Chapter 17.                                      (continued) 

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-accumulating, 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-favoring 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 favor 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.

                                   

                                                         1812 engraving of (purportedly) Ned Ludd 

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 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 atheists 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, the atheists say.