One way to ease into the moral relativism versus moral realism debate is to explain how I came to be obsessed with it.

When I was in Grade 9, I was fortunate enough to have had a fine teacher for science. He liked his subject, he liked kids, and he liked bringing the two together, which is all a good teacher ever really has to do. He impressed the thinking technique called the scientific method deeply into my mind. You get an idea or you imagine a model of how some part of the world around you works—how event A connects to event B. You think of a practical, real-world way to test the idea. You set up the apparatus you need, then you do the test. All the while, you keep careful records of what you observe.

Next, you analyze the data to see whether patterns exist that tend to support this theory or model of yours. You then develop further ideas for subtler theories, models, or tests, and you keep on researching. Sometimes you find a way to use your new insights about how the universe works to create technologies that enable humans to live in better health and happiness or in a little less pain. Once in a while, you find a way to formulate one of the basic laws of this universe.

I could see that by using this method, sharing their findings, and continuing their research, scientists had expanded human knowledge, created so many helpful technologies, and cured diseases—all in a steady march of progress. They had brought most of my way of life to its current state—one that was far safer, more comfortable, and more interesting than that known to any of my ancestors. Even at the youthful age of fourteen, I was filled with a rush of emotion each time I realized not only what had been accomplished but what might be still to come. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that we are destined for the stars.

On the other hand, between the ages of six and eleven, I had spent most of my Sunday mornings attending Sunday school at St. Stephen’s United Church. I felt similar profound emotions when I learned about the Being who had created this universe and who loved everything in it. My six-year-old heart ached when I thought about how so many human beings had lost their relationship with God. The evidence was easy to see for myself. Humans are not very moral or even logical most of the time. Even as a boy, I could see this truth in events all around me, from the schoolyard to the Cold War.

But I was uplifted when I was told of one man who had explained to humans how they might strike a new deal: if they could learn to truly love one another—to follow his example—then they could regain their relationships with one another and, ultimately, their relationship with God. The key concept to grasp was that following Jesus’s way was what mattered, not whether he really was some kind of “divine“ being, and not whether the people I met belonged to one particular group or sect. Love one another. Really love one another. Then peace, progress, and prosperity will all come. All of this was six-year-old naïveté, I admit. But as I look back even now, it seems more profound than the beliefs of many adults because it was clear, heartfelt, and unabashed.

                                   Witnesses seeing the miracle at Fatima, Portugal, 1917.

Even as a child, I did not believe in “miracles”; that is, events that lie beyond all rational explanation. I still don’t. Nor do I believe in the divinity of Jesus. Or, to be exact, I believe he had a spark of the divine in him, but so do all living things. He just had a lot more than most of us. But he differed from us in degree, not type. And miracles? They turn out to have rational explanations in the end.

I knew even as a child that the important thing to understand was what the new deal Jesus offered humanity represented. The principles being represented in the stories were what mattered, and they seemed to me absolutely bang on. If we take into account all that we know at this point in history, and we relentlessly apply our powers of reason to this material, we can find a clear path to survival—that is, to humanity’s living with decency, sense, and love. In other words, once a critical mass of humans shares a model of reality that shows us how to fit into the natural world and to get long-term, survival-oriented results there, by a few more millions in each generation, humanity will choose to join the walk along that path. Decency, sense, and love will prove fitter than cruelty and folly. Rational persuasion will prevail.

My faith was not destroyed when I gained an understanding of the scientific method. Nor was my passion for science destroyed by my spiritual beliefs. The two clashed at times, my faith wavered for a while, but as a man, I gradually worked out a way to integrate the two and then to synthesize them into a new belief system—a single, unified, coherent one, whose power to guide, nourish, and inspire is greater than any power residing in our old science or our old religion alone could ever be.

The question in this Age of Science is “How?” How can a rational human being in the modern era feel full, confident allegiance to both of these ways of viewing our world and our place in it, these two ways that are currently considered, by most people, to be incompatible? The answer is that they are so far from incompatible that the plural pronoun “they” does not work in this context. Only a single concept is being discussed here. There is a way of understanding and reconciling all that we know, a way that integrates it all, from our observations of events around us to the memories stored in our brains to all the concepts we use as we strive to understand what we see and recall, and then design effective responses to all of it. In short, when correctly understood, science is religion.

