Chapter 19                Moral Realism Connects to Theism

 

We come, at last, as promised, to making a case for a twenty-first century theism.

But, in order to bring all the threads of my case together, I must first go back and carefully review some assumptions that are implicit in this book’s argument, as they are in any argument based on Science.

What are we committing to if we agree with the points presented so far?

 

 

                      

                                   (When will humans walk this landscape?)

                   Afternoon on Mars (photo by the NASA probe, Spirit Rover) 

                                            (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

For many modern thinkers, an implicit assumption they are not conscious of, and do not examine, is that the universe is a single, integrated system. Every one of its parts connects to all of its other parts, and it runs by one set of laws, each law consistent with all the others. We don’t fully understand the system of natural laws yet. For example, we don’t yet understand how sub-atomic forces and electro-magnetism relate to gravity. But in Science, we implicitly assume that the laws of Science apply on Gliese 581g just as precisely as those laws apply here on Earth, as they also will, here on Earth, 100,000 years from now. (Dennis Overbye sums up the debate in a 2007 New York Times article.¹)

To some readers this assumption may seem so self-evident that stating it is silly. But that reaction is too hasty. This basic assumption informs and shapes all else that we contemplate and do. It deserves a bit more study and analysis.

This basic belief in the universality of the laws of Science was not always part of human thinking. We can clarify by simply asking: “A consistent universe? As opposed to what?”

 

         

                                        Artist’s conception of the Gliese 581 system

                                (credit: ESO/L. Calçada, via Wikimedia Commons)

The alternative view of our universe sees it as being made up of regions or eras in which different sets of rules apply or once did apply. This was the view of our forebears. They saw a universe being run by many varied and mutually hostile gods, each with his or her own realm and set of rules.

For example, for the ancient Greeks, Poseidon ruled the sea; he could make storms at will and bring them down on any mariners he disliked. Hades ruled the underworld, Zeus, the skies. Hades seized Persephone and took her to his realm; even Zeus could only negotiate to get her back to her mother for half the year. From this quarrel came the seasons. When Persephone is with her mom, summer comes. When she goes back to Hades, winter comes. Two brats who could not get along, and who happened to be supernatural, cause the seasons. The ancient Greeks believed they lived in a universe run by lust, rage, obstinacy, and cruelty. But today, we know exactly why the seasons occur. We find the old belief amusing, quaint perhaps. But no one takes it seriously.

 

                                 

                                              

                                               “The Return Of Persephone”

                          (credit: Frederic Leighton, via Wikimedia Commons)

The classical Greeks also accepted that their ancestors had been much stronger than they were. Repeatedly in The Iliad, heroes hoist rocks that “no man today could lift,” and they do it with ease.² In such a universe, ideas that were right in one era might be quite different from those that were right (in both the moral and scientific senses of right) in a later or earlier era.

But in the modern view, under Science, we assume all events have rational explanations, and that the laws describing the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, and gravity apply everywhere and always have done so. It is true that we have not yet found a way to translate our model of gravity into the system of ideas that describes the other three, but we are confident that a unified field theory does exist. Ours is a single coherent universe, we assume.

Do most people in our modern society truly believe the universe is a single, coherent system? Yes. That view is the view that Science begins from. The alternative – superstition – is simply not palatable for most people in the West today. Whatever the flaws in the current scientific worldview – and it is not logically airtight, as we have seen – we’ve nevertheless seen it achieve far too many successes to gamble on any of its superstitious alternatives.

People in the West today, by and large, do not take a sick child to a shaman for treatment. They go to a Western doctor. Who today would try to fix a car problem by burning incense sticks or chanting? Farmers everywhere look to scientists for advice on which crops to grow and which fertilizers to use. The evidence indicates that heeding Science is a smart gamble, a wise Bayesian choice, therefore, a rational one.

Let’s keep this first implicit assumption of Science in mind: in this universe, all is connected to all else in a coherent way. (Maxwell discusses this view and its problems at length in his book From Knowledge to Wisdom, pp. 107–109.)  

Second, we also have evidence now for the belief that this universe is, in a way, aware. Changes in one part of the universe can produce changes in other, distant parts – instantly. The parts of the universe connect in amazing ways.⁴ How parts connect is still a mystery to physicists, but that they are connected is no longer in doubt. This phenomenon is called entanglement. Research has verified it many times.

Quantum research tells us actions and reactions sometimes connect the tiniest particles so that action and reaction occur like one event. Reverse the spin of one here, and its partner particle – untouched by anything – will reverse its spin at that same instant even if it is on the other side of the universe! And the information passes from the first particle to its partner instantly. Not at the speed of light – which Einstein said was the speed limit of the universe – but instantly by some mysterious means that physicists call entanglement.

Physicists have proved that entanglement is real as surely as they have shown that Relativity Theory works or that electricity is connected to magnetism. (Josh Roebke describes this research in an article published in 2008.)⁵

If we are to build a moral code based on the facts of the physical universe, our code must be consistent with the idea of entanglement. Thus, it is rational for us to choose to see the universe as being not just coherent, but conscious. The universe “feels” itself all over, all at once, all of the time.

