Alexander Rosenberg Quotes

Physics is by no means "finished". But the part of it that explains almost everything in the universe—including us—is finished, and much of it has been finished for a century or more. This includes the physics that we are going to need. Nothing at the unsettled frontiers of physics challenges the parts we're going to make use of. What's more, the physics we need is easy to understand, certainly far easier than quantum mechanics, general relativity, or string theory.

Scientism starts with the idea that the physical facts fix all the facts, including the biological ones. These in turn have to fix the human facts—the facts about us, our psychology, and our morality. After all, we are biological creatures, the result of a biological process that Darwin discovered but that the physical facts ordained. As we have just seen, the biological facts can't guarantee that our core morality (or any other one, for that matter) is the right, true, or correct one. If the biological facts can't do it, then nothing can. No moral code is right, correct, true. That's nihilism. And we have to accept it.

Why is there anything at all? or as the question is famously put, Why is there something rather than nothing? Physics, especially quantum physics, shows that the correct answer to this question is: No reason, no reason at all.

the answer to the persistent question, What is the purpose of the universe? is quite simply: There is none.

If we can't have religion, we need a substitute that is as much like it as science can provide. Enter secular humanism, a doctrine, dare I say, "designed" to do this job. It hasn't worked (...) Scientism recognizes that the ambitions of the secular humanism are unattainable.

When it comes to understanding the future, history is bunk (...) There is no place history is heading, except toward the maximum-entropy heat death of the universe.

The parts of science that rule out theism are firmly fixed. Finally, it's not just probable that God doesn't exist. For scientism, it's as close to a sure thing as science can get.

Here is a list of some of the questions and their short answers (...) The interesting thing is to recognize how totally unavoidable they are, provided you place your confidence in science to provide the answers

We have to acknowledge (to ourselves, at least) that many questions we want the "right" answers to just don't have any. These are the questions about the morality of stem-cell research or abortion or affirmative action or gay marriage or our obligations to future generations. Many enlightened people, including many scientists, think that reasonable people can eventually find the right answers to such questions. Alas, it will turn out that all anyone can really find are the answers that they like.

Biologists have a label for the neat tricks that enable living things to take care of the four Fs of survival—feeding, fighting, flight, and... reproducing. The label for these traits is "adaptation".

When it comes to making life meaningful, what secular humanists hanker after is something they can't have and don't need. What they do need, if meaninglessness makes it impossible to get out of bed in the morning, is Prozac.

Most advocates of the nonphysical self have been happy enough with the immortality payoff not to obsess about the incoherence it carries with it.

If you are going to be scientistic, you will have to be comfortable with a certain amount of nihilism.

There is, however, a much more convincing argument that needs to be put on the table before we really begin turning common sense upside down. It is the overwhelming reason to prefer science to ordinary beliefs, common sense, and direct experience. Science is just common sense continually improving itself, rebuilding itself, until it is no longer recognizable as common sense. It is easy to miss this fact about science without studying a lot of history of science—and not the stories about science, but the succession of actual scientific theories and how common sense was both their mother and their midwife.

Biology is usually a lot more fun than physics. It's a lot easier to understand, and there's sex.