Chapter 17 – The Theistic Bottom Line

The three large principles summed up in the previous chapter are enough. Having established them, we have enough to conclude that a higher power or consciousness exists in our material universe. Or rather, as was promised in the introduction, we have enough to conclude that belief in God is a rational choice for a thinking, informed, modern human being to make.

And that is the point. Belief in God is a choice. It is simply a more rational choice than its alternatives.

It is also worth reiterating three other points here: first, we must have a moral program in our heads to function at all; second, the one we’ve inherited from the past is dangerously out-of-date; and third, whatever new one we devise, it will have to be turned from a cerebral code into a personal one. A moral code must be felt and lived as personal or else it isn’t really a moral code at all. It will not guide us when a moral crisis comes.

This final chapter gives a more informal explanation and interpretation of the pieces assembled so far and adds some other, better-known pieces whose significance in this discussion will now be explained as we go along. It will also try to answer some of the most likely reactions to the ideas in this book. My promise was that by the end of this book, we would be able to assemble a strong case for theism—that is, belief in God. We’re almost there. We shall begin this last chapter by revisiting, in a more personal way, a vexing problem in Philosophy mentioned in Chapter 4, a problem that is three hundred years old. The solution to this problem drives home our first main point on the final stretch of the thinking process that leads to theism.

   

                                                       

                       Movie actor playing a “mad” scientist (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Many scientists claim that their branch of human knowledge, unlike all of the ones that came before the rise of Science, does not have any basic assumptions at its foundation and that it is instead built from the ground up on merely observing reality, hypothesizing, designing and doing research, checking the results against one’s hypothesis, and then doing more hypothesizing, research, and so on. Under this view, science has no need of foundational assumptions in the way that, say, philosophy or Euclidean geometry do. Science is founded only on hard fact, they claim. But in this claim, as has been pointed out by thinkers like Nicholas Maxwell, those scientists are wrong.¹

Over the last four centuries, the scientific way of thinking, Bacon’s “new instrument,” has made possible the amazing progress in human knowledge and technology that today we associate with Science. But in the meantime, at least for philosophers, it has come in for some tougher analysis.

                                                              

                                      

                               Cover of early copy of Novum Organum (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

The heart of the matter, then, is the inductive method normally associated with science. The way in which scientists can come upon a phenomenon they cannot explain with any of their current models, devise a new theory that tries to explain the phenomenon, test the theory by doing experiments in the material world, and keep going back and forth from theory to experiment, adjusting and refining—this is the way of gaining knowledge called the scientific method. It has led us to so many powerful new insights and technologies. It really was an amazing breakthrough when Francis Bacon—whether we credit him with originating it or merely expressing what many in his era were already thinking—saw and explained what he called his “new instrument” (novum organum).

But as David Hume famously proved, the logic this method is built on is not perfect. Any natural law that we try to state as a way of describing our observations of reality is a gamble, one that may seem to summarize and bring order to entire files of experiences, but a gamble nonetheless. A natural law is a scientist’s claim about what he thinks is going to happen in specific future circumstances. But every natural law proposed is taking for granted a deep first assumption about the real world. That assumption is that events in the future will continue to steadily follow the patterns we have been able to spot in the flows of events in the past. But we simply can’t ever know whether this assumption is true. At any time, we may come on new data that stymie our best theories.