The Atheist's Guide to Reality

Resumen del libro

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.

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.

-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 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 wonderful new book perfectly satisfies.- - Rebecca Goldstein 36 Arguments for the Existence of God