(Grampa dozing in his chair. Enter Katy, Josh, Liam, Ainslie, Lochlann, Reiden, Ayla, Mira, Charlie, William, and Abbey. They are carrying several bags and cartons of take-out Indo-Canadian food.)

Grampa: (waking) Help! It’s a home invasion.

Katy: We’re all here, Grampa. All eleven of us. Christmas is in three days, and we’ll see you at Uncle Chris and Aunty Shani’s place, but then there’ll be distractions. Lochlann in from Edmo, as you call it, Charlie from Van, as you call it, Reiden in from Kitchener, and Ainslie in from Washington State U. The rest of us have been filling them in on your ideas about moral realism.

Grampa: This sounds ominous.

Katy: Stay serious for just a little while. This is crazy. Me the twenty-five year old telling you, the almost eighty year old to be serious.

Reiden: Crazy to outsiders. Not to any of us. We know how bizarre his sense of humor can be. But anyway …we’re all determined that you will not squirm out of our questioning or digress onto some other topic. We think we mostly get your ideas about moral realism.  

Josh: They’re starting to make sense to me, actually. What have I said? But what matters to us today is to get to the conclusion. You say all of your thinking about moral realism has led you to conclude that there is a god of some kind.

Grampa: That’s right.

Ainslie: Why? I’m taking Anthropology. Everything I read leads me to think that every culture creates religious ideas of some kind and they’re all equally false. I really want to hear this.

Grampa: Every culture has strong ideas of right and wrong too. You’d agree with that claim, right?

Ainslie: Yes. But they differ radically from culture to culture.

Grampa: True, but they all have courage, wisdom, freedom, and love in them in some form. Isn’t that so?

Ainslie: All I can say is that they sort of do. And some cultures in the past have crushed the idea of freedom almost out of existence in the minds of their people.

Grampa: That’s why they’re cultures of the past, Ainslie.

Ainslie: That is a huge blanket statement. You know that, don’t you?

Grampa: I’m past mincing words about these matters, Ainslie. I’m almost eighty, as someone has already been kind enough to mention.

Reiden: No, we’re not feeling sorry for you. We know you’re kidding anyway. We want to follow this line of argument to its logical end. We want to comprehend your system.

Charlie: So tell us. If we grant that maybe our most successful moral principles will steer us to handle real characteristics of the physical universe – if we grant that – then how does that lead to a theistic conclusion.

Grampa: The programs called “courage” and “wisdom”, “freedom” and “love” steer human beings, over thousands of years and millions of people, into the zones in which they can make more of themselves. Love steers us into ways of life that make it possible for us to spread love. More people in more ecosystems on more planets, some of them terraformed by us, making more people. We find what the SETI scientists call the “Goldilocks zones”. Courage, wisdom, freedom and love: they steer us physically because they inform our programming on the scale of all humanity.

Will: I can grant that much. But I’ve been thinking about this for months now. That moral realist thinking does not entail belief in a deity.

Grampa: No, not directly. But it does ask of us that we live a values-driven life, each of us, asked – or maybe we should say – programmed or exhorted or hinted toward, at different times, any of those terms may fit depending on the context that we’re speaking in. But we are being steered to live in certain ways, inside certain patterns, that make our surviving more likely over the long haul. And those are brave, wise, venturesome, loving ways. The way of love has lasted and spread not because it sounds nice, but because it works, my beloved rug-rats.

Liam: No, now you’re going too far. None of us has been a rug rat brat for more than ten, no twelve years.

Will: Don’t distract him, Liam. Stay on the point. So finally, how does all of this lead you to conclude that there is a God, Grampa.

Grampa: A sort of a God.

Will: A sort of a God then.

Grampa: Well, the difference matters. None of us could know more than a tiny fraction of a fragment of a splinter of that consciousness that fills all of the cosmos, but it’s there. The only way the universe could be showing the qualities that it does – consistency, coherence, quantum entanglement, and moral awareness – is if it does actually have a consciousness, a sort of a consciousness, if you like. It feels itself, all over, all at once, all of the time.

Lochlann: Ten to the what …eighty something power particles, fourteen billion light years across …my God, that’s is awesome.

Grampa: I hope you get the irony of what you just said, Lock, but yes. It is.

Ainslie: It’s still a bit much to gamble on. Well, gambling on our mental models is what you said before we do all of the time anyway, right?

Grampa: I did indeed. But do you see that it is reasonable to gamble on the big values in the most profound way, in other words to try to live by them every day, all through our lives?

Ainslie: I see that, yes. We don’t really believe them at all if we don’t live by them.

Grampa: And in addition, it won’t always be easy to remain true to your values and patient with the bullies and the lazy slugs of the world? And keep trying to be a decent person even when it would be so easy to become a fascist or communist or fundamentalist or some other form of intolerant bigot?

Ainslie: Yes, yes, all of that. But I don’t believe in God.  

Grampa: But you’re willing to admit that you believe moral values are just our words for things that are real?

Ainslie: Yes. That doesn’t change my atheism. I don’t think God exists.  

Grampa: Well, you’re still okay by me. I love you just as you are. But may I gently suggest that actually you do.

Reiden: See now there’s the jump I don’t get. How can you say that? She just told you that, no she does not believe in God.

Grampa: She believes in the consistency of the universe, and so do millions of others with her. That’s what science begins from. And she believes that the universe is a kind of conscious. And so do those millions of others today. Once you add to that sum the belief that moral values are our models of how our role in the real, empirical universe has to be lived, and you live by those values, then how you live, by the evidence that shows in your behavior – which is all that science cares about, remember – how you live will be indistinguishable in any substantive way from the lifestyle of a theist. You’re okay by me at that point and I really don’t have any more points to try to make to you because, even though you say you don’t believe in God, in every way that matters, you actually do.

Liam: What? That’s outrageous, you old scalliwag.

Grampa: Ah, let’s eat you guys. I smell chicken vindaloo and it’s getting cold.

(They look at one another and some begin to put out plates on his counter top, along with cutlery and condiments, while others open the cartons and spread them out on his small table.)

Lochlann: (privately, quietly) Thank you, Grampa. This is awesome.

Grampa: Merry Christmas, laddie. Enjoy your holiday.