My model of cultural evolution also showed me why some superstitious beliefs hang on for generations before they are dispelled. But in the end, as old thinkers are replaced by more enlightened ones, the method of human learning, whether it is individual or tribal, is an inductive one. We get ideas about the material world and we test them. We sometimes test world views or moral systems over generations, and what we learn is absorbed by the tribe over generations rather than cognized by any one individual. But our knowledge keeps growing, as it must if we are to survive. We are the only concept-driven species that we have encountered so far. The knowledge-building, social way of surviving is the human way. Our genetically acquired assets (speed, strength, etc.) are trivial by comparison. We live by learning or we die.

As we think about how science and its methods work, we realize, as Nicholas Maxwell has stressed many times, that it contains one more implicit assumption. This second assumption is that human minds can figure out the laws of this difficult and confusing place; that is, that we’re not kidding ourselves about how smart we are. All the evidence of the history of science, and of humanity more generally, suggests that we can figure those laws out. Therefore, I choose to gamble again, this time on the power of human minds, sometimes alone and sometimes in cooperation with other minds, to see through the layers of irrelevant, trivial events and to spot the patterns that underlie their larger movements. Then we can test and revise and gradually arrive at models and natural law statements that really do explain the world, and so we gradually come to master the knowledge that empowers us to design—and engage in—focused, strategic actions that get survival-favouring results.

Again, the majority of the citizens of the West see this choice-gamble as the only rational one to take. The alternative to believing in the power of human minds, individually or in cooperating groups, to figure out the laws underlying reality is to abandon reason in favour of beliefs founded on something other than observable, replicable, material facts. Once again, we have the evidence of centuries of human history to look back on. All the evidence we have about what life was like for the superstitious, cowed tribes of the past suggests that their lives were—as Hobbes puts it—nasty, brutish, and short. People who were willing to think, analyze, experiment, and learn made this society that we enjoy today; even the majority of Luddite cynics who claim to despise modernity won’t go two days without a shower.

My first point or conscious realization on the road to the theistic view, then, is that these beliefs in the consistency of the laws of the universe and in the power of the human mind to figure them out, when added together, amount to a kind of faith. To atheists and skeptics, this very belief system can’t properly be called a “faith” at all. It certainly doesn’t lead them to a belief in God. It simply enables skeptics and theists alike to keep doing science and to share ideas about science with anyone else who is interested. It does not entail more than that, atheists say.

But now let’s add some other powerful ideas.

If we truly believe in science, then we are committed to integrating into our thinking all well-supported theories in any of the branches of science. In the twenty-first century, what that means is that we must now try to integrate uncertainty, quantum and non-quantum, into our world view. Earlier we saw that extrapolating from the quantum model led us to conclude that the values we call freedom and love are real, that is, that our believing in these values and living under their worldview leads to survival-oriented, real-world consequences.

                                 

                                                                         Erwin Schrodinger

However, quantum theory, once it’s accepted, also comes with some other startling corollaries and experimental findings. Quantum entanglement implies that the universe feels itself, all over, all at once. The universe is not, as pre-quantum science pictured it, cool, local, and aloof. It is capable of what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” and in fact, it functions that way all the time.⁵ Our best twenty-first century model of the universe is telling us that all the parts of the universe are in touch, instantly, with all the other parts, all the time. Schrodinger put it this way: “There seems to be no way of stopping [entanglement] until the whole universe is part of a stupendous entanglement state.”⁶

If distant parts of an entity are in touch with one another (in the case of the physical universe, instantly), it is entirely reasonable to postulate that there must be a controller of some kind connecting the stimulus of a spin of one particle and the reverse-spin response of another particle in some distant location.

This way of seeing the universe as having a kind of awareness is my second big idea. It is well known to atheistic scientists. They admit it is a way to move a tiny bit closer to saying that a possibility exists of a sort of a God.

