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“real” versus “illusory.” (Are colors real? Is consciousness? Is morality?)
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Whether or not you believe in God— whether you are a theist or an
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atheist— is part of your ontology, but far from the whole story. “Religion”
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is a completely different kind of thing. It is associated with certain beliefs,
01
often including belief in God, although the definition of “God” can differ
02
substantially within religion’s broad scope. Religion can also be a cultural
03
force, a set of institutions, a way of life, a historical legacy, a collection of
04
practices and principles. It’s much more, and much messier, than a checklist
05
of doctrines. A counterpart to religion would be humanism, a collection of
06
beliefs and practices that is as varied and malleable as religion is.
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The broader ontology typically associated with atheism is naturalism—
08
there is only one world, the natural world, exhibiting patterns we call the
09
“laws of nature,” and which is discoverable by the methods of science and
10
empirical investigation. There is no separate realm of the supernatural,
11
spiritual, or divine; nor is there any cosmic teleology or transcendent pur-
12
pose inherent in the nature of the universe or in human life. “Life” and
13
“consciousness” do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways
14
of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordi-
15
narily complex systems. Purpose and meaning in life arise through funda-
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mentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything
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outside ourselves. Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describ-
18
ing all of reality as a seamless web.
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Naturalism has a long and distinguished pedigree. We find traces of it
20
in Buddhism, in the atomists of ancient Greece and Rome, and in Confu-
21
cianism. Hundreds of years after the death of Confucius, a Chinese thinker
22
named Wang Chong was a vocal naturalist, campaigning against the belief
23
in ghosts and spirits that had become popular in his day. But it is really only
24
in the last few centuries that the evidence in favor of naturalism has become
25
hard to resist.
26
27
•
28
All of these isms can feel a bit overwhelming. Fortunately we don’t need to
29
be rigorous or comprehensive about listing the possibilities. But we do need
30
to think hard about ontology. It’s at the heart of our Wile E. Coyote
31
problem.
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The last five hundred or so years of human intellectual progress have
33
completely upended how we think about the world at a fundamental level.
34
Our everyday experience suggests that there are large numbers of truly dif-
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stars— these all seem dramatically different from one another, deserving of
02
independent entries in our list of basic ingredients of reality. Our “folk
03
ontology” is pluralistic, full of myriad distinct categories. And that’s not
04
even counting notions that seem more abstract but are arguably equally
05
“real,” from numbers to our goals and dreams to our principles of right and
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wrong.
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As our knowledge grows, we have moved by fits and starts in the direc-
08
tion of a simpler, more unified ontology. It’s an ancient impulse. In the sixth
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century BCE, the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus suggested that wa-
10
ter is a primary principle from which all else is derived, while across the
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world, Hindu philosophers put forward Brahman as the single ultimate
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reality. The development of science has accelerated and codified the trend.
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Galileo observed that Jupiter has moons, implying that it is a gravitating
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body just like the Earth. Isaac Newton showed that the force of gravity is
15
universal, underlying both the motion of the planets and the way that ap-
16
ples fall from trees. John Dalton demonstrated how different chemical
17
compounds could be thought of as combinations of basic building blocks
18
called atoms. Charles Darwin established the unity of life from common
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ancestors. James Clerk Maxwell and other physicists brought together such
20
disparate phenomena as lightning, radiation, and magnets under the single
21
rubric of “electromagnetism.” Close analysis of starlight revealed that stars
22
are made of the same kinds of atoms as we find here on Earth, with Cecilia
23
Payne- Gaposchkin eventually proving that they are mostly hydrogen and
24
helium. Albert Einstein unified space and time, joining together matter
25
and energy along the way. Particle physics has taught us that every atom in
26
the periodic table of the elements is an arrangement of just three basic par-
27
ticles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Every object you have ever seen or
28
bumped into in your life is made of just those three particles.
29
We’re left with a very different view of reality from where we started. At
30
a fundamental level, there aren’t separate “living things” and “nonliving
31
things,” “things here on Earth” and “things up in the sky,” “matter” and
32
“spirit.” There is just the basic stuff of reality, appearing to us in many dif-
33
ferent forms.
34
How far will this process of unification and simplification go? It’s im-
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possible to say for sure. But we have a reasonable guess, based on our
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progress thus far: it will go all the way. We will ultimately understand the
01
world as a single, unified reality, not caused or sustained or influenced by
02
anything outsid
e itself. That’s a big deal.
03
04
•
05
Naturalism presents a hugely grandiose claim, and we have every right to be
06
skeptical. When we look into the eyes of another person, it doesn’t seem
07
like what we’re seeing is simply a collection of atoms, some sort of im-
08
mensely complicated chemical reaction. We often feel connected to the
09
universe in some way that transcends the merely physical, whether it’s a
10
sense of awe when we contemplate the sea or sky, a trancelike reverie during
11
meditation or prayer, or the feeling of love when we’re close to someone we
12
care about. The difference between a living being and an inanimate object
13
seems much more profound than the way certain molecules are arranged.
14
Just looking around, the idea that everything we see and feel can somehow
15
be explained by impersonal laws governing the motion of matter and en-
16
ergy seems preposterous.
17
It’s a bit of a leap, in the face of all of our commonsense experience, to
18
think that life can simply start up out of non- life, or that our experience of
19
consciousness needs no more ingredients than atoms obeying the laws of
20
physics. Of equal importance, appeals to transcendent purpose or a higher
21
power seem to provide answers to questions to some of the pressing “Why?”