This book is about what I call reasoned faith: a set of ideas that connects science to morality and then to faith. I have worked out a system that integrates all that we know and all that is justified, as science is, by reasoning and evidence alone. This system is consistent with my deepest instincts, with all the conceptual models used in science, and with all the sense data and memories of sense data that lie between these poles of intuition and reason.

In this book, I will construct an argument in everyday language proving that the current belief about the incompatibility of science and faith is wrong. My hope is that all readers who have struggled or are still struggling with this dilemma, the biggest dilemma of our time, and even those who claim to have committed themselves to one side of the debate or the other and to have stopped thinking about the matter, will find resolution by the end of the book.

I believe that all decisions to stop thinking about this dilemma are deluded and unsustainable. Few of the jingoists, atheist or theist, and even fewer of the discouraged ones in the middle—ever truly stop thinking about the dilemma. Instead, they live in anxiety and return to it via the pathways of daily experience again and again. I want to provide them all with a way to solve it, not permanently but repeatedly, every time doubt assails them, to work their way through doubts as they crop up in the flow of living and to do so with growing confidence in a comprehensive system of thought that enables them to do that work.

In philosophical terms, my main thesis is called "deriving ought from is” which means finding a strong logical base for moral values (the "ought" part) in the factual evidence of real life (the "is" part). I will prove that a code of right and wrong exists, embedded in the processes of the real world, and that we can figure out that code simply by looking at the evidence in science, in history, and in our daily lives. Further, I will show that once we recognize there is such a code—and we see what that code is telling us about how a human life can and should be lived—we are gradually and inescapably led to the conclusion that a God does exist in this universe. A “sort of a God,” if you like. I’m content with the term “sort of a God.” The more unique and personal the view of God that each reader arrives at by time he or she has finished reading this book, the happier I’ll be. That concept has to be personal, or in the end, it is nothing at all.

I have been mulling over this problem for more than fifty years, from the time that I was a child, through a long career teaching in the public school system, eight years of formal post-secondary study, three degrees (two undergraduate, one graduate), stints in agriculture, six rock bands, and business, time spent raising three kids, and a lot of life. However, I feel all these experiences neither add to nor detract from my case. They aren’t relevant. The case must stand on its own.

It is also worth noting that the ideas, historical records, texts, and perspectives I discuss in this book are mostly those of a man who was born into, and moulded by a Western culture. Certainly, plenty of other usable perspectives are available in the world today. But I am a son of the West. I can speak with at least some useful degree of conviction only on the ideas and history I’ve learned about in my country and its schools. However, the conclusions I draw in this book are universal; they can be extracted by logic from the historical records and daily life circumstances of any nation.

This book is an attempt to solve the dilemma of our time. I think I’ve untangled that dilemma. My hope is that those who stay with this book to the end will find that the reward—a thinking system that enables them to organize all their ideas, professional, moral, and personal, into one clear, consistent, coherent whole—will more than compensate for the effort they have invested in reading the book in full.

I have to try.

 

Notes

1. Emrys Westacott, “Moral Relativism,” International Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012. http://www.iep.utm.edu/moral-re/#SH3b.

2. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Mariner Books, 2002).

3. David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance (Greystone Books, 1997).

4. Albert Einstein, from a telegram to prominent Americans, May 24, 1946.

5. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2.3.3.4 (1739; Project Gutenberg). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4705/4705-h/4705-h.htm.

I've been working on my book again. One more re-write. This one, I swear, will be the last. I have to go on from where this book ends. I feel like time is running out. No more re-writes after this one. So, dear readers, I will put it up one more time, in digestible pieces. I hope you like. 

The Science God:

   Theism by Reason Alone

 

 

      by Dwight Wendell

Preface

Faith and reason are not enemies. But nor can they really be called friends. They are different aspects of the same thing. Science is simply the form that religion has taken in the modern world, and science has both faith and reason embedded in it. That is the message of this book. But I know I will have to make my case well if I am to get readers to see that what I am asserting is so.

We live in an age that we like to think of as an age of reason par excellence. We assume science and the methods of science are increasing in influence in our world with every day that passes, and we celebrate that fact because we have seen over and over that the majority of the cruel and stupid abuses of the past can be traced directly to the unscientific superstitions of the societies in which they occurred.

