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 an 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must have a moral program in our heads to function at all; second, the one we’ve inherited from the past is dangerously out-of-date; and third, whatever new one we devise, it will have to be turned from a cerebral code into a personal one.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 of argument assembled so far and then 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.

Many scientists claim that their branch of human knowledge, unlike all 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, forming theories, designing research, doing the research, checking the results against one’s theories, 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 facts, 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, that way of thinking has come in for some tougher analysis.

                                            

                                                               Cover of early copy of Novum Organum 

                                                (credit: John P. McCaskey, via 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.

                                    

                                          Albert Michelson  (credit: Bunzil, via Wikimedia Commons)            

                                            

                                                     Edward Morley  (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Clearly, Science is open to making mistakes. For scientists themselves, a shocking example of such a mistake was a mistake in Physics. Newton’s model of how gravity and acceleration work was excellent, but it wasn’t telling the full story of what goes on in the universe. After two centuries of taking Newton’s equations as their gospel, physicists were stunned by the experiment done by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in 1887. In essence, it showed that Newton’s laws were not adequate to explain all of what was really going on. Einstein’s thinking on these new data is what led him to the Theory of Relativity. But first came Michelson and Morley’s experiment, which showed that the scientific method, and Newton, were not infallible.

Newton was not proved totally wrong, but his laws were shown to be mere approximations, accurate only for smaller masses at slow speeds. As the masses and speeds tested become larger, Newton’s laws become less useful for predicting what is going to happen next.

Nevertheless, it was a scientist, Einstein, doing science who found the limitations of the laws and models specified by an earlier scientist. Newton was not amended by a clergyman or carpenter or a reading from an ancient holy text. Thus, from the personal standpoint, I have always believed, I still believe, and I’m confident I always will believe that the universe is consistent, that it runs by laws that will be the same in 2525 as they are now, even though we don’t understand all of them very well yet.

Relativity theory describes how the stars moved in the year 1,000,000 BC exactly as accurately as it describes the stars’ movements now. In that era, living things reproduced and changed by the process we call evolution just as reliably as living things do now. I believe that, for living things, genetic variation and natural selection are constants.

But I can’t prove beyond any doubt that the universe runs by one consistent set of laws; I can only choose to take a Bayesian kind of gamble on the foundational belief that this is so. I prefer this belief as a starting point over any alternative beliefs that portray the universe as being under laws that are capricious and unpredictable. Science has had so many successes that, even if I can’t be certain that its findings and theories are infallible, I choose to heed what scientists have to say. That choice, for me, is just a smart Bayesian gamble, preferable to any of the superstitious alternatives. Or as Robert Frost said: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I …I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”


   
                   two roads diverged in a wood (credit: Jakec, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                                       I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

There is even evidence that tribes of the past knew of the inductive method and gained knowledge by it.^2,3,4 More and more as millennia passed, they turned to their gods only when they couldn’t figure out on their own how some natural process worked. One of the big effects of Science has been to steadily dispel superstitions as better insights into the workings of physical reality are acquired. In fact, most people today, at least in the West, concede almost automatically that superstitions need to be dispelled. Plagues aren’t caused by evil spirits or God’s punishment, and they don’t go away if we burn incense or chant for days at a time. But if we control rats, we can control bubonic plague. If we selectively breed our livestock, then our chickens, cows, sheep, and pigs keep giving more eggs, milk, wool, and pork. In short, all humans and all human societies keep gradually becoming more rational, i.e. more scientific in their outlook and lifestyles, because survival demands it.

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 accumulating better and better knowledge and passing it on to our kids, or we die.