Chapter 20     The Theistic Bottom Line

 

The three large principles summed up in the previous chapter are enough. The universe is coherent, conscious, and moral. Having established these principles, we have enough to conclude that a consciousness exists in our material universe. Or rather, as was promised in the introduction, we have enough to conclude that belief in God is a rational choice for an informed modern human being to make, a rational gamble to take. More rational than any of its alternatives.

And that’s the point. Belief in God is a choice. It is simply a more rational choice than its alternatives, and it arises naturally once we understand the key ideas of the main branches of science – entropy, uncertainty, and evolution – and then further see that our moral values integrate us into the ways of the real world.

Our values are grounded in empirical reality. And seeing that values are real is the key step that enables us to cross from skepticism to a modern theism.

But now in this chapter I will examine many pieces of supporting argument and evidence that give this case for theism a sense of both universality - it fits the facts of physical reality - and immediacy - it speaks to each of us in ways that feel personal. Heartfelt, as a belief must be if it is to endure. Its carriers must care about it, and live by it, if it is to be transmitted to the next generation.  

At this stage of our discussion, it is also worth reiterating two other points made earlier: first, we must have a moral program in our heads to function at all; second, the one we’ve inherited from the past is dangerously out-of-date.

But this chapter so far has only summed up the case we have already made.

I can now give a more informal explanation of the argument we have assembled, then even more arguments whose special significance in this discussion will be explained as we go along. We will make the case personal and also try to answer some of the most likely reactions to it.

Let's get more deeply into this last chapter by revisiting a vexing problem in Philosophy mentioned in Chapter 4, a philosophical problem that is nearly three hundred years old. The solution to this problem drives home a main point on the final stretch of the thinking that leads to theism. Although it is a gamble to believe the universe is a single, conscious system, it is a rational gamble.

Many scientists claim that Science, unlike the other branches of knowledge that came before the rise of Science, does not have any assumptions at its foundation and that it is instead built from the ground up on merely observing reality, forming theories, designing research, doing experiments, checking the results against one’s theories/models, then adjusting the theories, and doing more hypothesizing, research, and so on. Under this view, Science has no need of foundational assumptions in the way that, say, Plato’s philosophy or Euclid’s geometry do. Science is founded only on hard, observable facts, they claim.

But in this claim, as has been pointed out by thinkers like Nicholas Maxwell, the scientists are wrong.¹ Science rests on some assumptions that are extremely basic, ones that may seem indisputably obvious, but that are still assumptions.

 

 

         The book that told the world how Science should work: Novum Organum 

                              (credit: John P. McCaskey, via Wikimedia Commons)

The heart of the matter, then, is the inductive method normally associated with Science. The way in which scientists can come upon a phenomenon they cannot explain by any of their current theories, devise a new theory that tries to explain the phenomenon, test the theory by doing experiments in the real world, and keep going back and forth from theory to experiment, adjusting and refining – this is the way of gaining knowledge called the scientific method. It has led us to many powerful insights and technologies.

But as David Hume famously proved, the logic this method is built on is not perfect. Any natural law we try to state as a way of describing our observations of reality is a gamble, one that may seem to summarize, and bring order to, whole files of experience, but it is a gamble, nonetheless.

A natural law statement is a scientist’s claim about what he thinks is going to happen in specific future circumstances. But every natural law proposed is taking for granted a deep first assumption about the real world. Every natural law statement rests on the assumption that events in the future will continue to steadily follow the patterns followed by events in the past. But we simply can’t know whether this assumption is true. We haven’t been to the future. Thus, we must allow for the possibility that at any time, we may come on new data that stymie our best theories. Therefore, we must accept that every natural law statement, no matter how well it seems to fit real data, is a gamble. It gambles on the belief that the future will go like the past.

Science is made up of a large group of terms, concepts, claims, and records that are all gambles. Some very likely to be true, some very speculative, the rest somewhere in between these two extremes.