22
questions we humans like to ask: Why this universe? Why am I here? Why
23
anything at all? Naturalism, by contrast, simply says: those aren’t the right
24
questions to ask. It’s a lot to swallow, and not a view that anyone should
25
accept unquestioningly.
26
Naturalism isn’t an obvious, default way to think about the world. The
27
case in its favor has built up gradually over the years, a consequence of our
28
relentless quest to improve our understanding of how things work at a deep
29
level, but there is still work to be done. We don’t know how the universe
30
began, or if it’s the only universe. We don’t know the ultimate, complete
31
laws of physics. We don’t know how life began, or how consciousness arose.
32
And we certainly haven’t agreed on the best way to live in the world as good
33
human beings.
34
The naturalist needs to make the case that, even without actually having
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these answers yet, their worldview is still by far the most likely framework
02
in which we will eventually find them. That’s what we’re here to do.
03
•
04
05
The pressing, human questions we have about our lives depend directly on
06
our attitudes toward the universe at a deeper level. For many people, those
07
attitudes are adopted rather informally from the surrounding culture,
08
rather than arising out of rigorous personal reflection. Each new generation
09
of people doesn’t invent the rules of living from scratch; we inherit ideas
10
and values that have evolved over vast stretches of time. At the moment, the
11
dominant image of the world remains one in which human life is cosmi-
12
cally special and significant, something more than mere matter in motion.
13
We need to do better at reconciling how we talk about life’s meaning with
14
what we know about the scientific image of our universe.
15
Among people who acknowledge the scientific basis of reality, there is
16
often a conviction— usually left implicit— that all of that philosophical
17
stuff like freedom, morality, and purpose should ultimately be pretty easy
18
to figure out. We’re collections of atoms, and we should be nice to one an-
19
other. How hard can it really be?
20
It can be really hard. Being nice to one another is a good start, but it
21
doesn’t get us very far. What happens when different people have incompat-
22
ible conceptions of niceness? Giving peace a chance sounds like a swell idea,
23
but in the real world, there are different actors with different interests, and
24
conflicts will inevitably arise. The absence of a supernatural guiding force
25
doesn’t mean we can’t meaningfully talk about right and wrong, but it
26
doesn’t mean we instantly know one from the other, either.
27
Meaning in life can’t be reduced to simplistic mottos. In some number
28
of years I will be dead; some memory of my time here on Earth may linger,
29
but I won’t be around to savor it. With that in mind, what kind of life is
30
worth living? How should we balance family and career, fortune and plea-
31
sure, action and contemplation? The universe is large, and I am a tiny part
32
of it, constructed of the same particles and forces as everything else: by it-
33
self, that tells us precisely nothing about how to answer such questions.
34
We’re going to have to be both smart and courageous as we work to get this
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right.
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01
02
2
03
04
Poetic Naturalism
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
O
13
ne thing Star Trek never really got clear on was how transporter
14
machines are supposed to work. Do they disassemble you one
15
atom at a time, zip those atoms elsewhere, and then reassemble
16
them? Or do they send only a blueprint of you, the information contained
17
in your arrangement of atoms, and then reconstruct you from existing mat-
18
ter in the environment to which you are traveling? Most often the ship’s
19
crew talks as if your actual atoms travel through space, but then how do we
20
explain “The Enemy Within”? That’s the episode, you’ll remember, in
21
which a transporter malfunction causes two copies of Captain Kirk to be
22
beamed aboard the Enterprise. It’s hard to see how two copies of a person
>
23
could be made out of one person- sized collection of atoms.
24
Fortunately for viewers of the show, the two copies of Kirk weren’t pre-
25
cisely identical. One copy was the normal (good) Kirk, and the other was
26
evil. Even better, the evil one quickly got scratched on the face by Yeoman
27
Rand, so it wasn’t hard to tell the two apart.
28
But what if they had been identical? We would then be faced with a
29
puzzle about the nature of personal identity, popularized by philosopher
30
Derek Parfit. Imagine a transporter machine that could disassemble a sin-
31
gle individual and reconstruct multiple exact copies of them out of different
32
atoms. Which one, if any, would be the “real” one? If there were just a single
33
copy, most of us would have no trouble accepting them as the original per-
34
son. (Using different atoms doesn’t really matter; in actual human bodies,
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our atoms are lost and replaced all the time.) Or what if one copy were made
02
of new atoms, while the original you remained intact— but the original
03
suffered a tragic death a few seconds after the duplicate was made. Would
04
the duplicate count as the same person?
05
All good philosophical fun and games of course, but without much
06
relevance to the real world, at least not at our current level of technology.
07
Or maybe not. There’s an older thought experiment called the Ship of
08
Theseus that raises some of the same issues. Theseus, the legendary
09
founder of Athens, had an impressive ship in which he had fought numer-
10
ous battles. To honor him, the citizens of Athens preserved his ship in
11
their port. Occasionally a plank or part of the mast would decay beyond
12
repair, and at some point that piece would have to be replaced to keep
13
the ship in good order. Once again we have a question of identity: is it the
14
same ship after we’ve replaced one of the planks? If you think it is, what
15
about after we’ve replaced all of the planks, one by one? And (as Thomas
16
Hobbes went on to ask), what if we then took all the old planks and built
17
a ship out of them? Would that one then suddenly become the Ship of
18
Theseus?
19
Narrowly speaking, these are all questions about identity. When is one
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