Carolina QuotesMost advocates of the nonphysical self have been happy enough with the immortality payoff not to obsess about the incoherence it carries with it.
Alexander Rosenberg Connected to the Carolinas
Source
No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- work
- The Atheist's Guide to Reality (2011)
- year
- 2011
no citation recorded
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“Most advocates of the nonphysical self have been happy enoug…” Alexander Rosenberg. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-61B6E09486. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/61b6e09486
More from Alexander Rosenberg
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.
A hundred years ago, it became clear that most events at the level of the subatomic are random, uncaused, indeterministic quantum events—merely matters of probability. Locate an electron on one side of a steel barrier it doesn't have the energy to penetrate. There is some probability that the next time you detect it, the electron will be on the other side of the barrier it can't penetrate. But there are no facts about the electron that explain why sometimes it does this and sometimes it doesn't. At the basement level of reality, there are just probabilities.
the answer to the persistent question, What is the purpose of the universe? is quite simply: There is none.