'll reflect upon them over the next several days.