 

 

 

                     Albert Michelson  (credit: Bunzil, via Wikimedia Commons)            

                      

                        

   

                                    Edward Morley  (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Science makes mistakes. For scientists themselves, a shocking example of such a mistake was one in Physics. Newton’s model of gravity and acceleration was brilliant, but it wasn’t telling the full story of what goes on in our universe. After two centuries of taking Newton’s equations as their gospel, physicists were stunned by Michelson and Morley’s experiment in 1887. In essence, it showed that Newton’s laws weren’t adequate to explain all that was going on in reality, especially at very high speeds or with very large masses. 

Einstein’s pondering these new data is what led him to the Theory of Relativity. But first came Michelson and Morley’s experiment, which showed Newton’s shortcomings, and also showed that the scientific method was not infallible.

Newton was not proved totally wrong, but his laws were shown to be only approximations, accurate only for smaller masses at relatively slow speeds. As masses or speeds become very large, Newton’s laws become less useful for predicting what is going to happen next.

Nevertheless, it was a scientist, Einstein, doing science who found the limitations of the theories and models specified by an earlier scientist. Newton was not amended by a clergyman or a reading from an ancient holy text.

Thus, from the personal standpoint, I have always believed, I still believe, and I’m confident I always will believe that the universe is consistent, that it runs by laws that will be the same in 2525 as they are now, even though we don’t understand all of them yet. Yes, the future – not in every detail, but in the big ways – will go like the past. Entropy. Uncertainty. My choice to gamble on Science is a good Bayesian gamble, preferable to all superstitious alternatives.

As a believer in Science, I also choose to gamble on the power of human minds, sometimes alone, sometimes in cooperation with other minds, to see through the layers of irrelevant, trivial events and spot the patterns that underlie large sets of data. In short, I believe we can figure this place out and gradually gain more and more power to move about in it without getting hurt or killed.

The alternative to believing in the power of human minds – individually or in cooperating groups – to figure out the laws which underlie reality is to abandon reason and instead gamble on forming our beliefs around something other than observations of facts. Once again, we have the evidence of centuries of history to look back on. All the evidence we have about what life was like for the cowed, superstitious tribes of the past suggests that their lives were – as Hobbes puts it – poor, nasty, brutish, and short. People who were willing to think about the real world they could observe, experiment with it, and learn from it, made the society we enjoy today. Even the most obstinate Luddites who claim to despise modernity don’t like to go two days without a bath or a shower.

My first point in this final chapter on the path to a personal kind of theism, then, is that belief in the consistency of Science – i.e. of the laws of the universe and the power of human minds to figure them out – amounts to a kind of faith. Yes, faith. Belief in ideas that are so basic that they cannot be proved by some other more basic ideas. For Science, there are no ideas more basic than the ones that say the universe is a single, coherent system and that we humans can figure out how that system works. The rest of Science rests on those assumptions.

Atheists say these beliefs can’t be called “faith” at all. They certainly don't lead to a belief in God. They just enable atheists and theists alike to do Science. To share ideas, theories, models, and research in their branches of Science with anyone who’s interested. But these are still beliefs in the long-term validity of concepts that can’t be directly observed. And that is a kind of faith.  

Now let’s add some other powerful ideas to this personal case for theism. If we truly believe in Science, then we are committed to integrating into our thinking all well-supported theories in all the branches of Science. In this century, that means we must try to integrate Quantum Theory into our world view. 

Earlier we saw that extrapolating from the quantum model led us to see that the values we call freedom and love are real. People who live by these values practice behaviors that suit the probabilistic nature of reality and, thus, they improve their society’s survival odds. Live by both freedom and love. Then as a consequence, you’ll live, and likely, your kids and grandkids will. And so on.

The best of our ancestors lived by the values implicit in the quantum worldview, the free will view, centuries before there was any scientific research to show us that the universe is founded on probabilities, not Newtonian chains of cause and effect. But we now have a model supported by research – the quantum model – to fit together with the moral code that tells us to practice freedom and love.

From Physics, we get quantum uncertainty, and from Moral Philosophy, freedom and love. Quantum Theory supports Moral Philosophy and vice versa; the concepts fit together; they fit human minds and cultures into reality as Science describes it for us. Taken together, they make a sensible gamble. 

