Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy and philosophy department chair at Duke University, where he is also a professor in the biology department and in the department of political science. He has held fellowships from the J.S. Guggenheim foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation and the National Humanities Center. Besides The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, featured on Rorotoko, he is the author of 12 books in the philosophy of science, molecular biology and economic theory, including most recently, The Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction and The Philosophy of Social Science. In 1992 he won the Lakatos Award for contributions to the philosophy of science. In 2007 he was the National Phi Beta Kappa Romanell lecturer.
Why have the obvious answers to life’s relentless questions been hard to recognize even by many atheists?The most serious obstacle to accepting science’s answers to the persistent questions is one erected by Mother Nature herself.Ironically, the barrier to accepting science results from the very Darwinian evolutionary process that theism rejects. It’s actually worse than ironic because the same Darwinian process that made it hard to understand science made it easy to be seduced by religion!The obstacle to understanding (and accepting) science is deep, subtle, insidious, purely psychological, and probably hardwired into our genes. The problem doesn’t even look like a problem. It has to do with the way we—educated or uneducated, atheist or theist, agnostic, deist, scientist, in fact all human beings—like our information to be “packaged.”A lot of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is devoted to showing that the most basic truths about reality that science reveals are never, ever, stories with plots.
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