Chapter 16                      The Theistic Bottom Line                       Part A

            The three large principles summed up in the previous chapter are enough. With them established, we have enough to conclude that there is a higher power or consciousness in the material universe in which we live. Or rather, as was promised in the introduction, we have enough to conclude that belief in God is a rational choice for a thinking, informed, modern human being to make.

            And that is the whole point. Belief in God is a choice. It is simply a more rational choice than its alternatives. It is also worth re-iterating three other points here: 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must have a moral program in our heads to function at all; second, the one we've inherited from the past is dangerously out-of-date; and third, whatever new one we devise, it will have to be turned from a cerebral code into a personal one. A moral code must be felt and lived as personal or else it isn't really a moral code at all.     

          

            This final chapter gives the more informal explanation and interpretation of the pieces that have been assembled so far, and adds some other, better known pieces whose significance in this discussion will now be explained as we go. Along the way, it also tries to answer some of the most likely reactions to this book. My promise was that at the end of this book, we would be able to assemble a strong case for theism, i.e. belief in God. We're almost there. We shall begin this last chapter by revisiting, in a more personal way, a vexing problem in Philosophy mentioned in an earlier chapter, a problem that is three hundred years old. The solution to this vexing problem drives home our first main point on the final stretch of the thinking process that leads to theism.  

                              

                                                   photo representing popular image of a scientist

            Many scientists claim that their branch of human knowledge, unlike all of the ones that came before the rise of Science, does not have any basic assumptions at its foundation and that it is instead built from the ground up on merely observing reality, hypothesizing, designing and doing research, checking results against one's hypothesis, and then doing more hypothesizing, research, etc. Under this view, Science has no need of unprovable foundational assumptions in the way that, say, Philosophy or Euclidean Geometry do. Science is founded only on hard fact, they claim. But in this claim, as has been pointed out by thinkers like Nicholas Maxwell, those scientists are wrong. (1.)

               

            Over the last four centuries, the scientific way of thinking, Bacon’s “new instrument”, has made possible the amazing progress in human knowledge and technology that today we associate with Science. But in the meantime, at least for philosophers, it has come in for some tougher analysis.

                                                      

                                     

                                                     cover of early copy of "Novum Organum" 

            The heart of the matter, then, is the inductive method that is normally associated with Science. The way in which scientists can come upon a phenomenon that they cannot explain with any of the models that they currently have, then devise a new theory that tries to explain the phenomenon, then test the theory by doing experiments in the material world, then keep going back and forth from theory to experiment, adjusting and refining – this is the way of gaining knowledge that is called the "scientific method". It has led us to so many powerful new insights and technologies. It really was an amazing breakthrough when Francis Bacon – whether we credit him with originating it or merely expressing what many in his era were already thinking – saw and explained what he called his “new instrument” (Novum Organum). We owe him more than more than all could pay.