The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, Alex Rosenberg, W. W. Norton & Co., 352pp, £17.99 (hardback)

Alex Rosenberg’s book, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, came out late last year but failed to attract the attention it deserves. Perhaps this is due in some part to its title, which wrongly suggests that the book belongs in a recent tradition of polemics for atheism, usually rehashes of Bertrand Russell. In effect, Russell domesticated the neo-paganism of Voltaire and Shelley to create a homelier breed of anti-Christianity suitable for the British public. This went a long way in Russell’s day, and apparently it still does. But it does not change the fact that arguing about religion only proves you have failed to understand it. ‘If the rationalist had any intelligence,’ wrote R. G. Collingwood, possibly thinking of Russell, ‘he would realise that his attacks on religion were too easy to be sound, and that there must be a catch somewhere.’ Rosenberg, by contrast, is aware of the catch, and begins his book by acknowledging it.

The catch is that people are not led to religion by arguments, nor by the lack of them. People are led to religion because we think in terms of stories. Storytelling is our most intuitive cognitive faculty, and religion exploits it fully. To everything we ask, religion answers with a story: creation stories to explain our world, parables to guide our actions, and encompassing narratives of salvation or redemption to wind together millions of individually arbitrary lives.

Being aware of this, Rosenberg does not bother arguing for atheism. He claims that his intended reader is already an atheist. More than this, his intended reader is an atheist for a very specific reason, namely that he orshe takes science seriously – takes it, in fact, as the only reliable source of knowledge about reality. Anyone who is serious about this commitment, Rosenberg insists, must stop thinking in terms of stories. This, rather than atheism, is the real topic of his book. The subtitle of the first chapter is ‘Do You Want Stories or Reality?’, and the book is effectively an argument that, given the choice, you should prefer reality.

Rosenberg defines a story as ‘a description of events in the form of a plot with characters driven by motives’. Stories are opposed to reality because science, taken to be the one reliable guide to reality, never explains things in terms of stories, ‘not even true ones’. Certainly it reveals natural processes, but these do not constitute stories.

In the first place, scientific revelations have no plots. In a story, one event does not simply give way to another; it leads to it. Hence A. J. P. Taylor declared the great task of the historian as storyteller to be ‘answering the child’s question: “What happened next?”’. The natural processes described by science, however, have no narrative flow. To use Rosenberg’s example, the account of the extinction of the dinosaurs could, for all that the laws of physics care, be given equally validly from back to front as an account of petroleum deposits gradually reconstituting themselves into rotting corpses that then come to life as lumbering, backwards-walking monsters:

I know it sounds absurd, but it’s true. The basic laws of motion that govern everything that happens to everything in the universe work both ways. … They tell no stories because they are completely indifferent to which event is the beginning and which is the end, so long as the sequences are mirror images of one another.

The question ‘what happened next?’ does not apply to the natural processes presented by science, because in them there is no ‘next’. There is no objective distinction between the beginning and the end, between what has happened and what is yet to come. (Certain parts of thermodynamics provide exceptions to this general claim, but Rosenberg deals with this potential objection to his argument in some detail.)

Moreover, the natural processes described by science contain no characters and no motives. Medieval philosophers believed that a stone fell to earth because it had, as Chaucer would have said, ‘a kindly enclyning towards its kindly stede’. Before this, the wasted vastness of the desert spoke the unfathomable, brooding mind of Yahweh. Even now it is hard to look at a cherry tree in full bloom without imagining its ebullience at the coming of spring. So many layers of rationalistic elaboration have been deposited on some of our stories that we hardly recognise the original glimmers of narrative inspiration at their core. If we apprehend reality scientifically, however, we need to give up these stories altogether. A stone is not a character with motives, nor is a tree, nor is the desert, nor is Nature itself.

So far, many will follow Rosenberg, but then comes a major shock. It is one thing to stop telling stories about stones and trees, but Rosenberg wants to say that the same must hold with regard to the stories we tell about ourselves. In reality, even our own actions are not produced by characters with motives. The prima facie absurdity of this claim and the philosophical sophistication of its defence are likely to lose Rosenberg many readers. Yet they are the heart of his book, distinguishing it dramatically from other popular books on this topic.

