One way to ease into the moral relativism versus moral realism debate is to explain how I came to be obsessed with it.

When I was in Grade 9, I was fortunate enough to have had a fine teacher for science. He liked his subject, he liked kids, and he liked bringing the two together, which is all a good teacher ever really has to do. He impressed the thinking technique called the scientific method deeply into my mind. You get an idea 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, real-world way to test the idea. You set up the apparatus you need, then you do the test. All the while, you keep careful records of what you observe.

Next, you analyze the data to see whether patterns exist that tend to support this theory or model of yours. You then develop further ideas for subtler theories, models, or 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 in better health and happiness or in a little less pain. Once in a while, you find a way to formulate one of the basic laws of this universe.

I could see that by using this method, sharing their findings, and continuing their research, scientists had expanded human knowledge, created so many helpful technologies, and cured diseases—all 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. Even at the youthful age of fourteen, I was filled with a rush of emotion each time 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 felt similar profound emotions when I learned about the Being who had created this universe and who loved everything in it. My six-year-old heart ached when I thought about how so many human beings had lost their relationship with God. The evidence 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 around me, from the schoolyard to the Cold War.

But I was uplifted when I was told of one man who had explained to humans how they might strike a new deal: if they could learn to truly love one another—to follow his example—then they could regain their relationships with one another and, ultimately, their relationship with God. The key concept to grasp was that following Jesus’s 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 one another. Really love one another. Then peace, progress, and prosperity will all come. All of this was six-year-old naïveté, I admit. But as I look back even now, it seems more profound than the beliefs of many adults because it was clear, heartfelt, and unabashed.

                                   Witnesses seeing the miracle at Fatima, Portugal, 1917.

Even as a child, I did not believe in “miracles”; that is, events that lie beyond all rational explanation. I still don’t. Nor do I believe in the divinity of Jesus. Or, to be exact, I believe 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 type. And miracles? They turn out to have rational explanations in the end.

I knew even as a child that the important thing to understand was what the new deal Jesus offered humanity represented. The principles being represented in the stories were what mattered, and they seemed to me absolutely bang on. If we take into account all that we know at this point in history, and we relentlessly apply our powers of reason to this material, we can find a clear path to survival—that is, to humanity’s living with decency, sense, and love. In other words, once a critical mass of humans shares a model of reality that shows us how to fit into the natural world and to get long-term, survival-oriented results there, by a few more millions in each generation, humanity will choose to join the walk along that path. Decency, sense, and love 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 synthesize them into a new belief system—a single, unified, coherent one, whose power to guide, nourish, and inspire is greater than any power residing in our old science or our old religion alone could ever be.

The question in this Age of Science is “How?” How can a rational human being in the modern era feel full, confident allegiance to both of these ways of viewing our world and our place in it, these two ways that are currently considered, by most people, to be incompatible? The answer is that they are so far from incompatible that the plural pronoun “they” does not work in this context. Only a single concept is being discussed 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 stored in our brains to all the concepts we use as we strive to understand what we see and recall, and then design effective responses to all of it. 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 and then to faith. I have worked out a system that integrates all that we know and all 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 the sense data and memories of sense data that lie between these poles of intuition and reason.

In this book, I will construct an argument in everyday language proving that the current belief about the incompatibility of science and faith is wrong. My hope is that all readers who have struggled or 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 by the end of the book.

I believe that all decisions to stop thinking about this dilemma are deluded and unsustainable. Few of the jingoists, atheist or theist, and even fewer of the discouraged ones in the middle—ever truly stop thinking about the dilemma. Instead, they live in anxiety and return to it via the pathways of daily experience again and again. I want to provide them all with a way to solve it, not permanently but repeatedly, every time doubt assails them, to work their way through doubts as they crop up in the flow of living and to do so with growing confidence in a comprehensive system of thought that enables them to do that work.

In philosophical terms, my main thesis is called "deriving ought from is” which means finding a strong logical base for moral values (the "ought" part) in the factual evidence of real life (the "is" part). I will prove that a code of right and wrong exists, embedded in the processes of the real world, and that we can figure out that code simply by looking at the evidence in science, in history, and in our daily lives. Further, I will show that once we recognize there is such a code—and we see what that code is telling us about how a human life can and should be lived—we are gradually and inescapably led to the conclusion that a God does exist in this universe. A “sort of a God,” if you like. I’m content with the term “sort of a God.” The more unique and personal the view of God that each reader arrives at by time he or she has finished reading this book, the happier I’ll be. That concept has to be personal, or in the end, it is 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, I feel all these experiences neither add to nor detract from my case. They aren’t relevant. The case must stand on its own.

It is also worth noting that the ideas, historical records, texts, and perspectives I discuss in this book are mostly those of a man who was born into, and moulded by a Western culture. Certainly, plenty of other usable perspectives are available in the world today. But I am a son of the West. I can speak with at least some useful degree of conviction only on the ideas and history I’ve learned about in my country and its schools. However, the conclusions 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 to the end will find that the reward—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 for the effort they have invested in reading the book in full.

I have to try.

 

Notes

1. Emrys Westacott, “Moral Relativism,” International Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012. http://www.iep.utm.edu/moral-re/#SH3b.

2. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Mariner Books, 2002).

3. David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance (Greystone Books, 1997).

4. Albert Einstein, from a telegram to prominent Americans, May 24, 1946.

5. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2.3.3.4 (1739; Project Gutenberg). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4705/4705-h/4705-h.htm.