Chapter 1.               (continued) 

                                    

                                    

                                                                         Sigmund Freud.

Now, all of this may seem bad enough, but it gets worse. The third significant way in which science eroded religion came when science began to understand the workings of the human brain. Humans had long felt that many things in this world could not be explained in physical terms because they had long known that inside the privacy of their minds, they had dreams and feelings, and even outside in physical reality, they sometimes saw or did things, that by logic alone made no sense. Cruel or lustful thoughts and acts were bad enough. But at least they seemed somewhat predictable, given humans’ “sinful” nature. From long experience, we’ve come to know our instinctive human drives, so we can often accept intermittent thoughts of fornication, theft, violence, and even murder as natural. But people also have much weirder dreams and even see weird things when they’re wide awake that are, by the laws of physics and common sense, not possible.

Why do people have dreams and waking visions of angels or demons hovering in the air, or of talking cats on mountaintops bathed in orange light and standing on their hind feet? Night after night, many of us dream not just cruel or lustful dreams, but also many more that are simply absurd. Other people, wide awake, see angels, demons, and miracles. For centuries, if a person saw or did something that afterward he himself could not make sense of, the widely accepted explanation was that God (or Satan) had caused the event or had made him do the deed. Much of normal human experience, apparently, lies beyond science and even common sense.

When Freud came along, his big contribution to human knowledge was simply the proposition that all these perceptions come from inside the brain of the person having the dream or vision. Thus, visions and miracles can be easily explained. They come from stored-up memories that combine and recombine to form symbolic narratives that are driven by deep, unconscious needs—needs that the visionary isn’t aware of because they are buried so deeply she can’t consciously access them, no matter how she tries. Under stress, her brain transmits images into her optic nerves, which is the opposite of what usually happens. Thus, even wide awake, we can sometimes see what in physical reality is not there.

Most of our memories may not be recallable at will, but they are all in there. Unless a person has had some brain-destroying injury or disease, her brain holds all she has ever experienced, all the sense data that have ever been fed into it via sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. How they will affect her moment-by-moment flow of consciousness can’t be exactly predicted in advance, but the patterns in those “paranormal” experiences coincide too often and too closely with the subject’s personal issues for us to believe that those experiences are somehow independent of the mental states that preceded them. People have visions of angels when they have been reading about miraculous cures for the very troubles that they have been suffering under for the last six months. They dream of tidal waves after watching a t.v. show about the recent big one in Japan. They see the ghosts of their dead fathers after spending days feeling guilty for how they neglected him while he was alive - just before what would have been his 80th birthday. The sciences of the mind have shown convincingly that we can literally see what we want/need to see.

While at first, Freud and his followers were widely considered to be sex-obsessed crackpots, they soon began to gain credibility and command respect, mainly because they were getting results. Their model could explain all of human behavior, they could make high probability predictions about how individuals with certain backgrounds would act in specific future situations, and they began to cure people of neuroses and psychoses that, in earlier times, would have been pronounced hopeless.

Then, as research on the human brain advanced, other researchers showed that the model portraying all of a person’s experiences as being stored in his brain, even though he can’t recall the experiences at will, is literally true. Patients willing to stay conscious during neurosurgery, allowing researchers to place tiny electrodes on their brains, are able, when a milliamp current is turned on, to recall all kinds of memories in detail, memories of which they ordinarily have no conscious awareness.⁶

Freud went much further with his psycho-sexual explanations of nearly all of the motives that drive human behaviour. Much of what he had to say has today been discredited; for example, we no longer believe that little girls are consumed with a desire to have a penis. But the larger impact of his discoveries remains. Those parts of human experience that for so long had seemed to defy logic and common sense turned out to have a rational explanation. The dreams and visions were, and are, figments of overactive human imaginations; they never actually took place at all. No more miracles.

If we consider just these three scientific theories—Galileo’s, Darwin’s, and Freud’s—what can we say have been their consequences? Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, for most people, removed the biblical God from their picture of the cosmos. They didn’t need him in their model of the universe. Darwin removed God as the creator of life. He even reduced humans to just one more kind of animal. And Freud made humans look like sick animals, easily deluded by their own aggressive, lustful, self-absorbed thoughts. (Donald Palmer’s book articulates this idea well.⁷)

Despite all this, science has not proved that the existence of God is impossible or that a universal moral code is impossible. But over the past four centuries, science has severely shaken the traditional idea of God and thus, inevitably, the traditional ideas of morality (the two are deeply intertwined, as we shall see). However, let me stress again that what does not follow from these scientific models is that there is no God or that every form of theism and every form of moral code are mere wishful thinking. We just need a new understanding of what God is and what the fact of God’s existence should mean for us in how we live our daily lives, an understanding that incorporates some subtler ideas of God and science into a single, consistent, coherent picture of what we believe is real.

