The Atheist's Guide to Reality

Science enables atheism to answer life’s universal and relentless questions with evidence employing a real understanding of the natural world. Some of the answers it provides to these questions may disconcert you. Several will certainly surprise you. But they are all as certain as the science on which our atheism is grounded. An unblinking scientific worldview requires atheism.

Among the seemingly unquestionable truths science makes us deny is the idea that we have any purposes at all, that we ever make plans—for today, tomorrow, or next year. Science must even deny the basic notion that we ever really think about the past and the future or even that our conscious thoughts ever give any meaning to the actions that express them.

ver since science became central to our culture, there has been a veritable industry devoted to harmonizing science’s findings with the prescientific worldview. A great many deep thinkers have devoted themselves to this project for half a century now, under the banner of “naturalism, ” without much success. Scientism stands on the shoulders of giants: all those great naturalistic philosophers who have tried to make peace between science and ordinary beliefs and have failed.

science trumps common sense.

Science is just common sense continually improving itself, rebuilding itself, correcting itself, until it is no longer recognizable as common sense.

The real common sense is relativity and quantum mechanics, atomic chemistry and natural selection. That’s why we should believe it in preference to what ordinary experience suggests.

The mistake is the notion that when we think, or rather when our brain thinks, it thinks about anything at all.

The brain can’t have thoughts about Paris, or about France, or about capitals, or about anything else for that matter. When consciousness convinces you that you, or your mind, or your brain has thoughts about things, it is wrong.