Alex Rosenberg

Why understanding science is hard and seduction by the humanities is easy

Cover Interview of December 13, 2011

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.

science / polemics / evolution / atheism / narrative / darwin charles / cognition / evolutionary anthropology /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009