                                                                                  

                                     

                             

                                    Erwin Schrodinger (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

However, the quantum worldview, if we choose to follow it, comes with some startling corollaries. Quantum entanglement, and the experiments testing it, have shown us that particles all over the universe are in instant communication with each other all the time. This model implies that the universe is conscious. 

The universe is not, as pre-quantum science pictured it, totally Newtonian and local. It is capable of what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,”. In fact, it works that way all the time.⁵ Schrodinger said: “There seems to be no way of stopping [entanglement] until the whole universe is part of a stupendous entanglement state.”⁶ 

Why does the quantum view matter so much to our case for theism? Because if we think distant parts of an entity are in touch with one another (in the case of the universe, instantly), it is entirely reasonable to further postulate that there must be an entity, a “thing of some kind”, connecting the stimulus change of one particle to the response change of another particle in a distant location. 

The universe is a single, coherent entity that feels. 

This way of seeing the universe as being a kind of aware is my second big idea in this final, personal chapter of my argument. It is well known to scientists, theist and atheist alike. They admit that understanding entanglement does move us a bit closer to believing that some sort of a God may exist.

                                                 

 

                    

                                Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize–winning physicist

                                                 (credit: Wikipedia)

But according to science-minded atheists, these ideas –  about how the universe is a single consistent entity and how it seems to have a kind of awareness – even taken together, only add up to a trivial belief. A proposal we can consider, but then drop because there is too little evidence to support it and, in addition, it leads nowhere. It does not enable human minds to imagine any new models of reality, nor to any new way of testing such models. Physicist Murray Gell-Mann went so far as to derisively call this way of thinking “quantum flapdoodle.”⁷ 

In other words, we may have deep feelings of wonder when we see how vast and intricate the universe is – far more amazing, by the way, than any religion of past societies made it seem. Our intuition may even suggest that for information to travel instantly from one particle in one part of the universe to another particle in another vastly separated part, a consciousness of some kind must be joining the two. But these feelings, the atheists say, don’t change anything. According to science-minded atheists, the God that theists describe doesn’t answer prayer, doesn’t grant us another existence after we die, doesn’t perform miracles, and doesn’t care a hoot about us or how we behave.

 

                            

 

       Pierre-Simon de Laplace (via James Posselwhite, via Wikimedia Commons)

In the atheist view, believing in such a God is simply excess baggage. It is a belief that we might enjoy clinging to as children, but it is extra, unjustified weight that only encumbers the active thinking and living we need to practice if we wish to keep expanding our knowledge and living in society as responsible adults. Theism, the atheists say, hobbles both Science and common sense. Or as Laplace famously told Napoleon, “Monsieur, I have no need of that hypothesis.”

                                                          

 

 

                           William of Occam, English philosopher and theologian 

                           (credit: Andrea di Bonaiuto, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

Centuries ago, William of Occam said the best explanation for any phenomenon is the simplest one that will do the job. Newton reiterated the point: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.”⁸ If we can explain a phenomenon by using two basic concepts instead of three or four, we should choose the two-pronged tool.

According to atheists, belief in God – or at least in a God that might or might not exist in this coherent, entangled, apparently self-aware universe – is a piece of unneeded, dead weight. In our time, under the worldview of modern Science, the idea has no useful content. It can and should be dropped. Or as the sternest atheists put it, it is time that humanity grew up.

 

       

 

                                         Starry Night at La Silla Observatory, Chile  

                                    (credit: ESO/H. Dahle, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

The model of cultural evolution developed in this book undoes the cynicism of such atheists. Under moral realism, values are real, we are going somewhere, and whether we behave morally or immorally does matter, not just to us in our limited frames of reference, but to the consciousness that underlies the universe. That presence, over millennia, helps the good to thrive by maintaining a reality in which there are lots of free choices and chances to learn, but also a long-term advantage to those who strive to perform their actions in ways that balance courage, wisdom, freedom, and brotherly love.

This is the third big idea in my overall case for theism: moral realism. First, we see the universe as a consistent, coherent system; second, we see it as conscious; third, we see our values as being connected to the universe in a physical way.

Why does this third insight matter so much? Because it refutes everything else atheists claim to know. Under the moral realist model, our values are the beliefs that maximize the probability of our survival. The moral realist model guides us to formulate and live by values that work. Trying to be good matters. 

