I think a short personal note might be in order at this point. One way to ease into this topic of moral realism is to explain how I came to be obsessed with it.

  When I was in grade nine, I was lucky enough to have a really fine teacher for Science. He liked Science, and he liked kids, and he liked getting the two together, which is all a good teacher ever really has to do. He impressed the thinking technique called “the scientific method” very deeply into my mind. You get an idea about, 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, physical-world way to test the idea. You set up the apparatus that you need, then you do the test. All the while, you keep careful records of the data that you observe.

      Then, you analyze the data to see whether there are patterns in them, patterns that tend to support this theory or model of yours. You then get more ideas for subtler theories or more decisive 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 with a little more health and a little less pain. Once in a while, you find a way to precisely formulate one of the basic laws of this universe. 

               

      I could see that by using this method, sharing their findings, and doing more and more research, scientists had expanded human knowledge, created so many helpful technologies, and cured diseases, 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. I was filled with a rush of emotion as 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 had felt similar profound emotions when I had learned about the Being who had made this universe and who still loved everything in it. My six-year-old heart ached when I thought that human beings had lost their relationship with God. The evidence which showed that they had 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 about me, from the schoolyard to the Cold War.

   But I was uplifted when I was told of one man who had explained to human beings how they might strike a new deal: if they could just learn to truly love one another – to follow his example – then they could regain their relationships with each other and then, finally, their relationship with God. The key thing to see was that following Jesus’ 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 each other. Really love each other. Then peace, progress, and prosperity will all come. All of this was six-year-old naïve, I admit. But it seemed then, and it seems to me now, 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", i.e. events that lie beyond all rational explanation. Still don't. Nor do I believe in the divinity of Jesus. Or, to be exact, I thought then and think now, 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 in kind.

     I knew even as a child that the important thing to understand was what the new deal that Jesus offered humanity represented. The principles being represented in the stories were what mattered, and they seemed to me absolutely bang on. Solve for “x” and a clear path to survival - that is, to humanity’s living in both decency and sense - becomes visible before us. In other words, once a critical mass of humans on this planet share a model of reality that shows them how to fit into the natural world and to get long-term, survival-oriented results there, then, by a few more millions in each generation, humanity will choose to join the walk along that path. Decency and sense 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 marry them, to synthesize a new belief system, a single, unified, coherent one, whose power to guide, nourish, and inspire is greater than any power residing in any science alone or any religion alone could ever be.

               

        The question in this Age of Science is “How?” How could a rational human being in the modern era feel full, confident allegiance to both of these ways of viewing this world and our place in it, these two ways that are generally considered by people today to be incompatible? The answer is that they are so far from incompatible that there should be no “they” pronoun involved here. There is a way of seeing and reconciling all that we know, a way that integrates it all, from the our observations of the flow of the events around us, to the memories that are stored in our brains, to all the concepts that we use as we strive to match sense data and memories with concepts, and then to design effective responses to life. 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 "good". I have worked out a system that integrates all that we know, and that is also justified, as Science is, by reason and evidence alone. This system is consistent with my deepest instincts, with all the conceptual models studied in university science departments, and with all of the sense data and memories of sense data that lie between these poles of instinct and reason.

      In this book, I will construct an argument in everyday language which proves that the belief about the incompatibility of Science and Faith is wrong. My hope is that all readers who have struggled, and 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 at the end of this book. 

   I believe that decisions to stop thinking about this matter are deluded and unsustainable. The jingoists, both atheist and theist, and the discouraged ones in the middle - none of them truly stop thinking about the dilemma. Instead they live in anxiety and they keep returning to it – via the pathways of daily human experience – again and again. I want to give them a way to solve it, not permanently but repeatedly, and with growing confidence in a comprehensive system of thought that enables them to do that work.

  In philosophical terms, my main thesis can be characterized as “deriving ought from is”, which means I will prove that there is a code of right and wrong embedded in the processes of the real world, and that we can figure that code out just from looking at the evidence in Science, in History, and in our daily lives. Then I will show that once we see that there is such a code – and we see what that code is telling us about how a human life could and should be lived – we are gradually and inescapably led on to the further conclusion that there is a God in this universe. A “sort of a God”, if you like. I am content with the term “sort of a God”. The more unique and personal the view of God that each of my readers arrives at by time he or she has finished reading this book, the happier I'll be. It's personal or it's nothing at all. 

    I have been meditating and concentrating on 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, all these facts together, I feel, neither add to, nor detract from, my case. They aren’t relevant. The case must stand on its own.

   It is also worth noting here that the ideas, historical records, texts, and perspectives that I discuss in this book are mostly those of a man who was born into, and molded by, a Western culture. There are plenty of other valuable perspectives around in the world of the twenty-first century.  

   But I am a son of the West. I can only speak with at least some useful degree of conviction on the ideas and historical experiences that I learned about in my country and its schools. However, this is also a good place in which to say that I believe the conclusions that I draw in this book are universal; they can be extracted by logic from the historical records and belief systems 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 will find that the reward in the end – 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 them for the effort that they have invested in reading right to the end.

               

           I have to try.