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

"Like what? What he says about free will? Some of it is and some of it isn’t. The main point he makes, that we are material objects and have to obey the laws of physics, is uncontroversial. It’s also uncontroversial among scientists and philosophers that the form of libertarian free will — and this is something I’m deeply involved with right now — that people think they have, where we are conscious agents that can make choice A or choice B if we want to, is simply insupportable. The only people who really believe that are people who a) haven’t thought much about it — and that’s a lot of people or b) religious people who have this dualistic view that there is something more to your behavior and your choices than the laws of physics. There’s two aspects to what you’ve just asked. First of all, that this kind of determinism causes nihilism and lassitude. The answer is that it doesn’t, because we cannot overcome our feeling that we’re agents. Even if you think about it, even if you truly, deeply realize it, you still go ahead and act like you act, because we’re programmed like that by evolution. Which is the second part of the question, why don’t I just stay in bed all day or walk around like a robot? It’s because evolution has made you think you’re an agent. Which leads to a very interesting question. Why do we have this false sense of being able to choose, when we don’t really have it? We don’t know. There are several explanations I could give you for why we have this false sense of agency, this illusion of free will… I can explain it to you in one second why we don’t, and it’s this: our brains are made of molecules. Molecules obey the laws of physics therefore everything that comes out of our brain, including our behaviors and choices, must obey the laws of physics. Therefore, in so far as those laws apply, everything we do is basically determined. It may be determined on a macro-level or fundamentally indeterminate on a quantum level but we cannot affect how our brains work by thinking about it, because even our thinking is physically-based. So that means we can’t make a choice. If you were to go back to last night, when you were drinking wine, you didn’t have a choice how many glasses you had. It could have been predicted in advance by the circumstances of nature. People hate that, they really hate it. That’s one reason Alex’s book has received a lot of scorn and dislike, because it basically speaks the truth. We are physical automatons. And there are good things about that. Determinism does have some beneficial social consequences. Right now we have the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Boston , they’ve been weighing up whether or not to kill him because of the Boston Marathon bombing. They’re trying to judge whether or not he had a choice to do what he did and the defense are saying, “Well, he was influenced by his brother.” It’s as if the more choice he had, the guiltier he is. If he had some kind of brain disease, or if he was under the sway of his brother, then maybe he should just be sent to prison for life. The problem is that none of this is true. He didn’t have a choice about what he did, no matter what the situation was. It was the result of his genes and his environment. Therefore, and Alex talks about this, you shouldn’t punish someone based on the false assumption that they can choose to do good or bad, because they can’t. You can only do one thing at any one time in your life and if that’s bad, that’s not because you made the choice to be bad. It’s because all your environmental and genetic history impinged on you to behave in this way at that time. That has enormous consequences for how we treat people, for punishment and reward, as well as how we regard our own lives. Our feelings of sorrow (I should have behaved this way!) will all vanish, as well as invidious social consequences like the theory that people are poor because they deserve it, or that people get what they deserve in this life. That’s the basis for conservative politics. And it’s all wrong. People don’t get what they deserve, they get what they get because of the laws of physics. Physics is hard. I find myself struggling with popular books on physics like Brian Greene’s all the time, and, as we all know, Stephen Hawking’s first book is the best-selling least-read book of all time . But where I part company with Alex is where he dismisses the humanities as an illusion. On one level, he’s right. They are. But on another level, we live our lives as human beings and the humanities have an emotional effect on us. They can change the way we behave. We can weep when we hear symphonies, we get enormously moved when we read Tolstoy — or at least I do. That would be Anna Karenina , not War and Peace . He’s saying they’re an illusion. That doesn’t mean that something is false, it means it’s not what it seems to be. I don’t know exactly what he means when he says they’re “elaborations of an illusion.” That’s probably connected with his confusing discussion of thinking about things, and how we can’t really think about things. I won’t even get into that. But it’s raised the ire of a lot of non-scientists, to imply — and he may well believe this — that most of the humanities are of no consequence. He could have left that stuff out. The value of his book is in drawing out the consequences of naturalism, which generally I think he’s right about. It’s just that people don’t like it. People like to think they can make choices. They like to think that consciousness is something other than an illusion that comes from molecular interactions. Naturalism did away with that a long time ago. But it still hasn’t filtered down to the theologians. The Catholic theologian John Haught said that we can live with science, we can respect the findings of science, but that what religious people can’t abide is “the conviction that the universe and life is pointless.” And yet Steven Weinberg, who is an atheist and Nobel Prize winning physicist, has said that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. So there’s a real clash there between science and religion that cannot be overcome, even if you’re a science-friendly believer. Nearly all scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries were believers, but only because everyone was a believer then — or at least had to pretend that they were believers. And yes, as I said at the beginning, there are still a substantial number of religious scientists. But the more accomplished scientists tend to be atheistic. For example, only 7% of the members of the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences believe in God. As for Hawking specifically, it’s clear he used the word ‘God’ as a loose metaphor for the laws of physics. To quote him on this: “What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God. Which there isn’t. I’m an atheist.” That pretty much settles the issue. But believers still like to argue for comity between science and faith by citing famous scientists who are thought to have believed in God. Einstein, by the way, was almost certainly a nonbeliever as well. As I show in my book , he stated repeatedly and explicitly that he didn’t accept a personal God, and saw all religions as manmade."