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 - the theistic and the scientific? 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 understanding and reconciling all that we know, a way that integrates it all, from our observations of events around us, to the memories that are stored in our brains, to all the concepts that we use as we strive to understand what we see and recall, 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 morality. I have worked out a system that integrates all that we know, and 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 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 current 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 all decisions to stop thinking about this dilemma are deluded and unsustainable. None of the jingoists, atheist or theist, nor the discouraged ones in the middle - ever 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 all 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. That concept has to be unique and personal or it's 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, 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 usable perspectives around in the world today.  

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 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 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. 

                

Notes    

1. Westacott,Emrys; “Moral Relativism”;http://www.iep.utm.edu/moral-  

  re/#SH3b; 2012.

2. Carson, Rachel: “Silent Spring”; Mariner Books; 2002.

3. Suzuki, David; “The Sacred Balance”; Greystone Books; 1997.

4. Einstein, Albert; from a telegram to prominent Americans; May 24, 

   1946.  

5. Hume, David; "A Treatise of Human Nature" 2.3.3.4; first published 1739.