Outro: Farewell
Thus, the philosophical argument of this book closes.
But I will add a creative bit of writing at the very end. It isn't expository in style. It is a short dialogue that attempts in a more creative way to capture the whole case this book has tried to make. A brief one act play, if you like, with almost no physical action, but a great deal of the mental kind.
I hope you enjoy. Farewell.
__________________________________________________________________
(A scene in a sidewalk café in
Vancouver, Canada, where two characters meet and have a Socratic dialogue.
University of British Columbia graduate student, Titus Flavius, known to his
friends as Flux, is drinking coffee and relaxing in the sunshine. His friend,
Evo, another grad student, strolls past. Flux recognizes him and calls out.)
Flux: Evo! Evo, you subversive element! Over here!
Evo: (Drawing near.) Well, well. The quarry you see when you don’t have a gun. What mischief are you plotting now? Wait. I’ll get a coffee. (Goes to counter.)
Flux: (Muttering to himself.) Hmm. Just the guy I wanted to see. I think.
Evo: (Approaching with his coffee in hand and sitting.) So, what’s up, bro?
Flux: The truth is … I’ve been getting
more and more obsessed in the last few weeks with the whole debate over the
existence of God. And moral relativism, and whether we need to believe in God
to be good. Whether people in general do, I mean. Not you and me. We’re so good
we’re excellent. That’s an axiom.
(Laughs awkwardly.)
Evo: (Glancing at a girl going by.) I can resist anything but temptation. Wild Oscar said that. But seriously, folks.
Flux: (Looking glum.) It is serious, actually, this moral thing. These days, I can’t seem to think of anything else. Almost everyone I talk to at UBC despises religion, but none of them have a way of deciding what right and wrong are. It’s all relative, they say. Then I say they’re committing humanity to permanent warfare, probably annihilation, when they say things like that. They shrug and tell me to grow up. We’re doomed, my friend. Humanity is doomed, even if it is a nice day. (Slurps his coffee. Laughs darkly.)
Evo: Are you sure you want to start
this conversation? I have a lot to say on the subject, you know. And, after
all, I am older and wiser than you are. (Laughs.)
Flux: Ah, be serious. But … yeah, I know you’ve thought about this one. Which makes me ask – if you’re okay with talking about it – you still believe in God?
Evo: I do.
Flux: When we talked about this before, your answers didn’t really work for me. But you’re saying you still believe?
Evo: Yes. (Pauses.) I don’t buy most of the world’s religions, or priests, or holy books. But the answer is, basically, yes.
Flux: Still.
Evo: More than ever. When did we last talk about this stuff? At that party at the lake?
Flux: Yeah. That was it. And you haven’t changed your mind? At all?
Evo: No. (Pauses.) The short answer is “no”.
Flux: What’s the long answer?
Evo: (laughs) How much time do you have?
Flux: It’s Friday afternoon. I got no place I have to be till Monday morning. Come on. Seriously. The whole issue is weighing me down.
Evo: Well, how about you ask questions, and I’ll try to answer them.
Flux: Alright, so be it. So, do you really believe in God, in your most private heart of hearts?
Evo: Yes.
Flux: What was the crucial moment or crucial logical step, or whatever you call it, for you?
Evo: No one moment. No one step. No epiphanies. I came to it gradually for a bunch of reasons, backed by logic and evidence. Later, it did get personal. It’s in my “heart of hearts”, as you put it. I call my own kind of religion theism, which isn’t a very original term. But I need to be clear that I think each of us has to work out his or her own way of conceiving of God and relate to that personally in their own good time. I came to believe that moral beliefs can be based on what Science is based on – the facts of empirical reality. That’s moral realism, and it led me gradually to think we have to design a moral code that’s acceptable for all people, and then live by it …and learn to live together. Gotta do that if we’re gonna survive. I got motivated to think hard for a while. I came to two conclusions. First, that moral values do name things that are real, and second, that the core belief in the moral code that will allow us to survive …that core belief is theism. In other words, moral realism logically entails theism.
