Richard Marshall reviews Alex Rosenberg's new book, The Atheist's Guide To Reality:
Rosenberg talks about having fun. Nice nihilism implies that attributing meaning to our lives is just an introspective illusion selected by blind evolutionary processes, caused by photons and fermions blindly operating, working in real time in our brains, that has helped us survive. We attach meaning by these determined operations in our brain which give the illusion that there are actual purposes. But there are no such things.
As I said, the illusion is explained by natural selection: it has been heavily selected for so that everyone is within two standard deviations of the mean of a happy normal life – the fun life – in the biosphere we find ourselves in. We flourish, or rather, have fun, because we are naturally selected to do so. We trick out statements of purpose but they are illusions. Naturalism cannot solve the problem of philosophy in ways that satisfy those seeking confirmation of a reality that gives purpose because there is no purpose.
Leon Wieseltier [pay-walled] calls it the worst book of the year.
The Dish 