Nothing is more obvious, it seems, than the fact that what caused me to buy bread today was my thought about the absence of bread in my house and my intention to have toast in the morning. But Rosenberg claims that it is not a fact. The brain that governs my movements is a continual storm of electrochemical changes. Philosophers have tried for years to show how these changes are what we refer to as thoughts about empty breadbins or intentions to have toast – a project known as reductionism, since it attempts to reduce beliefs and desires to neurological processes.

Rosenberg contends that reductionism does not work. Beliefs and desires have a feature that makes them irreducible to processes in the brain. This is what philosophers call ‘intentional content’: a belief is a belief about something specific; a desire is a desire for a particular object or state of affairs. Rosenberg argues that there is no plausible explanation of how brain processes could possess intentional content. How can one arrangement of matter be about another completely different arrangement of matter? The words scribbled on a page are about something for a competent person reading them, but who or what reads the ‘words’ in the brain? Certainly not the soul; if you are part of Rosenberg’s target audience you stopped telling yourself that story long ago.

In rejecting reductionism, Rosenberg embraces a more radical position, known as eliminativism. The eliminativist argues that a true scientific account of human action must make no reference to beliefs and desires at all. What causes me to buy bread in the above example is, according to the eliminativist, a group of brain processes that have no intentional content; they are not about bread, nor about tomorrow morning, nor about me, nor about anything at all. The idea that beliefs and desires cause our actions is another story that science cannot retain. ‘The brain,’ as Rosenberg puts it, ‘does everything without thinking about anything at all.’

Now the Atheist’s Guide becomes a lot more challenging, even to the hard-headed scientific realist. Consider which stories we must give up if we accept this picture of reality. Romeo did not fake his death because he longed to live happily with Juliet. Martin Luther King did not act on account of his dream of the future. History and literature become, as Rosenberg puts it with devastating alacrity, ‘fun’. No purposes guide our lives, not even our own purposes. Everything we do is the result of synaptic firings that have no more content than stones rolling down a hill or the thoughtless throbs of energy of which all things are made.

Rosenberg is, therefore, no sanguine atheist of the school of Jean-Paul Sartre or A. C. Grayling, proposing that in the absence of God it is we who must give life its purpose. That is precisely what we cannot do. There is ‘no convincing story in secular humanism’ which hopes to put human purposes in the place of divine ones.

In light of this, Rosenberg’s primary question – ‘do you want stories or reality?’ – no longer looks quite so rhetorical, even if the facts are as he presents them. The reality in which we live and with which we engage at an everyday level is fundamentally constituted of stories – of characters and motives, beginnings and endings. Is a reality without stories inhabitable at all?

This, to my mind, is a properly philosophical question. It is of the grand, old-fashioned kind for which contemporary philosophy has lost its taste. Rosenberg is quite right to insist that arguing about religion is pointless, since it is our love – perhaps our need – for stories and not our reason that inspires religious belief. Not only is that the right way to look at religion; it is the right way to think about our culture in general. To a significant extent, the modern world has done just what Rosenberg recommends; we have given up stories in favour of ‘blueprints, recipes, formulas, wiring diagrams, systems of equations, and geometrical proofs’.

For example, ask the average politician his or her hopes for the future and you are likely to get answers that would be easy to translate into numerical form: higher GDP (or some metric of wellbeing), higher productivity here or there, cost-effective health care. Even the narrative flourishes of political speeches are designed and controlled according to psephological calculations and poll-taking. The narratives themselves usually culminate in visions of a future that is simply a more efficient and structurally sound version of the present. In other words, they turn out to be mere blueprints after all.

Perhaps this, as Rosenberg proposes, is a more realistic way of looking at things. Even so, I think we should be careful about losing our trust in stories. For if we break the habit of asking ‘what happens next?’ we might find that we have also broken the habit of caring. What the characterless, law-governed processes of science leave out is the sense of adventure that animates any great story. This is partly what religion is about; it is why A. N. Whitehead once claimed that ‘the death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure’. Anyway, even if Rosenberg is right, the business of living has always been more art than science.