But at the same time, the moral codes we need simply to move through our daily lives, from the personal level to the global, have suffered serious damage in the last four centuries, largely because these moral codes haven’t held up under the scrutiny of this same science. Most people know this on some level. We are bolstered and encouraged by the material progress science has brought us, but we are also frightened by the amorality of its world view.   

From the old codes of right and wrong, we keep getting directions that we can see are obsolete. Executing murderers, for example, is entirely counterproductive. In the meantime, however, the new gurus of Western society, namely the scientists, when they are asked to define right and wrong, say that science cannot comment on morality or, worse yet, they flatly assert that all moral values are no more than fantasy concoctions, about as empirically real as Santa Claus.¹

Science has given us the capacity to do harm on a planetary scale. Because of that, we need guidance; we need answers and not just piecemeal ones. We need a general moral system that can tell us which of our actions are at least tending toward right and which are not. We can’t go on doing things like building nuclear weapons and polluting our planet without, sooner or later, having to face consequences. Environmentalists from Rachel Carson to David Suzuki have said we must stop the madness.^2,3

The nuclear physicist’s nightmare is even more horrifying, so much so that Einstein himself said the unleashing of the power of the atom had set us drifting toward “unparalleled catastrophe.”⁴

We have a reasonable chance of surviving on into the future only if we can work out a new moral code that we can all agree to live by. Every other path into the future is shadowed by a high probability of disaster. That is the dark side of the power science has given us.

                                         artist's conception of nuclear bomb explosion 




                                                          Hiroshima: August 6, 1945

This book is an attempt to solve the dilemma of our time, the dilemma called moral relativism that has left us not so much struggling to live up to our ideals as wondering what those ideals are, and whether such things as ideals are even relevant in our world today. Moral relativism is a position in philosophy that simply says there is no basis in the factual, scientific world for any moral values. "Right" and "wrong" are words that may make sense in a particular society at a particular time, but they are only tastes that a lot of people hold all at once in that society. They change from era to era and place to place. In short, the only thing that one can say about morality, according to the moral relativists, is "when in Rome, do as the Romans do." 

On the other hand, moral realism says that there must be a factual, scientific basis for moral values and then its adherents set out, with varying degrees of success, to try to find that basis.

In this book, I will work out a solution to that dilemma, a solution based not on so-called "holy texts" or personal epiphanies, but on reason backed by replicable evidence. However, I admit that readers will have to give their full attention to following the arguments I present here. My arguments aim to fill a tall order; they can’t be explained in a line or two.

I will try very hard to make my overall case a rigorously logical one, but I know it is also very much a personal one. I don’t apologize for this admission. I will discuss matters I believe are profoundly important for us all. My case is both logical and anecdotal, and my tone has to be both rational and personal. As the philosopher David Hume said, feelings drive thoughts and actions, not vice versa.⁵

(Grampa dozing in his chair. Enter Katy, Josh, Liam, Ainslie, Lochlann, Reiden, Ayla, Mira, Charlie, William, and Abbey. They are carrying several bags and cartons of take-out Indo-Canadian food.)

Grampa: (waking) Help! It’s a home invasion.

Katy: We’re all here, Grampa. All eleven of us. Christmas is in three days, and we’ll see you at Uncle Chris and Aunty Shani’s place, but then there’ll be distractions. Lochlann in from Edmo, as you call it, Charlie from Van, as you call it, Reiden in from Kitchener, and Ainslie in from Washington State U. The rest of us have been filling them in on your ideas about moral realism.

Grampa: This sounds ominous.

Katy: Stay serious for just a little while. This is crazy. Me the twenty-five year old telling you, the almost eighty year old to be serious.

Reiden: Crazy to outsiders. Not to any of us. We know how bizarre his sense of humor can be. But anyway …we’re all determined that you will not squirm out of our questioning or digress onto some other topic. We think we mostly get your ideas about moral realism.  

Josh: They’re starting to make sense to me, actually. What have I said? But what matters to us today is to get to the conclusion. You say all of your thinking about moral realism has led you to conclude that there is a god of some kind.

Grampa: That’s right.

Ainslie: Why? I’m taking Anthropology. Everything I read leads me to think that every culture creates religious ideas of some kind and they’re all equally false. I really want to hear this.

Grampa: Every culture has strong ideas of right and wrong too. You’d agree with that claim, right?

Ainslie: Yes. But they differ radically from culture to culture.

Grampa: True, but they all have courage, wisdom, freedom, and love in them in some form. Isn’t that so?

Ainslie: All I can say is that they sort of do. And some cultures in the past have crushed the idea of freedom almost out of existence in the minds of their people.

Grampa: That’s why they’re cultures of the past, Ainslie.

Ainslie: That is a huge blanket statement. You know that, don’t you?

Grampa: I’m past mincing words about these matters, Ainslie. I’m almost eighty, as someone has already been kind enough to mention.

Reiden: No, we’re not feeling sorry for you. We know you’re kidding anyway. We want to follow this line of argument to its logical end. We want to comprehend your system.

Charlie: So tell us. If we grant that maybe our most successful moral principles will steer us to handle real characteristics of the physical universe – if we grant that – then how does that lead to a theistic conclusion.

Grampa: The programs called “courage” and “wisdom”, “freedom” and “love” steer human beings, over thousands of years and millions of people, into the zones in which they can make more of themselves. Love steers us into ways of life that make it possible for us to spread love. More people in more ecosystems on more planets, some of them terraformed by us, making more people. We find what the SETI scientists call the “Goldilocks zones”. Courage, wisdom, freedom and love: they steer us physically because they inform our programming on the scale of all humanity.

Will: I can grant that much. But I’ve been thinking about this for months now. That moral realist thinking does not entail belief in a deity.

Grampa: No, not directly. But it does ask of us that we live a values-driven life, each of us, asked – or maybe we should say – programmed or exhorted or hinted toward, at different times, any of those terms may fit depending on the context that we’re speaking in. But we are being steered to live in certain ways, inside certain patterns, that make our surviving more likely over the long haul. And those are brave, wise, venturesome, loving ways. The way of love has lasted and spread not because it sounds nice, but because it works, my beloved rug-rats.

Liam: No, now you’re going too far. None of us has been a rug rat brat for more than ten, no twelve years.

Will: Don’t distract him, Liam. Stay on the point. So finally, how does all of this lead you to conclude that there is a God, Grampa.

Grampa: A sort of a God.

Will: A sort of a God then.

Grampa: Well, the difference matters. None of us could know more than a tiny fraction of a fragment of a splinter of that consciousness that fills all of the cosmos, but it’s there. The only way the universe could be showing the qualities that it does – consistency, coherence, quantum entanglement, and moral awareness – is if it does actually have a consciousness, a sort of a consciousness, if you like. It feels itself, all over, all at once, all of the time.

Lochlann: Ten to the what …eighty something power particles, fourteen billion light years across …my God, that’s is awesome.

Grampa: I hope you get the irony of what you just said, Lock, but yes. It is.

Ainslie: It’s still a bit much to gamble on. Well, gambling on our mental models is what you said before we do all of the time anyway, right?

Grampa: I did indeed. But do you see that it is reasonable to gamble on the big values in the most profound way, in other words to try to live by them every day, all through our lives?

Ainslie: I see that, yes. We don’t really believe them at all if we don’t live by them.

Grampa: And in addition, it won’t always be easy to remain true to your values and patient with the bullies and the lazy slugs of the world? And keep trying to be a decent person even when it would be so easy to become a fascist or communist or fundamentalist or some other form of intolerant bigot?

Ainslie: Yes, yes, all of that. But I don’t believe in God.  

Grampa: But you’re willing to admit that you believe moral values are just our words for things that are real?

Ainslie: Yes. That doesn’t change my atheism. I don’t think God exists.  

Grampa: Well, you’re still okay by me. I love you just as you are. But may I gently suggest that actually you do.

Reiden: See now there’s the jump I don’t get. How can you say that? She just told you that, no she does not believe in God.

Grampa: She believes in the consistency of the universe, and so do millions of others with her. That’s what science begins from. And she believes that the universe is a kind of conscious. And so do those millions of others today. Once you add to that sum the belief that moral values are our models of how our role in the real, empirical universe has to be lived, and you live by those values, then how you live, by the evidence that shows in your behavior – which is all that science cares about, remember – how you live will be indistinguishable in any substantive way from the lifestyle of a theist. You’re okay by me at that point and I really don’t have any more points to try to make to you because, even though you say you don’t believe in God, in every way that matters, you actually do.

Liam: What? That’s outrageous, you old scalliwag.

Grampa: Ah, let’s eat you guys. I smell chicken vindaloo and it’s getting cold.

(They look at one another and some begin to put out plates on his counter top, along with cutlery and condiments, while others open the cartons and spread them out on his small table.)

Lochlann: (privately, quietly) Thank you, Grampa. This is awesome.

Grampa: Merry Christmas, laddie. Enjoy your holiday.      

(Grampa is napping in his armchair. William, Ayla, Abbey, Mira, Liam, and Josh all come tramping through the door without knocking.)

Grampa: (waking up, yawning) We’re going to need a bigger boat.

Liam: That’s a line from “Jaws”.

Grampa: Well, it happens to fit right now.

Ayla: If you want, some of us can go to Taco Del Mar for lunch. I guess we should have called to warn you.

Grampa: Not at all. I’m just kidding. A small boat is a cozy boat. There’s lots of chili the freezer. It’ll just take a while to microwave.

Abbey: I’ll start on doing that. These philosophical arguments drag on too much for my enjoyment, anyway.

Grampa: Thank you, Abbey. You try to give us what we need right here and now.

Liam: “Jesus Christ Superstar” allusion. Well, you don’t do that by accident.

Grampa: Alright. That’s true. But Will, Josh …you look impatient already.

Will: We are. What’s the other value or value set that is founded in the physical world? And why does your case for the realness of values make you believe in God. Most of our parents think all forms of theism are a lot of hooey.

Grampa: That’s for sure. But you guys …you’re not that jaded yet.

Josh: But to the quick of the ulcer, as you say. What is the other fact of reality that you think impacts and shapes and …informs, that’s the word …how our values and our cultures have evolved. Let’s just fasten our attention on that.

Grampa: Fastening like a pit bull. Alright. In a few words, quantum uncertainty is a fact of reality, but it means for ordinary life that life is always tentative and dangerous. Hazardous. The future is made of a multitude of possible futures, but I go into only one. There are many events possible, but for me only one future will be realized. Each of the possible futures has a degree of probability associated with it. A degree of probability ranging from very unlikely to almost certain. Then many factors influence which of them actually occur.

Josh: Including the rolls of the dice that are happening right down at the level of atoms and quarks all the time?

Grampa: Some physicists don’t think quantum events affect things at the macro level where we live, but I think they can and do.

Josh: Isn’t there enough uncertainty at the macro level already without the effects of quantum forces? This part I know. Things like the weather are tough to predict because there are so many factors involved. Or at least it’s tough to predict far in advance. A few days is the best we can do. Too much data if we look further.

Grampa: All true, Josh. And I believe that events like the weather are affected by quantum scale events. But the important thing to get is this: we have to live in an uncertain, but not chaotic, universe. There are probabilities associated with every one of those possible futures, and for at least some of them, we can lower or raise the probabilities.

Ayla: We do have some free will, in other words. Well …I’m helping Abbey, but I’m also listening. So go on, Grampa.

Grampa: You’re all listening. I can tell. But …yes …I’ll say the thing you want to hear. We do have some free will. All living things do. They can get out of the way of the rock slides and the avalanches. Or at least defend themselves. And the smarter they get, the further ahead they can estimate the probabilities of events and the more reliably they can do things to alter those probabilities.

Mira: Dad still runs the vineyard. He has to think ahead or he won’t get a crop. Or at least, the chance that he will is not very great if he doesn’t do some things that will shape the future for twenty thousand grape plants.

Grampa: Well-chosen example. Agriculture is a good example of a human activity that demonstrates our free will, Mira. Well chosen.

Will: I am determined to get to the end of this whole line of thought. So the world is hazardous. Quantum theory says it has to be and always will be, no matter how smart we may get in the future. There’ll always be hazards, right?

Grampa: Yes.

Will: And I’ll concede that it certainly looks like we have free will, or at least some degree of free will. But then …what are the values or virtues that we need to learn in order to inform - as you put it - our lives so that we survive and multiply?

Grampa: First comes freedom. We can be pretty strong, smart, and determined each of us by herself or himself, but that’s minor compared to how much fitter we get if we have a whole tribe or community that’s filled with a lot of different kinds of people. Different kinds of physiques and talents. Then we significantly improve the odds that no matter what surprises the future may throw at us, there will be someone in town who has an answer to the challenge. That person then shows the rest of us what to do to get through the plague or the famine or to get out of the way of the tsunami …whatever …and most of us listen, and the tribe survives.

Liam: Very social, your idea of fitness, isn’t it? We have to be a team if we want to go on. The individual with his talents is still only a small factor in the whole calculation of whether a tribe is going to go on.

Grampa: You’re a very strong lad now, Liam. But we all get old. And the smart lose their acuity and the musicians go deaf and so on. And even the dullest people can sometimes have a something to give to the tribe that turns out to be lifesaving.

Ayla: So freedom means letting your neighbor be herself or himself, doesn’t it?

Grampa: As long as that person is not limiting your activities, then, yes. That’s what freedom means. The right of every person to pursue their own interests.

Will: But I think I see where you’re going to go next. You said about courage that it works as our social response to the hardship of life only if it is balanced out by wisdom. We have to teach our kids to be brave, but also wise.

Grampa: Knowledgeable is also a good word. But yes, you’re recalling our talk well. That’s what culture is about. The old folks pass lessons on to the young and the wisdom accumulates over the generations.

Mira: Except that we don’t want to listen to our parents most of the time.

Grampa: Ah, you’re seventeen, Mira. You will. Start to listen, I mean.

Mira: We listen to you.

Grampa: Which is why I have to be careful about what I say.

Josh: We’re getting sidetracked again. If I concede that it looks like freedom as a value taught to young people makes more individuals want to chase their best ideas and their dreams, then just like wisdom balances and focuses courage, there must be some other value that balances freedom.

Grampa: Why would you need to balance freedom? Free is a good thing to be.

Will: Oh no. We ask the questions here. You’re the suspect being questioned.

Grampa: And you’re the detectives.

Will: Something like that. And freedom by itself would have downsides too. I can see that. A tribe that was fixated on freedom would soon be full of a big bunch of factions all arguing with each other and no one listening. Soon they’d all be at one another’s throats. In a generation, they’d fragment …what do the historians call it? …balkanize, right?

Ayla: I was right. You’re going to say we have to learn to love one another, aren’t you? Every individual, every faction, treating all of the others with respect.

(A silence fills the room. All the young people are staring at Grampa. His eyes are filling up with tears.)

Grampa: You make me very happy, Ayla.

(Another awkward moment of silence.)

Abbey: (softly) Everything’s ready, guys. Let’s eat.

Grampa: Lunch for seven. A lucky number. Abbey’s right. Let’s eat.  

(Grampa dozing on chesterfield. T.V. is on. Enter William, Ayla, and Lochlann. Ayla shuts off t.v. Grampa starts up. There’s an awkward moment, then they all laugh.)

Grampa: Thieves! Help! Oh! False alarm. It’s just mischievous kids. Lochlann. Yay!

Lochlann: Professional day for our school. I thought I’d join these guys.

Grampa: What grade are you in now?

Lochlann: Nine. But that doesn’t mean I can’t think just as well as these two. Sorry about scaring you.

Ayla: We like to make him jump. He doesn’t get mad, or at least not very often.

Grampa: It’s okay. I sleep too much, anyway. Back for more are you, Will?

William: Well …yes. I can’t see how values like courage and wisdom ever got to be so – respected, I think is the right word – all over. By the way, you two, I’m picking up where we left off on Tuesday, when Josh and Liam were here.

Ayla: I know. I get it. Grampa and I have had this talk in the past. Or ones like it.

Grampa: So. To cut to the chase, as the idiom goes, a few really general values get widely accepted and used to guide behavior in daily life – and in crisis situations, for that matter – when more of the people who live by them survive better over thousands of years.

W: And you’re saying that’s where values come from?

G: The most general ones, yes. There’s no other way to account for the fact that those few values are so widespread, Will. In almost every society that is or ever has been.

W: Alright. Suppose we accept that hypothesis or model of social evolution, if you like. Then why are there so many disputes over values and morés. Those disputes are what wars are started over. I mean people must be pretty attached to their morés, values, customs, habits …whatever you want to call them, if they are ready to kill one another over the differences between their ways and some other tribe’s ways. And it keeps happening. We’ve got people in all parts of the world right now who’ll fight to the death to keep their way of life from alien intrusions. Alien. Foreign. Infidel. Heathens. Gaijin. Gwailo. There must be a thousand terms.

