Having now completed our ten-part series of posts on Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, it seems a roundup of sorts is in order. As I have said, Rosenberg’s book is worthy of attention because he sees more clearly than most other contemporary atheist writers do the true implications of the scientism on which their position is founded. And interestingly enough, the implications he says it has are more or less the very implications I argued scientism has in my own book The Last Superstition. The difference between us is this: Rosenberg acknowledges that the implications in question are utterly bizarre, but maintains that they must be accepted because the case for the scientism that entails them is ironclad. I maintain that Rosenberg’s case for scientism is completely worthless, and that the implications of scientism are not merely bizarre but utterly incoherent and constitute a reductio ad absurdum of the premises that lead to them.
I first reviewedRosenberg’s book in the November 2011 issue of First Things. My series of blog posts on the book began around the same time. Here are links to each of them, together with a brief description of the specific subject matter of each post:
Part I [On the content of Rosenberg’s book, which is primarily about the implications of scientism rather than a critique of theism or a defense of atheism]
Part II [On Rosenberg’s characterization of, and central argument for, scientism, and his treatment of teleology]
Part III [On Rosenberg’s attempt to account for the existence of the universe in terms of quantum mechanics and the multiverse theory]
Part IV [On Rosenberg’s account of the origins of biological adaptation, and its unintended but implicit biological eliminativism]
Part V [On Rosenberg’s attempt in his book Darwinian Reductionism to avoid eliminativism in the philosophy of biology]
Part VI [On Rosenberg’s attempt to show that Darwinism is incompatible with theism]
Part VII [On the incoherence of Rosenberg’s nihilistic approach to morality]
Part VIII [On Rosenberg’s appeal to neuroscience, and in particular to “blindsight” phenomena and Libet’s free will experiments, in order to cast doubt on the reliability of introspection]
Part IX [On Rosenberg’s failure to make his denial of the intentionality or “aboutness” of thought coherent]
Part X [On Rosenberg’s treatment of those arguments, from Thomas Nagel and others, which he regards as “among the last serious challenges to scientism”]
Rosenberg’s 2009 article “The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality” was a precursor to the book. A number of philosophers commented on the article, and I wrote up my own response here:
Rosenberg then responded to his critics here. I posted a couple of replies to this response:
Finally, just to pile it on, some links to critical reviews of Rosenberg’s book by philosophers otherwise sympathetic to his naturalism: Michael Ruse, Philip Kitcher, and Massimo Pigliucci.