       

                                          Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize–winning physicist

But according to the science-minded atheists, all these ideas about how the universe stays consistent and how it seems to have a kind of awareness, even taken together, add up to little more than a trivial belief. Nobel Prize–winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann went so far as to derisively call this whole way of thinking “quantum flapdoodle.”⁷

In other words, we may have deep feelings of wonder when we see how huge and amazing the universe is—far more amazing, by the way, than any religion of past societies made it seem. Our intuition may even suggest that for information to go instantaneously from one particle in one part of the universe to another particle in another vastly separated part, a controlling consciousness of some kind must be joining the two. But these feelings, the atheists say, don’t change anything. The God that theists describe and claim to believe in, according to all the evidence, doesn’t answer prayer, doesn’t give us some other existence after we die, doesn’t perform miracles, and doesn’t care a hoot about us or how we behave.

                        

                                                                   Pierre-Simon de Laplace

In the atheistic scientistic view, believing in such a God is simply excess baggage. It is a belief that we might enjoy clinging to as children, but it is extra, unjustified weight that only encumbers the thinking and active living necessary to keep increasing our knowledge and living in society like responsible adults. Theism, atheists say, pointlessly hobbles both science and common sense. Or as Laplace famously told Napoleon, “Monsieur, I have no need of that hypothesis.”

          

  

         William of Occam, English Franciscan friar, philosopher, and theologian, c. 1287–1347

Centuries earlier, William of Occam said the explanation that best suffices for any phenomenon is the simplest one. Newton reiterated the point: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.”⁸ The method of science tells us that if we can explain a phenomenon by using three basic concepts instead of four or five, the three-pronged tool should be the one we choose.

According to atheists, belief in God—or at least in the God that might or might not permeate this consistent, entangled, self-aware, material universe—is a piece of unneeded, dead weight. In our time, under the worldview of modern science, the idea has no content. It can and should be dropped. As the hardest atheists say, it is time that humanity grew up.

Acquiring the cultural model of human evolution changes all this. Under it, values are real, humanity is going somewhere, and whether we behave morally or immorally really does matter, not just to us in our limited frames of reference, but to that consciousness that underlies the universe. That presence, over millennia, helps the good to thrive by maintaining a reality in which there are lots of free choices and chances to learn, but also a small, long-term advantage to those who choose to be venturesome and learn to be brave, wise, and loving.

This is the third big idea in my overall case for theism: moral realism, which means seeing moral values as being connected to the material universe in a tangible way.

This model, which shows the role of morals in the human mode of living, shakes everything else atheists claim to know. Under this model, there is no doubt about one thing: the programs that maximize the probability of our survival—that is, our moral values—are our guides for finding safer paths, as a species, through the hazardous patterns in the movements of matter and energy in the physical universe itself.

Therefore, belief in the realness of moral values is not trivial in the same way as the belief in the consistency of the universe is not trivial. Both beliefs have an effect, via the patterns of behavior they foster, on the odds of our surviving as a species in the real world.

In short, the presence that fills the universe doesn’t just maintain and feel. It also favors those living entities who follow the ways we think of as “good.”

It cares.

In my own intellectual, moral, and spiritual journey, I was a long time admitting even to myself that by this point I was gradually coming to believe in a thing that was, essentially, a kind of universal consciousness. God.

God spans fifteen billion light years across the known part of the universe. Googuls of particles. About 10⁷⁹ instances of electrons alone, never mind quarks or strings. Consistent, aware, and compassionate, all over, all at once, all the time. And these claims describe only the pieces of evidence that we know of. What might exist before and after, in smaller or larger forms, or even in the other dimensions that some physicists, in their cutting-edge theories, have postulated?

Every idea about matter or space that I can describe with numbers is a naïve children’s story compared with what is meant by the word infinite. Every idea I can talk about in terms that name bits of what we call time has to be set aside when I use the word eternal. For many of us in the West today, formulas and graphs, for far too long, have obscured these points, even though most scientists freely admit there is so much that they don’t know. Newton said, “I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”⁹