Chapter 16 Part D
Thus, by these gradual,
grudging steps, in my forties, I began to believe that I ought to believe in
God because it was, as beliefs go, a smart gamble. That belief is logically implicit in the way of thinking that
seems maximally likely to bring me, my kids, my nation, and my species the best
odds of surviving and flourishing over the long haul.
And yet and yet. In spite of
gradually coming to believe all of this, I was hesitant. I had
spent a long time in my early adulthood being an atheist. I also knew that human
beings are very inclined to see what they want to see. There was a lot of reasoning and evidence to support my theory, but then again, there was a lot against it. And
given what I knew of the cognitive dissonnance-reducing inclinations in all
human minds, I worried that I was only coming around to a view that I wanted to
believe anyway.
The
exactly honest way to put the matter is that, at this point in my personal journey,
I believed in believing in God. I believed that I should believe in God. I
believed that every person who wanted to be decent and, even more simply, just logically consistent, should believe in God. But I had no personal sense of any presence nurturing me or hovering by me.
I had even concluded that this belief choice is the most profound one that we as a species are going to make in this post-industrial era. We can't go on as we have for so long been going. We are only going to survive if we make the values and beliefs that
underlie and enable democracy - and its darling child, Science - personal. Over
the long haul, Science and democracy will only flourish in a society that loves wisdom and
freedom like it loves its children. So it is exactly true to say that we
will only survive if we give to these key values our deepest selves, our
willingness to die for our values in a crisis, but far more
importantly, to live for them every day.
Note
also here that in a democracy, our values may be this kind of personal and still the morés
we put in place to express these values may be constantly modified and updated.
We can constantly gather evidence and apply reasoning in our assessment of our morés. What
changes is a reformer advocating? What reasoning does he offer to support his
demands? What evidence can he show to back up his reasoning and conclusions?
modern lethal injection chamber
For
example, we can see now that capital punishment is a retrograde and barbaric practice. The evidence shows that it does not
serve as a deterrent. Countries that get rid of c.p. see
their murder rates per 100,000 citizens in the population drop, not rise.
Capital trials that succeed in getting death sentences also are subject to many
more appeals than non-capital trials because juries don’t want to make a
mistake, which means that, in the end, executing a murderer, on average, costs the
state much more than imprisoning him for life. Furthermore, murderers allowed
to live out their years in a prison can be interviewed and studied. Social scientists
thereby can get ever closer to the day when they will be able to
spot and quarantine a killer before he kills. And finally, a state that does not execute people convicted of murder will never, because of a legal miscarriage, take an innocent life.
Reasoning.
Evidence. Then a rational decision to re-write policy, and practice. Many
difficult issues that we are facing and will face can, should, must, and will
be solved in this way. Even war. We can make wisdom/reason – or to be exact,
our faith in wisdom/reason – personal.
The whole intent all along, of
course, will be to create a society in which we don't have to die in mass
numbers to test and update our values. If we really are a balance of brave, wise, loving,
and free, we will solve disputes before they ever get that far, and practicable
solutions will come to us because we will have a large majority in society who
believe in constantly adjusting balances within their social ecosystem and who believe
in wisdom and freedom, as principles to follow in that adjusting, with a passion that is personal. We will be living and
evolving in the way that the
consciousness which permeates the universe wants us to.
But back to the main point.
The evidence of the physical
world, the living world, the behaviors of the human species, and my own
experiences and memories said something vast and conscious was all around. Logic said that I ought to take the best gamble and give my personal
loyalty to that something. My deepest feelings about humanity were prompting me
to. And yet ...I was skeptical.
After long, hard debate inside
myself, but still feeling so cautious, I decided to try to live "as
if". I would behave, and I would try to think, as if I did believe that my idea of God was factually real.
I had found what some people call
a "contemplative practice", a way of meditation, one of the oldest
around, and I had discovered that I liked it. Praying I could not do. What kind
of arrogance would it take to ask something like what I conceived God to be for favors? Perhaps, one day if I truly believed I was communing with that Something, I
could ask for guidance. But I can't grasp any form of prayer that asks to not have
to die or to get help in winning a business contract. Death is a necessary
part of life. Living things eventually wear out, as entropy requires, and material successes like contracts must be won by intelligent
application of one’s own efforts. God does not play favorites, but God does reward virtue. It just sometimes takes
a while. In a universe built on freedom – i.e. on quantum probability – there
is no other way. But who would really choose otherwise? Meanwhile, I had this stubborn me to deal
with.
But I had found that I could meditate. I could use a technique that
cleared my mind and opened my consciousness to communing with Something that
was also conscious, though outside of me. That did make sense. I knew that some of
the best thinkers in history had got some of their best ideas in this way: quietly,
privately communing with the universe.
I meditated daily, and I kept
going over all of the arguments for and against. I worked internally,
awkwardly, constantly talking to myself, trying to learn discipline,
compassion, and forgiveness, to really learn them, as I kept on simply navigating
through my days and my thoughts.
As a digression, let me say here
that I believe that there is a science of Evolutionary Sociology ahead for us,
a science that will help us to find the maximally effective balances of
elements in our societies. This science will measure observable, physical
quantities -- our society's energy consumption levels, and biomass, and the biodiversity
of the environments near our living areas -- and will derive models that will
tell us where the balances of the underlying values, i.e. courage and wisdom, should lie.
These scientists will count quantities like the numbers of people in prisons and in insane asylums as percentages of the
population and will eventually show us where the balances of freedom and love
lie, where our tax dollars spent on education should be concentrated. We will
find ways of measuring cultural diversity that will tell us where in our social
ecosystem the most dynamic balances of laws and educational policies lie, in
ways analogous to the ways in which we now measure biodiversity in a wild
ecosystem.
In their models,
economists have long tried to design similar measures – for example, positing “savings
indexes” for various nations. They are well-intentioned, but they are measuring the wrong things. Human societies are driven by meme-complexes, value systems – not yearnings for
commodities. Human beings only seek to buy the things that they have been taught to desire. It is the principles underlying the programming of those desires that hold the real keys to understanding human history. Economic events are mere symptoms of deeper forces that are not economic.
All of this I believed then, and
I still believe now.
However, these speculations on what
might constitute objectively measurable indicators of moral growth, and how
they might be fitted into a model of human history, I must leave for another
book. They are beyond the scope of this one.
These larger speculations were
just parts, however, of the case I was building for myself twenty years ago,
the case that I was going over hour by hour. By this point in the development
of my model, it had become personal. Everything I knew logically had connected to everything that I knew personally. Non-overlapping magisteria of Science and Religion no longer existed for me. I cared about it all. My children's and species' survival required my being a principled man. Being truly good meant making
values personal; that entailed belief not just in the
empirical value of virtue, but in the thing in the universe that made it work. I believed in believing. And
I kept meditating.
One day It was just there.
Something that was not me was quietly reassuring me over and over, "You're
alright. You're getting there." And about every worry or challenge, I
would get, by meditation and patience, ideas coming on in gestalt moments telling
me: "Here's something that you can try." Not a voice or a
light: just a quiet presence that was as real as me, even though I felt certain that it wasn't me. In the times when I had been stubbornly
refusing to ask for any spiritual guidance, I had been running like a hamster on a
wheel and getting no useful insights about my life at
all. When I began to meditate and to live “as if”, the confusion and despair began
to lift and drift away.
chimpanzees sharing food
A belief in a presence that is
aware, compassionate, and personal, to some determined atheists, may still seem
not essential to our living decent lives. If we search diligently enough
through reality, and think hard about what we see, we have the potential,
in principle, they say, to formulate values that will enable us to be responsible
citizens of our planet, and of our communities, and yet not believe in God.
But it has always seemed to me that
the atheists who claim to find moral principles underlying the living world, in the behavior patterns
of primates, for example - principles they say need no theistic interpretation
- are dodging the argument.
If I find altruistic behavior in some primates and
can prove that altruism has value in evolutionary terms, that hardly marks
the end of the search for moral values. The questions that scientific atheists
should then be asking themselves are: "Why do some forms of altruistic
behavior have survival value for some species? If an altruistic style of
behavior gets good results for a species over the long haul, what is that
saying about the nature of the physical universe in which this species
lives?"
So let us sum up and conclude.
The most profound
choice that we make in our lives is our choice of what sort of overall thinking
system we are going to operate under, what system will give order to all of our
thoughts. Many different thinking systems already are being used in different
cultures around the world. In theory, infinite numbers of such systems are
possible, systems that we can choose to employ as we organize and structure our
sense data and memories of sense data into categories and files that can be
used to guide us as we deal with life in physical reality. Systems that, most crucially, we can choose to teach to our children.
The maximally effective thinking
system ought to be a comprehensive one. If we're just being rational, our master operating system ought to be one that is organized around a single
epistemological concept, a way of thinking that provides explanations for what
thinking is, what I should and should not do with my ability to think, how I
should try to act in this world, and even why I think at all. A system that
is efficient, and that, therefore, leads us to positive results in timely ways. A system that has
maximal probability of enabling me, my kids, my nation, and my species to
survive.
If our values are finely
tuned, and if we have the character in us to live by them and so to move onto
and along these most efficient paths – in our ways of working, cooperating, reproducing, etc.
– we will survive. If not, we will all, or nearly all, die, and we will likely
kill most of the other species on Earth with us. Other life forms with moral
capabilities will evolve on planets in other parts of the universe. Probably, in time, another intelligent life form will even evolve here on Planet Earth. But, if we humans
fail morally, our small part in the story of the
universe will end.
The base for our belief in democracy,
Science, and the scientific method - namely the God axiom - is a first
assumption that itself is free-standing. It does not begin from anything else that
is deeper or more primary. As is the case with any first axiom, belief in God
is a choice and a gamble that entails huge, potentially fatal, consequences.
All fundamental epistemological choices do. But it is also true that we have to
choose some first assumption in order to function at all. The key thing to see
is that of all of the choices out there, scientific theism appears to be the one most likely to work.
This book's main point is that
the first step to believing, the one in which you can say,
"Yes, it does appear from the evidence that something conscious is out
there", is a rational step. It is not just one more product of your own
wishful thinking. Building the rest of your faith in God is up to you.
No other human being can find it for you. Not in a universe in which
you are free. It is your spiritual journey. All that this book originally aimed
to do was to make a case for saying that belief in God is not an irrational
belief. It is the most rational of all beliefs. The rest is up to you.
God is hard, but also real. In a
universe made out of nothing, of course there must be exactly as much potential
for good as for evil, for growth as for decay, for suffering as for joy. No other
kind of universe could be what we call “real”. Buddha and Lao Tsu both said
this long ago, even if they were ambiguous about the existence of God.
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But the consciousness that gave
us this amazing place also gave us an amazing power to move and navigate in it,
by mentally storing and manipulating memories that
we absorb as we exist here. And She (if you like) also gave us each other. Alone I am short-sighted
and ineffective. But by cooperating with my fellow citizens and engaging in reasoned discussion, debate, and activity, I can become a useful part of a team, a
society that works. That is just rational.
If God is infinite, as my reason
tells me God must be, then no human could ever be aware of more than a particle
of that infinite consciousness. Thus, humility is a close companion to reason.
I know I can think, but I also know I need others. And thus we can, as a team, find
a path through the hazards. We can both think and love.
If
we, as a species, choose to believe that values are real, then each of us will be motivated to work
at learning what his or her best role in the community is. We will then work
together with the sense of direction and level of devotion that will keep
leading us to that path of paths on which we will survive. On Earth and beyond.
The stars are calling us.
If we are not able to be that
devoted to both God and Science, or more accurately, to Science as God's way, I believe that we have no chance at all.
Our reaching the kind of passionate belief in wisdom and love that will give us the breakthroughs that we need to survive global warming and to dismantle our nuclear weapons is going
to first require a belief in the kind of being that humans for centuries have called
"God". Only specious semantic quibbles block the path between these two beliefs. We need God in order to be good.
And let me say, on a more personal
note, that all of my
experience also tells me that this gradual process of coming to believe in God
is similar to the process by which any of us realizes real love for another
human being. Real, durable love grows gradually as piece is added to careful piece.
And if God offers no easy sources of certainty for the skeptical, I, as a theist can just as easily ask
the atheists my hard question for them: "How much evidence do you need?”
This incredible system that we live in needs no little exceptions (miracles)
made within it to be seen as marvelous, vast, subtle, and aware, and compassionate. My infant grand-child’s smile contains miracles; it contains courage and love beyond all human analysis or cognition.
It is also very likely, if
you live to middle age, that you will arrive at complete despair at least once
yourself. Personal lives simply are not scientific in their subjective feel;
they often don't even seem rational. People who are battling personal demons begin to sort their lives out when
they begin to believe in a higher power. When they accept the intuitions that
come with letting go of their need to control and stop trying to be totally, cognitively in
charge. In short, case studies by the thousands have shown that the majority of
the dysfunctional ones who do get back their ability to function do so
after they find a personal connection to God.
This is not because reason has
failed; it is simply because reason must re-configure and begin again and again
from something that is not reason. Evidence supporting this view fills
the realms of personal, anecdotal experience just as much as it does the realms
of studies in History and Science.
I am a theist, but I hate the mumbo-jumbo and
mystery-making of most traditional religions. Over and over, the priests,
pastors, gurus, rabbis, and imams have claimed knowledge that cannot be confronted by any
argument because no evidence drawn from real experience is relevant to any
discussion of that special knowledge. These "chosen" few claim to have a secret
knowledge based on an unexplainable understanding of sacred texts or on some
non-replicable moments of personal enlightenment. Then they further claim that this
knowledge gives them a right to rule. Inquisition-like persecutions of many
kinds in many parts of the world have been justified in this way. Over and
over, the theocrats have claimed: "We know best.”
On the other hand, I base a
belief in God on careful examination of this world and how I and my fellow
human beings live in it. I find the evidence for my all-encompassing belief in
that something called “God” in all that is happening around me, and in me. Under this model, a questioning style of living is the only moral way.
Therefore, I can ask any of the priests, imams, pastors, lamas, gurus, or popes
of any of the societies of my world at any time: "What material evidence
do you have for these ways that you are telling me to follow? What probable consequences
will they bind me and my community to? If I believe them and act in accordance
with them, what are their survival implications?"
In
short, my belief in God sanctifies above all else my ability to think for
myself. A mind is God's special gift to each of us. I will not surrender mine
for anything. Under my model, I cannot give up my freedom to think for myself,
if I am to remain a decent guy. It was my mind that led me to God.
All that has changed since my
atheistic days is that I now choose to believe in something outside of me, a
universal consciousness, as a fact because it is a basic part of a model that entails my,
my kids', and my species' maximal survival odds. Under this model, I can and should trust the intuitions that
I receive when I open myself up to that awesome Something. But then, once I've had that gestalt moment, I think
about what my intuitions are telling me, I analyze any conclusions that I am
being led toward, and I test them scientifically. If I have re-configured well,
I get new perspectives on my life and new ideas for how to live well.
Occasionally, if I have a deeply intuitive moment, I make Science. But I begin the whole process from something that isn't Science.
My degree of confidence in my
belief in God's existence is not perfect. It is just higher than my degree of
confidence in any other belief that I hold. In fact, my belief in God is what
makes all of my other beliefs cohere, including not just my beliefs in the laws
of Science, and in the moral values underlying democracy and Science, but my
belief in the reality of these words that I am typing on my computer screen and
my belief that the hands that I am operating, feeling, and seeing at the ends
of my two arms are really there.
God is there alright. God is just one tough
customer - hard, even cruel-seeming in our short-sighted eyes sometimes. Knowing
even a little of the history of all those billions who suffered and died before
our time can bring us to tears. All those drowning soldiers in that frozen lake
at Austerlitz. All those soldiers at the Somme. All those poor patients
coughing sprays of blood for centuries as tuberculosis raged. All those starving
peasants who outnumbered the aristocrats ten to one in so many of those past
societies that some fools today believe were nobler and more Romantic
than ours.
But
God has to be so. A reality in which there is freedom cannot work in any other
way. Thus, in reality, knowing God is for adults. Children need to be told of a gentler
version for a few years. Adults – in order to be adults – as much as they can
stand, must see God as She/He is. Hard, but not impossible.
In
order for you to function well in this universe, the optimistic, focused state
of mind that I am describing must be in dynamic equilibrium within you. It must
be in a constant state of being doubted and renewed. It is renewed by your observing
the data you get from the world and the workings of the very thought processes
that you use as you sort that data, and affirming over and over again that
the God-based way of thinking works. This belief, this meme-complex, this brain
state that is enabled by your assuming the God-based model of reality, must
constantly evolve inside of your mind.
Theistic belief is a living entity inside of
you, and like any living thing, it must be constantly self-perpetuating in the way that all living things must be. If it isn’t constantly metabolizing, self-perpetuating, and evolving in this living way, it eventually withers
and dies: you cease to believe in God. In the meme-jungle of the mind, there is
a struggle for survival very like the one in the physical world. Ideas live on in us if
they work.
So I want, as I close, to reach
out one more time to the many atheists that I love. If you do in fact think,
deeply and personally, that even though being good is difficult and complicated
sometimes, it is much more rational than being bad or indifferent, and if you
also believe in both the sustained nature of the laws of the universe and the
method of thinking that enables your way of figuring them out, then I am
confident that I will see decency in your actions and I will continue to love
and trust you. You will act in moral ways even though, in your immediate physical
situation, there is no material reward in sight for you. You will act exactly as
if you believe that there is a moral code embedded in reality even though you
may not care to admit that you do so believe. You may get old
and die and still never say that you believe in God, but that truly does not
matter. In the deepest, most non-trivial of ways, in
essence, you already do.
This mental model of reality, a
model which enables the mind to look forward and back, inward and out, and to
place itself into its own picture of all that is, captures how deeply moral values,
and the foundational beliefs on which they rest, run: from our ideas of the
sub-atomic up through all the levels of resolution – human and non-human,
living and non-living – to our ideas of the cosmos.
"Self"-conscious humans
who possess this thought-ordering, life-ordering, dynamic, evolving master
concept live in a mental state that has a name. The "I" that is most
"I" lives constantly in this tentative, but not arbitrary, evolving state, the one referred to at the start of this book. It is called
"faith".
Welcome home.
Here the Great River
Now empties into the sea;
Here the babbles and
roars of Duality cease;
Every echoing gorge,
every swirling façade,
Is dissolved in the infinite ocean of God.
(Author unknown)