But for now, we can say that science has almost levelled the old, pre-Enlightenment ways of thinking of these things. And let us make no mistake about what the loss of their belief in God has done to the vast majority of ordinary people. Removing God from Western society’s generally accepted picture of how the world works had the inevitable consequence of removing our society’s confidence in its moral code, our ideas of what right and wrong are, and how we should try to act—toward the world in general, but especially toward one another. If the moral rules we’re supposed to follow aren’t God’s rules, whose rules are they? Human authorities’ rules? Which human authorities? Who are they to be telling me what to do?

The point may seem a rather trivial one to most people in the West. Why should we care whether the old ideas of God and right and wrong are crumbling? Explaining in more detail why humans throughout the world, sometimes at deep, subconscious levels, are struggling to cope with this loss, even though they may not be aware of the philosophical names for the thoughts and feelings they are having, will be the business of the next chapter.

Notes

1. Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 55.

2. “Life Expectancy,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed March 29, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.

3. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Articles 211 and 212, ed. Jonathan Bennett. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/descartes1649.pdf.

4. Ibid., Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations 3 and 4., trans. John Veitch, 1901. http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations.

5. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1966), p. 353.

6. Cathryn Delude, “Researchers Show That Memories Reside in Specific Brain Cells,” MIT News, March 22, 2012. http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2012/conjuring-memories-artificially-0322.

7. Donald Palmer, Does the Center Hold? An Introduction to Western Philosophy (California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1st edition, 1991), p. 56.

        Chapter 1.       (continued)  

                      

                                                                 Charles Darwin.

In the mid-1800s, Charles Darwin hit the faithful and their institutions and beliefs with probably the biggest of all the jolts. He gave an excellent scientific explanation for life itself. Life on earth, by Darwin’s theory of evolution, had evolved from a few simple cells to complex organisms with trillions of cells over the course of millions (or, he guessed, perhaps billions) of years.

Darwin had the theory, and he had the evidence to support it. The models of genetic variation and natural selection can explain every life form on earth in all their many subtle variations. Fossils in the rocks all over the world show the stages through which life has developed and spread. Both chemical and physical testing give consistent, predictable results that clearly support Darwin’s theory. Life, in all its complex forms on this earth, developed from a few simple cells, by gradual increments, over billions of years.

Where was the Bible then? The first chapter of the Bible, the Book of Genesis, has billions of years of creation squeezed into a time scale of six days. The Darwinian theory of evolution says this is ridiculous. Furthermore, the theory implies that natural physical processes—those that can be observed, predicted, and even manipulated—can account for all of the phenomena in reality, living and non-living. For scientists, the concept of God is not needed in their discussion of what this universe is or what human beings are. It isn’t even relevant.

Darwin’s theory of evolution was a shock of such magnitude that Church authorities and most of the faithful who listen to them are still reeling from it and still lashing out at it. Scientists who believe the theory gives a true picture of reality find these attacks annoying and silly. The evidence is there—mounds of it. What evidence is there for the alternate explanation? One old book, written by a bunch of priests, prophets, and disciples with vested interests and sinecure jobs to protect, making claims about events they did not witness, events that can’t be replicated, examined, or tested. It just isn’t science.

In fact, how can the so-called “faithful”—who every day derive most of the comforts of their way of life from the ideas, discoveries, and inventions of scientists—be such ingrates? It’s a sure bet that however much they may want to criticize the broad range of studies and activities called science, they don’t want to starve and they don’t want their electricity turned off. They certainly don’t want to be eating tainted food, shivering in a hovel by a wood fire, watching their children die of mysterious “miasmas”.

In spite of all of these accusations, however, the point of this book is to show that the full description of both sides of this nasty quarrel is more complex than what the last couple of paragraphs portray. For now, this small section on the theory of evolution can be summarized by saying that Darwin’s theory, for most thinking people, floored the Bible for the count. He had found a theory that explained the greatest of the mysteries of our human experience, and he had assembled the evidence to back up that theory.

The Bible had been reduced, apparently, to a collection of myths and poems, with some bits of one ancient tribe’s history woven in. God was like Zeus or Wotan, a story-book character created by a gang of theocrats who played on human fears in order to rule the masses.

Chapter 1. (continued) 

At this point, as science began to affect people’s material lives, it inevitably began to affect their deeper ways of thinking. For many people who were trying to hang on to a traditional style of faith, some of the large-scale changes to the generally held ways of thinking that most people had subscribed to for so long were not happy changes. The same still holds true today.

                               

                                                                            René Descartes.

A younger contemporary of Bacon was the man many still see as the leading light of the Renaissance and its new way thinking, a sickly French parochial-school boy who became a sickly man with a mind like a razor: René Descartes. He spent years maneuvering to get a feel for what the religious leaders of his time would let him say, and only then did he publish his views on how thinking and learning should be done.