Flux: All right, wait a minute. Realism? You’re saying values are real like this cup is real? I’m not gambling on whether this cup of coffee is in my hand right now. It’s there. It’s real. I’m certain of it.
Evo: No, actually that statement isn’t a certainty, even if you think you’re certain of it. Human senses can be fooled. That’s what the movie The Matrix is about. And Descartes talked about it four hundred years ago. And more.
Flux: Hmm. Okay. I take your point.
Evo: Every belief is a gamble, even our belief in Science and the scientific method. The smartest of smart gambles is theism. Believing in God. Not so I can improve my odds of getting into some dimly imagined afterlife, but so I and my kind can survive. Here. On Earth. So we can handle what the future’s going to throw at us. Navigate the hazards. Once I proved my version of a universal moral code to my own satisfaction, from there it was a series of small steps to the core belief in God.
Flux: But you must have periods of doubt? Surely.
Evo: I used to. But they’ve almost gone. Mostly because I keep answering the doubts inside my own head. Over and over. I’ve seen the doubters’ best moves. I can whip ’em. And don’t call me “Shirley”. (Laughs.)
Flux: So …what then? Your belief, in your head ̶ your theism, I mean – is constantly fighting for its life?
Evo: Pretty much. All beliefs in all heads have to fight to survive.
Flux: But you don’t worry that one day the theism in your head is going to lose?
Evo: I don’t know for sure that I’ll never lose my faith, but the signs are that it’s pretty durable.
Flux: And yet you love Science?
Evo: Absolutely. Science is God’s way for us. For humans in general, I mean.
Flux: Were you ever an atheist?
Evo: Oh, sure. I look back on it now as a phase I had to go through. Everyone does. Some people don’t ever get to the other side, that’s all. Other side of that atheist phase, I mean.
Flux: You don’t worry that what you see in the real world is …only what you want to see?
Evo: I see Science and the theories of Science, Flux. Testable. Repeatable. They and all the experimental evidence that supports them keep telling me, more and more, that God is there. Here. Real.
Flux: But you did have periods of doubt?
Evo: Oh, yes. For fifteen years. And then I only came around a few years ago to believing I ought to believe in God. That it was a smart gamble. And that everything in life is a gamble in the end. Even the most basic things you trust – not just Science, but even believing your hands are at the ends of your arms because you see and feel them there. Sense data. Things you sense. But for a long time, that smart theistic gamble wasn’t personal. Not personal like you love Marie or your mom and dad. It was only cerebral. I believed in believing in God, but I didn’t believe – like – primally, if you get my meaning.
Flux: Yeah, I get your meaning. So what changed?
Evo: I started meditating. Every day. Half an hour or so. Sometimes, twice a day.
Flux: Did you take a course?
Evo: Yes.
Flux: Which one?
Evo: It doesn’t matter. Check around. Find one that works for you. Then it’ll feel like it’s yours.
Flux: Hmm. Okay. That’s fair. And then what? God just arrived?
Evo: Basically, yes. I realized one day that I was hearing an inner voice. Not a great way of putting it, but close enough. During the time when I was trying to control every detail in my life, I was going nuts. Then I learned to accept handling just the details my conscience – God’s voice in my head – told me were mine to handle, my responsibility. It was like, I became “response-able” – able to respond – and then I got good solutions just as I was coming out of my meditation, or right after. It was a way of thinking about God that made sense to me. Let God – the universe, if you like – talk to me. Then I’d get some quiet, excellent answers. Like a presence was hovering by me, nurturing me. That’s not very dramatic. But it’s how I experience my personal sense of God. Like I love my kids. Or my dad. Personal. First, for large, evidence-backed reasons, and then, second, for internally felt ones.
Flux: (Studying his friend) And it still seems like a rational decision to you?
