Chapter 15.                       Part C 

         Why we should want to devise a more rational, modern, and yet also personally felt values system for our society is, perhaps, also worth reiterating. The reason for our seeking a new values system is very simple, and the case for it was made early on in this book: we can't go on as we, for so long, have. In the past, as a species, we have always chosen between competing values systems, and the cultures they drive, by war. Incompatible values systems and the nations who adhered to them always fought to establish which would dominate and which submit, i.e. which culture would rule.

            But we can't keep using that way of resolving disputes between nations, i.e. of testing cultural codes against each other. Our weapons have grown too big. Therefore, it is rational to gamble on the view of the universe which portrays it as being aware as long as, first, we accept that the old ways are obsolete, second, remember that the choice was a conscious one that can be reversed if we see it taking us toward dangerous consequences, and, third, the model that arises out of our belief in a kind of universal awareness appears to be steering us toward discernibly positive results.

            Thus, it is rational to see the universe as both coherent and a kind of conscious. But is this enough to justify a choice to embark on a personal path toward a personal theism?    

The third big idea in this analysis of our background assumptions is the one that this book has labored long to establish. It is the one which says that there is a kind of moral order in this universe, a moral order that is real, "real” in the sense that scientists mean. Observably, empirically real.  

The universe runs by laws that produce patterns in the flows of events, and our culturally acquired moral values guide us, as tribes, to navigate through those patterns. These values were learned through trial and error by millions of people over thousands of years. People learned that certain very general ideas called “values” – ideas like courage, wisdom, freedom, and love – work. In theory, many varied cultures can evolve that incorporate these values into a viable way of life in many different and distinct ways. But the general giant directions of all cultures are discernible, if we are honest enough to study hard. And if we go where these giant values point, we get useful results. The people who live by these values survive. Those who don’t, don’t. That physically observable effect of values in human behavior qualifies values as "real". As real as gravity and magnetism.  

Again we can ask about our third idea in this line of thinking: “As opposed to what?” The usual opposing idea to moral realism in modern times is “moral relativism”. By it, moral values are mere tastes, and right and wrong depend on where you are. What is right in Rome in the first century of the modern era is not morally right today; what is right in East Africa is not right in Western Europe and vice-versa. Under the moral relativists’ thinking, there is no peaceful way to resolve disputes between different cultures because there is no common ground on which to even begin the negotiations. 

There are lots of forms of moral relativism being espoused in the twenty-first century. Some even claim, in convoluted arguments, to offer us ways to establish common definitions of "good" and to resolve disputes peacefully. But for the purposes of this book, moral relativism as just described will suffice. Moral relativism takes the position that moral values are not founded in any scientifically specifiable, physical world phenomena. (5.) This book says we can't live like that and don't have to even pretend to do so.  

            The view of moral realism offered in this book says of the relativists' position that nothing could be further from the truth. Material reality is the common ground, and if we understand what our species’ history is telling us about values, we can infer that values are based in what is real and all of our disputes, at least in theory, are resolvable. The things stopping us from creating and maintaining world peace are the anti-morals: cowardice, willful ignorance, laziness, and bigotry.

The infuriating thing about the moral relativists, for me, is that they simply don’t live their own lives by such mushy principles. Academics, for example, follow a set of moral guidelines even in how they do their work, a set that is rational and coherent. Academia proceeds, in its cumulative, coherent way, because the people in it live by principles of freedom and honesty. Freedom to explore, test, publish, and discuss. Honesty in saying what they really think and, when they use another's ideas, giving credit where it is due. These morés are axioms in the academic world.

So let us now close in on our long anticipated main point. 

If, as a modern human being, in touch with at least the basics of what Science in all of its forms is telling me, I believe that the universe is one coherent thing – even if we don’t understand all of its laws yet – and I further believe that it is conscious – even if its consciousness is of a type so vast and so simultaneous that it can’t be cognized by a human mind – and I further believe that 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 are true, then, yes, I do believe in a kind of a God.

What?

That’s it?

Yes, my patient reader. But now, in a personal response to the logic presented so far, let me try to show you that this case is more than enough. And “personal” is the most honest way to describe my final chapter. It has to be so. Or, to be exact, it has to make the personal, universal and the universal, personal, as we shall see. 

Notes 

1.http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html? pagewanted=all&_r=0

2. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-h/6130-h.html#fig120 (p. 91) 

3. Maxwell, Nicholas;"From Knowledge To Wisdom: A Revolution For Science and the   

    Humanities" (pp. 107-109); Pentire Press; 1984.  

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

5. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/