Descartes separated science from religion and morality. Under his model, science can advance our ways of dealing with the physical world of the body, but religion and its inherent morality must still oversee the activities of our minds and souls. For the people of his time, the affairs of souls were seen as being much more important than those of bodies or anything else made from matter. Under Descartes’s model, religion retains primary control over our decisions about what we should be doing with our lives, including how we should be using the findings of science.^3,4

Descartes’s clever maneuver then enabled him to separate the mind from the body and the realm of thought from the realm of faith. It was a move that somewhat ameliorated the religious authorities’ scrutiny of those who studied the physical world and how the things in it worked, but he only delayed the inevitable. Because we humans have issues and concerns in both realms, the sensory and the abstract, sooner or later we have to deal with the logical conclusion that the two realms must interact somehow in order for them both to involve, matter to, and make sense to, us.

Describing all the ways in which science sometimes eroded, and sometimes blasted, the traditional beliefs of the majority of people would fill a whole encyclopedia. We can be content with looking at just three such ways. I chose these three because I believe they are paradigmatic, as did Freud.⁵

                      Galileo Galilei, physicist, mathematician, engineer, astronomer, and philosopher.

First, the astronomers shook the traditional view of the heavens. In 1543, Copernicus proposed a new model of our universe. Instead of the earth being at the centre with the rest of the heavenly bodies like the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars revolving around it, he said the sun was at the centre of our solar system, and the earth was just one more planet—along with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—revolving around the sun. Supposedly, his idea was proposed only for discussion purposes so he was not attacked by the religious leaders of his time. But in the 1600s, Galileo and, later, Newton took up and refined the Copernican model. They discovered a set of natural laws that described both events in the cosmos and events on the earth in subtle mathematical formulas that gave precise predictions about phenomena like falling objects, fired cannonballs, eclipses, comets, and planetary orbits—phenomena that had previously been given only inaccurate, conceptually messy, ad hoc explanations.

Today, Galileo and Newton’s picture of the solar system and how it works seems intuitive and obvious to most people. But Galileo in his time was seen by religious leaders as a demon. The Bible said God had made man as his special, darling creation. The earth had been created, along with all of its life forms, as a special home for us. Thus, the earth had to be the centre of the universe. Ptolemy also had said so, over a thousand years before, and his model of the cosmos fitted neatly together with the doctrine of the Church. Besides, the sun, the moon, and the stars moved across the sky from east to west. These things would not be possible if the earth were not the cosmos’ centre. What fool could question these obvious truths?

Galileo did and almost paid with his life. He was forced to recant under the threat of horrible torture. Galileo had begun his higher education studying medicine. He knew what they could make him say once they began to apply their racks and thumbscrews. With his telescope to back him up, he tried hard to persuade the pope and his agents that the evidence proved the Copernican model was correct. They weren’t interested; in fact, they became angrier. So he signed where they told him to sign. But according to one version of his story, as he left the building, he pointed up at the moon and said, “It still moves.”

That statement deeply reveals the kind of thinking on which it is predicated. It could stand as a statement of the fundamental belief of science. Material reality is what it is. Our role is to learn about it by observing it, formulating theories about it, and doing experiments to test those theories. We can’t impose our views on reality. If one of our theories goes against what has long been society’s received wisdom on any subject, this contradiction, for scientists, means nothing. What matters is whether it fits the evidence.

Aristotle and the authors of the Bible and even last year’s scientific theories have no more of a monopoly on truth than any one of us. Most crucially, we can always go back to physical reality and test again. Let reality be the arbiter. That is the method and belief system to which scientists are committed. (The Catholic Church pardoned Galileo in 1992, nearly 360 years after his “offence.” The Copernican model of the solar system, the one that Galileo championed, has been generally accepted as the correct model since about 1700.)

Some scientists have also been deeply religious people whose scientific findings have clashed with their religious beliefs. The history of science is filled with accounts of people who felt they had to drop their faith in the Bible, usually after much personal anguish, in order to continue to pursue science. However, what their torments mean to our argument today is nothing. Their anguish does not have any bearing on what science considers to be knowledge; only the evidence does.

Chapter 1.           (continued) 

The Renaissance changed all that. Bacon came late in the Renaissance era, but he is usually given credit for articulating the new system of thinking that had been sweeping over Europe for more than a hundred years by the time he came on the scene.

What Bacon said, essentially, was that he didn’t think the authorities were infallible. In fact, he proposed that people could learn about this world themselves, by watching real events closely and developing their own ideas about how things worked. Then—and here came the crucial step—they could devise ways to test their models and theories of reality and create increasingly better models that allowed them to conduct increasingly more reliable, material-world tests, until they could predict precisely, in advance, something like “If I do or see A and B, I know that C will result, within a reasonable time frame.”

This proposed change to the method of learning at first seemed a bit silly and very likely to be a complete waste of time. Why spend months or years carefully observing, thinking, and testing, only to discover that Aristotle or the Bible had been right all along? The majority of medieval scholars assumed that this was all that would happen. Their confidence in the Church authorities and the classics was near to absolute. Scholars might discuss how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (they really did argue over that one), but the major questions had already been given answers that were beyond debate.

Of course, science, in the modern sense of the word, was not suddenly made possible by one writer’s pronouncing how it could and should work. A few rare thinkers had already been using methods pretty much like those Bacon described—and arguably, they’d been using them for centuries. They simply hadn’t been conscious of the steps in the method. However, Bacon’s book on how the real world could and should be studied did give the medieval scholars, who lived mainly in their books, a new model to think about and discuss, one that was much more specific and material-world oriented than any of its predecessors had been.

  

                             St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, an architectural marvel of its time

But whether Bacon started a revolution or merely articulated what was already taking place in the minds of the curious and creative men of his time is not important for my case. What matters is that the method to which Bacon gave voice began, increasingly, to produce useful results. Navigation, architecture, law, agriculture, medicine, industry, warfare, and even the routines of daily life began to show greater and more frequent improvements because of the discoveries and inventions of science.

Chapter 1 – Science Gets the Blame

               

artists conception of Plato (l) and Aristotle (r). (From Raphael’s The School of Athens.)

Science gets the blame—or the credit, depending on your point of view—for having eroded the base out from under the moral systems that our ancestors lived by and depended on. For the most part, it fully deserves this blame. Prior to the scientific revolution, people were pretty miserable in terms of their physical lives. Life was hard for nearly all folk and death came soon. Famines, plagues, and war swept the land. Infant mortality rates are estimated to have been between 30 and 50 percent ¹, and life expectancy was under forty years.²

But people knew where they stood in society, and they knew where they stood—or at least should be trying to stand—in moral terms, in their relationships with other people, from the bottom of society to the top. Kings had their duties just as noblemen, serfs, and craftsmen did, and all of their wives did, and sins had consequences. God was in his heaven; he enforced his rules—harshly but fairly, even if humans couldn’t always see his logic and even if his justice sometimes took generations to arrive. People knew “what goes around comes around.” For most folk, all was right with the world.

 

                    

                                                                  Francis Bacon.

The scientific revolution essentially began from a new method for studying the physical world, a method proposed most articulately by the English Renaissance philosopher, Francis Bacon. For centuries before the Renaissance, most people who studied the material world had followed the models of reality that had been laid down in the texts of the ancient Greeks, or even better, in the Bible. Works by Aristotle, in particular, described how the natural world worked in almost every one of its aspects, from atomic theory to biology to cosmology.

On most matters, the Greeks were seen as having merely described in more detail what had been created in the first place by God, as the Bible plainly showed. In most fields, original thought was not resented or despised. It was simply absent. Thus, for over a thousand years, our forbearers believed the classic Greek works and the Bible, when taken together, contained every kind of wisdom (from ancient Roman times to the Renaissance) that human beings could want to know. A true gentleman’s life duty was to pass on to his sons, intact, the beliefs, morés, and values of his ancestors.

                               

                                                           Thomas Aquinas.

Was there any danger that the ancient Greek texts and the Bible might irreconcilably contradict each other? No. Several experts, including Thomas Aquinas, had shown that these two sources were compatible with each other. Even if inconsistencies were found, of course, the divine authority of the Bible resolved them. For the folk of the West, for centuries, the Bible was the word of God. Period.

In every field, if you wanted to learn about a subject, you consulted the authorities—your priest or the teachers who taught the wisdom of the sages of old. But for most folk, deeply analyzing events in their own lives or analyzing things the authorities told them wasn’t so much worrying as inconceivable. Over 90 percent of the people were illiterate. They took on faith what the authorities told them because everyone they knew had always done so. A mind capable of memorization and imitation was valued; a questioning, innovative one was not.

Greetings, loyal followers of this blog. I am back. I have finished my university year. At 66 years of age studying gets harder, but I did well and am satisfied. Whether I will return in the fall is still being debated between the four or five of me locked inside my head. 

All of that is not relevant here, at least not for the most part, though some of the ideas I was exposed to at the university may crowd into my discussions here from time to time. 

What is relevant is that I have decided to post my book in manageable chunks over the next few weeks, then get a few copies printed to be given out to family and friends, and then finally let it alone once and for all. I've given most of my life's intellectual energies to the thesis I develop in this book. For years. It is time to let it go. 

The memes developed here deserve to live. They do solve the dilemma of our time in a workable way. But anyway, this is the last. Some parts of the book have been re-written as my evolving sensibilities have guided me, but most of what I will post is the last version of the book with a few different examples or accompanying images. 

I hope you enjoy. 

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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 if and 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.

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

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.

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.