Evo: More than that, Flux. I think as a species we’re all going to have to come to some form of Moral Realism, then theism, if we’re going to get past the crises that are coming. Getting rid of nukes. Fixing the environment. Moral realism is the only option that has any chance of working. Nobody trusts the so-called sacred texts or priests anymore. Most of us don’t trust personal epiphanies either, no matter how intense the event feels. We know it’s too easy to see what you want to see. First, we want models that fit our observations of empirical evidence, over and over. And Moral Realism, for me, is that kind of true. It’s a model of reality that fits the facts of History and life …every day.
Flux: You think Science proves that God exists? I know people who’d laugh out loud at that.
Evo: They don’t see History or
Anthropology as sciences. And don’t analyze Science itself. If they did, they’d
reconsider.
Flux: So, tell me. For you, what moral values are grounded in empirical reality?
Evo: Sure. For example, humans have gradually evolved responses to entropy, over billions of people and thousands of generations. The cultures that emerge may vary from era to era and place to place, but every culture seeks a balance of courage and wisdom. Those values are our big-scale responses to entropy, the “uphillness” of life. Courage and wisdom. Other balanced sets of values built around freedom and love are our responses to quantum uncertainty. All four values – courage, wisdom, freedom, and love (checks them off on his fingers) – inform the software of all nations that survive because they shape how people in those tribes behave. In other words, their values connect them to reality. And those basic traits of adversity and uncertainty, remember, are built into our universe down to the atoms. They’re all over, all the time. We learned to handle entropy and uncertainty, not as individuals, but as tribes, over centuries, by building our societies more and more on those four values.
Flux: Well, I gotta say you sure have your spiel down. But those are some pretty vague moral principles to build a culture on. A lot of radically different societies could be constructed that all claimed they were brave and wise and so on.
Evo: Which is only to say how free we truly are, Flux. But notice my system is way different than saying moral values are arbitrary tastes, like a preference for vanilla shakes over chocolate, or Irish Spring soap over Ivory.
Flux: I think I see where you’re going with this line of thought. Actually, in theory, we could build an ideal society or something pretty close, couldn’t we?
Evo: We’ve been working our way toward that realization for two hundred thousand years.
Flux: These moral values, the way you describe them, must have been worked out over a long time, and also with a lot of pain then …right?
Evo: Pain and death, Flux. Which is why
we’re taught to respect our values so much. Our accumulated wisdom keeps
telling us not to re-do our past mistakes.
Flux: Here’s a mental leap coming at you. How would the kind of society you envision — brave, wise, free, tolerant — right? – how would it evolve, without war or revolution? How would it resolve an internal argument over …say …a controversial social issue?
Evo: Yay! A smart question. An issue like capital punishment, say?
Flux: Whoa! Quick answer. But, yeah. Not the one I had in mind, but a good example, actually.
Evo: Reasoning and evidence. Consensus-building. Scientific studies. Calm persuasion. The facts say it doesn’t work, you know. Capital punishment.
Flux: How so? It seems to me that it solves a problem permanently.
Evo: Countries that get rid of it see their murder rates go down, not up. It doesn’t deter potential killers. Just the opposite. It makes them determined to leave no witnesses. To any crime. And then capital trials drag on and on ’cause juries don’t want to make a mistake. In the end, it costs more to execute an accused killer than to lock him up …for good. Long-term studies say so.
Flux: What if he lives a really long time?
Evo: In my system, barring exceptional circumstances, he’d stay locked up. But most of them die in under twenty years. They’re mostly people who live unhealthy lifestyles. Junk food. Drugs. Smoking. Hate exercise but keep getting into fights. They don’t last long, in prison or out. On average, I mean.
Flux: But even if, say for the sake of argument, they only last twenty years in prison, it’s a long time. Guards to pay, meals, meds, entertainment – Christ! Entertainment yet! – it’s gotta add up.
Evo: Not as much as killing him does by, like, nearly three times. The studies say so. On average, killers only live about sixteen years after they go to prison.
Flux: I’ll look it up later. But to get back to our point …you think we can solve all our disputes by debate and compromise?
Evo: Based on reasoning and evidence, the answer is yes. And patience. Just not war. The Soviet Union went from being an unstoppable superpower to gone in my lifetime. With no global war. I’ll never doubt the power of patience again.
Flux: I think I’m beginning to see your point a bit. You see moral …rules …maybe, guidelines is better …as being grounded in facts of physical reality?
Evo: Not in all lands. But they should be. I’ve made that case for myself and some others many times over. Entropy and quantum uncertainty are built into reality. As long as I’m in this universe, life will be hard and scary, so courage, wisdom, freedom, and love will always be virtues. That picture – for me, anyway – is more reliable than my senses. It’s eternal. I’m 99.99 percent sure.
Flux: And that proves for you that God exists?
Evo: That and a couple of other main points. It takes a sort of faith even to believe the universe stays consistent from place to place and era to era. No one can prove the future will go like the past. But we take it as a given that the universe has that kind of consistency. Science wouldn’t make any sense under any other first assumption. Then, I get direction from cutting-edge Science – namely Quantum Physics. All the particles in the universe are what physicists call entangled, you know. Which means the universe has a kind of awareness.
Flux: What, like I’m aware?
Evo: As far beyond your and my awareness as the universe is beyond us in size. Yeah, that’s a hell of a statement. I know full well what I’m saying. But look at the evidence. Let me say it all at once, as plainly as I can. The first step to theism is believing in the consistency of the universe. The second is believing the universe is aware. The third is Moral Realism, which means believing that courage, wisdom, freedom, and brotherly love steer us into paths through matter, space, and time. These three beliefs – in the consistency of the universe, in its aware nature, and in universal moral truth, when they’re added together, tell me this universe is a single, aware, caring thing. “God,” if you like that term. If not, that’s okay. Call it by whatever name works for you.
Flux: Cold sort of caring, don’t you think? There are a lot of cruel things in life.
Evo: No, it just looks that way to us sometimes. But it’s unreasonable and unfair for me to ask God to pardon me from getting cancer or meningitis or whatever …if the dice roll that way. God loves it all, all the time. God loves the avalanche that buries the careless skier who skis out of bounds. God loves malignant cells and meningococcal bacteria just as much as God loves me. We may learn how to change the odds, to cure meningitis or prevent cancer, but in a universe that is balanced and free, those scientific advances are up to us. Our brains evolved to solve puzzles exactly like those ones.
Flux: You know there are people who get the consistency-of-the-laws-of-science idea, even the quantum-entanglement-awareness one, but leave you right at that moral realism step.
Evo: Oh, I know. They keep trying to find another way to base moral principles in the natural world. A lot of people don’t want God. They wanna be in charge. Nietzsche said God couldn’t exist, because if he did, Nietzsche could never believe he himself wasn’t God. Something like that. What a child! (Laughs)
Flux: Other species like chimps and squirrels find altruism on their own, you know. Sometimes, one of them will do something for the good of the community and even get killed because of it. Trying to save others. From a weasel, say.
Evo: The next thing to ask is: What
kind of a universe rewards those animals’ practicing altruism? People finding
altruism in nature and saying that means they don’t need to believe in God in
order to be decent …that dodge is no dodge at all. It only delays answering the
question. Why is being altruistic – what they call “good” – a desirable way to
be for squirrels? So the tribe survives? If so, we have to ask: what does that say
about life in this reality?
Flux: All right, I see why you say that. Hmm. You aim to find moral values that would be moral even to aliens from other worlds, don’t you? Do you dislike people who keep, as you say, “dodging” the moral realism question?