And let’s remind ourselves here that Quantum Theory works. It is what many technologies in our modern world spring from. It even fits daily life the way we live it. It pictures us as having a degree of free will. In fact, implicit belief in free will is what allows me to hold people responsible for their actions.

In reality, the majority of us don’t live daily life as if the cars around us in traffic are driven by unchangeable forces toward inescapable outcomes. Cars contain drivers who are responsible beings. If they aren’t, they shouldn’t be driving. If your car drifts out of its lane, and I have to steer sharply left and almost swerve into oncoming traffic, I’m going to be mad at you, not your car. (Get off your phone!) Similarly, I reject any moral code that excuses felons as not being responsible for their actions. Quantum Theory endorses a picture of reality that allows for free will. Thus, with its corollary entanglement firmly attached, Quantum Theory corroborates the “feel” of daily life.

Therefore, I propose that this model that we get from Physics justifies our inserting a further basic concept into our total worldview and, thus, into our moral system: the universe is a single, integrated, coherent thing that is also a kind of conscious. We can rationally insert this second idea into our moral thinking. This view of the universe fits the evidence. As opposed to what? The alternative view of the universe as utterly unfeeling and insentient, the view of Newton and Laplace, does not fit the evidence we get from quantum research.

Now, let’s see where this subtler view of physical reality leads. 

If we see our universe as being both coherent and conscious, is this view nuanced view enough to justify theism? No. We need one more idea.       

The third big foundational idea in the case for my thesis is the one this book has labored long to prove. It is the belief that there is a moral order in this universe, a moral order that is observably, empirically real.

The universe runs by laws that cause patterns in the flows of physical events. Our moral values guide us onto the best survival paths as we move through these events. Our values are not visible. But we can see that they were learned by our forbears, by trial and error, over millennia and that people who lived by these values survived. Therefore, our core values – love, freedom, wisdom, and courage – are real. They are like electromagnetism and gravity in one crucial sense: they names things that we can’t see except by the effects they have on things that we can see.

Again, we can ask about this third big idea: “As opposed to what?”

The idea usually opposed to moral realism in our times is moral relativism. In its view, values are only tastes, and right and wrong depend on where you are. The moral relativists say that what was right in Rome in the first century is not morally right today; what is right in East Africa is not right in Western Europe. For the moral relativists, there are no physical facts that can tell us anything about what right is. You can’t derive “ought” from “is”. For them, no values are ever grounded in reality.

In this view, I have shown, they are wrong. Values are based in material reality.

Now, add all these three big ideas together.

The universe is a single, integrated thing.

The universe is also conscious.

The universe is also moral. 

None of these claims is supported by perfect, irrefutable logic. All of them are supported by solid Bayesian estimates of their likelihood. Each one of them is a much more rational choice than its alternatives.

If, as a modern human in touch with the basics of Science in all its forms, I believe the universe is a single, integrated thing – even if we do not understand all of its laws – and I further believe it is a kind of conscious – even if its consciousness is so vast and subtle that humans have barely begun to grasp it – and I further believe it is morally responsive – even if its moral quality is only discernible in the flows of millions of people over thousands of years – if I believe these three claims, then in my personal way, I do believe in God.

What? That’s it?

Yes, my patient reader. That’s it. I do still believe in God. My view is a pretty lean one. No sacred texts, holy men, miracles, or rituals. But every instinct in me tells me that it is a wise, sane, Bayesian gamble at the base of my thinking, where I must gamble on some sort of worldview if I am to function. I can’t be neutral about the base of my own sanity. Theism is the most rational of all the possible bases for the worldview I use to run my life.

And as far as the leanness of this kind of theism goes, I say: “Such is life.” Adults have to get by on leaner fare than do children who seek a bearded man in the sky. For adult citizens in a democracy, life is labor and hazard much of the time. But the best consolation of adult life is the firm belief that the patterns we see in the flows of human events in the world – patterns that only show in the evidence of centuries of human actions – are real. Your deep intuition that courage, wisdom, freedom, and love are real, and most of all, that right is real, is not naïve or crazy. It is the sanest belief you have.  

How can an informed human being in modern times find balance between Morality and Science? By building their own version of theism. Belief in God.

Now, in a personal expanding of this case for theism, let me show that it is strong enough to support a more profound, comprehensive belief in God. And personal is the word to use to describe my next chapter. In the end, theism has to be personal – it has to work as a foundation for the way of thinking by which a human runs his or her life – or it is nothing at all.

 

Notes

 

1. Dennis Overbye, “Laws of Nature, Source Unknown,” New York Times, December 18, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html? pagewanted=all&_r=0.

 

2. Homer, The Illiad (c. 800–725 BC; Project Gutenberg), p. 91.

  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-h/6130-h.html#fig120.

 

3. Nicholas Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities (London, UK: Pentire Press, 1984), pp. 107–109.

 

4. http://www.wired.com/2013/12/secret-language-of-plants/

 

5. Joshua Roebke, “The Reality Tests,” Seed magazine, June 4, 2008.

     http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_reality_tests/P1/.