Thus, moral realism is not trivial. It is vital. How you act is going to contribute in real ways to the survival odds of you, your children, and your species. The way to act if you want to improve the odds of all of those things surviving begins by informing your thinking with the large values of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love. Ergo, decency and sense are embedded in the particles of reality itself.  

The inescapable implication of seeing moral values as being arbitrary and trivial is seeing one's own existence as trivial. And for real people living real lives, that just is not how life works, makes sense or, more basically, feels. 

Belief in the realness of values is not trivial just as belief in the consistency of the universe is not trivial. Both beliefs have an effect – via the kinds of thinking and behavior they cause in us – on the odds of our survival. In the long haul, Science is good for us. So is Moral Realism. People who carry these programs in their heads outwork, outfight, outbreed, and outlast the competition. Moral Realism's worldview does describe reality. Our reality. 

Thus, belief in the realness of our values enables us to see that the presence that fills the universe doesn’t just stay consistent and even have a kind of awareness. It also favors those living entities that follow the ways we call “good.”

It cares.

In my own intellectual, moral, and spiritual journey, I went a long time before I could admit even to myself that by this point I was gradually coming to believe in a kind of deity. God.

Fourteen billion light years across the known parts of the universe. Googols of particles. 10⁷⁹ instances of electrons alone, never mind quarks or strings. And all integrated into a single thing -- consistent, aware, and compassionate, all over, all at once, all the time. 

And these claims describe only the files of evidence we know of. What might exist before or after, in smaller or larger forms, or even other dimensions and alternate universes that some physicists have postulated? We can’t even guess.

And it cares.

Every idea about matter or space that I can describe with numbers is a naïve children’s story compared with what is meant by the word infinite. Every idea I can talk about in terms that name bits of what we call “time” must be set aside when I use the word eternal. For many of us in the West, formulas and graphs, for far too long, have obscured the big ideas, even though most scientists freely admit there is so much that they don’t know.

Isaac Newton said: “I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”⁹  

And it cares. 

With beliefs in the coherence shown by Science, in the Universal Awareness we see in Quantum Theory, and in Moral Realism firmly in place, Wonder arrives. 

This way of living resolutely by moral guidelines whose consequences may take generations to arrive is exactly what is meant by the word faith. Belief in things not seen. 

This theistic view, when it’s widely accepted in society, also is utterly consistent with Science. A general adherence in society to the moral realist way of thinking is what makes communities of scientists doing Science possible. 

Consciously and individually, every scientist should value wisdom and freedom, for reasons that are uplifting, but even more because they are rational. Or rather -- to be more exact -- rational and uplifting, fully understood, turn out to be the same thing. As Keats told us, beauty is truth, truth beauty.

Scientists know that figuring out how the events in reality work is personally gratifying. But more importantly, each scientist should see that this work is done most effectively in a free, interacting community of scientists functioning as one sub-culture in a larger social ecosystem where freedom and love reign.

Many of us in the West have become deeply attached to our belief in Science. We’ve been programmed to feel that attachment. We believe our modern wise men – scientists – doing and sharing research are vital to our survival.

Of all the subcultures within democracy that we might point to, none is more dependent on moral realist values than is Science.

Scientists have to have courage. Courage to think in unorthodox ways, to outlast neglect, even ridicule, and to work, sometimes for decades, with levels of dedication that people in most walks of life find hard to believe. (Yes, decades. Many, even after decades of research on the particular problem they have chosen to study, die with that problem unsolved.)

Scientists need the profoundest form of wisdom. Wisdom that counsels them to listen to analysis and criticism from their peers without allowing egos to cloud their judgement, and to sift through what is said for insights that they may use to refine their theories and methods and try again.

Scientists need freedom. Freedom to pursue Truth where she leads, no matter whether the truths discovered are unpopular or threatening to the status quo. 

Finally, scientists must practice love. Yes, love. Love that causes them to treat every other human being as an individual whose unique experience and thought may prove valuable to their own. Science is only viable in such a community.