Evo: Not at all. As long as I can see that they’re trying to live lives of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love, I love them. They may get old and die and never say that they believe in anything like God, but I don’t care. I still love them. Hey, if they try hard to live decent lives, for me that’s enough. But believe in God? By the evidence that shows on the outside of them – which, by the way, is all Science cares about – they actually do. Do believe, I mean. They just choose a lonely existence inside. Which is their choice, of course. But I still love them.
Flux: They’d tell you that viewpoint is pretty condescending.
Evo: They have, many times. It’s still okay. We can live together in peace. And evolve and survive. That’s all that really matters. (Pauses) But we must choose to live. Surviving is not a given. So, we need a system of ethics in order to decide even simple things, minute by minute, day in and day out, about every object and event we meet up with. Good or bad? Important or trivial? Take action or not? What are my action choices? Which one looks like the best gamble in this situation? An efficient moral code will be one that’s laid out so our decisions are quick, accurate, and effective. Consistent with the facts of reality, short and long term. A central organizing concept – a belief in God – is just efficient. At least to start with. It’s only after a lot of change inside yourself that it becomes personal. But first of all it’s just efficient. It enables timely action. It gets results.
Flux: Your picture isn’t very comforting, you know, Evo. The mental space it offers to live in is pretty bare.
Evo: I know. I’d be a liar if I offered you easy grace. You first have to choose to live free – responsible for your own life. Then so many other challenges come. But they’d come anyway. It’s just that if you choose to live unfree, to bow your head and take the beatings tyrants dish out, without trying to figure things out or act to improve your odds of happiness, your life’ll be even worse. You have to choose to choose, and even then life is going to be rough. God’s a hard case. But I’m okay with seeing God as a pretty hard case. To make something out of nothing, he has to be. It takes a balance of forces to make something out of nothing. And in that picture, God made us free, Flux. Whether we choose to rise to the challenge, to live bravely and creatively, is up to us. Out of the labor and struggle, we make ourselves – and then our society – what we call “good”. If we’re really good, we teach our kids to do the same. Hopefully, even better.
Flux: You don’t believe in miracles, do you?
Evo: “Only in a way” would be my answer there. I think events that look miraculous happen. Things that look like exceptions to the laws of Science. But they turn out to have scientific explanations. For me, everything I see all the time is the miracle. What’s it doing here? Why isn’t there just nothing? And then the living things in the world are more miraculous, and then …my baby’s smile …you know what they say. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Flux: Is there a church you could belong to? Are you pulled to any of them?
Evo: Unitarians, maybe? Nah, that’s another question that you need to answer for yourself.
Flux: Any you hate?
Evo: Honestly? Nearly all of them. Priests make up mumbo-jumbo to take away people’s ability to think for themselves. It’s easy with most people ‘cause they don’t wanna think. They want security. But there’s no such thing. Not in this lifetime. That one I’m sure of. Maybe they don’t consciously make up the b.s., but they do make it up. Priests do, I mean. Religion gets them a slack lifestyle so they gravitate toward making up ways to protect that. Over generations, the lies just keep getting worse. No, I’m not big on organized religion.
Flux: Would you call yourself a dreamer? A starry-eyed optimist?
Evo: I seem that way to some people. My view of myself is that I look at the long haul. I’m most interested in that. Then, what energy I have left over I give to the confusing ups and downs of everyday life. You could call me a dreamer. But cynics are cowards to me. It’s the dreamers who have courage. And once in a while they turn out to be right, you know. (Laughs.)
Flux: I better let you go, Evo. I’ve kept you long enough. I was just feeling …down …you know.
Evo: You’re not keeping me from anything that matters as much as this talk does, bro.
Flux: Alright. I’ll take that as being sincere. Actually, knowing you as long as I have, I know it is. Thank you. I’m feeling …I don’t know …hopeful, somehow, right now. (Pauses.) Actually …I think I get it.
Evo: Welcome home, Flavius, my friend.
Welcome home.
Korso, Krokso, Sandon
(credit: Arald
Vagen via Wikimedia Commons)
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.