G: I think humans have a gene built in that makes them suspicious of outsiders.

W: What would be the use of that? Of our being tilted in the direction of going to war, in other words? Are you saying a desire to make war is built into us?

G: It has been for a long time, Will.

W: But why? That gene – it’s a gene, you’re saying, not some learned behavior – you’re saying it’s built in and it has survived as long as humans have been human.

G: That’s right.

W: Well, I don’t get it. That would make no sense. Killing off the young men or sometimes nearly all of some tribe. That would make us less likely to survive and go on, not more likely.

G: There were more people, more human beings, alive in the world at the end of World War Two than there were at the start.

W: What?! That can’t be right.

L: No, he’s right, Will. Even in grade nine, we read about World War Two. And I have read more on my own. My dad’s books.  

W: Alright. That is a surprise. So then, Grampa … I mean, why? Why all that loss of life and all that grieving for millions of people? And not just in that war. History is made of wars, it seems.

G: Wars test cultural fitness, Will.

W: That’s Nazism. That’s Hitler, right down the line.

G: No, he thought wars tested racial fitness, and that’s nonsense. Humans are all one species. The idea of there being races of humans is an empty concept.  

W: That I knew. But let’s not get sidetracked. War has been toughening us for eons then? Is that what you’re saying?

G: Yes. But let’s be careful here. War has been toughening us culturally. Our technologies and economies have been getting tougher via wars. But genetically we have probably gone down a bit. We save people who would have died in cave people’s days. From defects, congenitally acquired diseases, and things like that. And those people breed and their genes stay in the gene pool. But weaker morés, values, customs, and so on …those things get pounded out of existence because the people who believe in less effective values and customs don’t compete as well as people who have a little more efficient sets of values and customs and so on.

A: And economies and technologies.

G: That’s right.

A: So are you implying that the superior …that’s a scary, fascist-sounding word … but anyway, are you implying that superior technologies and economies come from a society’s valuing courage and wisdom? Over centuries, of course.  

G: There’s no other way to explain them, Ayla. On the face of it, this talk all seems very scary and upsetting, but notice that there are also compassionate instincts in us as well. We may beat a culture and the nation that follows it to its knees, but we hardly ever exterminate it totally. At the end of the war – the Second World War – the Allies decided to loan money to Germany and Japan so those countries could re-build. Nearly all US loans, by the way. Very compassionate. It’s probably why those countries are basically loyal to the democracies of the West now. We are learning to change our cultural codes by less cruel means. I believe that, but we have to look at the scale of millions of people and thousands of years to begin to see these trends.    

W: And really general values like courage and wisdom inform the whole rest of the cultural code of a country? Or any successful country, anyway?

G: That’s right.

L: I’m going to jump in here. So why in your model are there so many variations on these large-scale themes?

G: Sharp, sharp question. Well, done. But just like gene codes, cultural codes have to keep experimenting. The world – the physical world – keeps changing in ways we can’t anticipate. Not because the shifts are so hard to anticipate; because they can’t be anticipated. A computer as big as this planet, programmed with all of the knowledge of our whole species over all of its history …even that computer could not make such a calculation about the future because that is impossible. The most recent edge of science, that’s quantum theory, says reality unfolds within certain probabilities. But there are no certainties. Future events can’t be predicted. Or at least not exactly. Only at various levels of probability. It’s important to get that.

A: So it's our cultural codes that are varying and producing different cultures and then the fitter cultures survive better? Is that what you're saying? 

G: That's right. We stopped evolving genetically long ago. Cultural evolution is a better way to evolve. It's nimble. It responds to changes in the ecosystem faster. And those changes always come. Quantum uncertainty insures that they have to.  

W: Hey, wait a minute! That brings us to that second principle of reality you said affects how we make up our values and cultural codes. Isn’t that what you were saying when Josh was here?

G: Well re-called, young polemicist.

W: You’re going to call a halt here, aren’t you? I can feel it.

G: What you got today is enough to absorb for a while. Let’s make lunch. And no beer for Lochlann. Don’t even ask. His mother would burn me at the stake if he started drinking beer in my home.

A: You can be infuriating. We’d like to get to the end of this plot line, you know.

G: Indeed, I do. But it’s time for lunch. Aren’t you hungry?

A: And thirsty.