Scientists recognize that no one human mind can hold more than a tiny fraction of all there is to know. They must respectfully share and peer-review ideas and research in order to advance, individually and collectively. 

Scientists do their best work in a community of thinkers who value, respect and love one another, so automatically, that they cease to notice another person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.. Under the cultural evolution model, one can even argue that democracy’s largest purpose has always been to create a social environment in which Science can flourish.

But these are just pleasant digressions. The main implication of the moral realist way of thinking is even more personal and profound, so let’s return to it.

The universe is coherent, aware, and compassionate. Belief in each of these qualities of reality is a separate, free choice in each case. Modern atheists insist that far more evidence and weight of argument exist for the first than for the second or third of these three beliefs. My contention is that this is no longer so. Once we see how our values connect to reality, the theistic choice becomes a reasonable one and an existential one. It defines who we are.

Therefore, belief in God emerges out of an epistemological choice, the same kind of choice we make when we choose to believe that the laws of the universe are consistent. Choosing to believe, first, in the laws of Science, second, in the self-aware universe implied by quantum theory, and third, in the realness of the moral values that enable democratic living (and Science) entails a further belief in a steadfast, aware, and compassionate universal consciousness. God.

Belief in God follows logically from my choosing a specific way of viewing this universe and my integral role in it: the scientific way.

The biggest problem for stubborn atheists who refuse to make this choice is that they, like every other human being, have to choose to believe in something.

Each of us must have a set of foundational beliefs in place in order to function effectively enough to move through the day and stay sane. The Bayesian model rules all that I claim to know. I have to gamble on some set of axioms in order to move through life. The only real question is: “What shall I gamble on?”

Reason points to the theistic gamble as being not the only choice, but the wisest choice of the epistemological choices before us. I’m going to gamble that God is real. As far as I can see, I have to gamble on some worldview, and theism is the best gamble. It makes all my ideas come together into one coherent system that I can follow readily as I make choices and implement them in all aspects of life.

Theism - belief in a single, conscious, compassionate entity that is present in all the universe all the time - is simply more efficient than any competing way of thinking ever could be. Theism makes effective, timely action possible.  

The best gamble in this gambling life is theism. Reaching that conclusion comes from looking at the evidence. Following this realization up with the building of a personal relationship with God, one that makes sense to you as it also makes you a good friend – that, dear reader, is up to you. Do it in a way that is personal. That is the only way in which it can be done truly, if it is to be done at all.

To close in an unashamedly personal way, then. 

Once one truly believes in the theistic conclusion, does life remain hard? Of course. Adversity is an inherent feature of life in this universe. But we evolved to work. If life got easy, we would long for challenge. And please note that, in the past, life has been safe for some people spoiled by inherited riches. For a while. But those who don't know challenge, know ennui. Look at the evidence. 

Will life remain scary, uncertain, if one sees that theism really does make sense? Of course. But seeing the whole picture also affirms for us that the upside of living in a stochastic universe is freedom. Uncertainty/anxiety is the  price of freedom. The joy and the fear of conscious existence. The best response to such a realization is more than just work. It is imagination. Creativity. Best of all, we realize that permeating this whole way of thinking is the knowledge that love is real. Love will triumph if we practice it well. That's how reality is built.    

 

 

Notes

1. Nicholas Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic? (London, UK: Imperial College Press, 2004).

2. “History of Science in Early Cultures,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 

Accessed May 2, 2015.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_in_early_cultures.

3. Mary Magoulick, “What Is Myth?” Folklore Connections, Georgia College & State University. 

https://faculty.gcsu.edu/custom-website/mary-magoulick/defmyth.htm#Functionalism.

4. “Pawnee Mythology,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 2, 2015.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawnee_mythology.

5. “Quantum Entanglement,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 2, 2015.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement.

6. Jonathan Allday, Quantum Reality: Theory and Philosophy (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2009), p. 376.

7. “Quantum Flapdoodle,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 2, 2015.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism#.22Quantum_flapdoodle.22.

8. “Occam’s Razor,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 4, 2015.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor.

9. “Isaac Newton,” Wikiquote, the Free Quote Compendium. Accessed May 4, 2015.http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton