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 molded 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.

                                                        The Boating Party  (Mary Cassatt) (credit: Wikipedia)                                                      

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.