Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize–winning physicist (credit: Wikipedia) 

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 (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

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 active thinking and living we need to practice to keep increasing our knowledge and living in society as 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 philosopher and theologian (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

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 two basic concepts instead of three or four, the two-pronged tool should be the one we choose.

According to atheists, belief in God—or at least in a 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. Or as the sternest atheists put it, 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, brave, wise, and loving.

This is the third big idea in my overall case for theism: moral realism. Seeing 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 belief in the consistency of the universe is not trivial. Both beliefs have an effect, via the patterns of behaviour they foster, on the odds of our surviving as a species in the real world. People who carry them out-survive the competition, and these people and their ideas spread.

In short, the presence that fills the universe doesn’t just maintain and feel. It also favours 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 kind of universal consciousness. God.