Melancholy (credit: W. Bagg, via Wikimedia Commons) 

I am not a catatonic lump of protoplasm sitting in a corner. I think, speak, and act all day every day. I know that guiding my “ways”, there must be an operating system. I think, make choices, and act with that programming running my actions. Many don’t care to examine what they do or why. I seek persistently to know why I and others do the things we do. To understand as well as I can how I implicitly view the world. This insight is critical to grasping why we do as we do.

After a review of all the evidence and theories ever offered to explain human ways, I concluded that a belief in a consistent universe (belief in Science) and a belief that the universe is conscious – both of these are necessary and rational beliefs.

I repeat: I can’t stay sane and alive and not have some programming in place on which I may ground my daily thoughts and acts. Beginning from a model of the universe that sees it as being consistent and aware, seems to me, after much careful thought, to be the best, most rational, Bayesian answer to two questions that, one way or another, must be answered. 

There is the option, of course, that many choose of ceasing to think about their programming at all. But this option, for me is just not palatable. I am driven by a need to understand why we humans do the things we do.

And now we are ready to proceed to the finish line of this book.       

The third big background idea in the case for my thesis is the one this book has laboured long to prove. It is the belief that there is a kind of moral order in this universe, a moral order that is “real”. Observably, empirically real.

The universe runs by laws that cause patterns in the flows of physical events. Our culturally acquired moral values guide us, as tribes, to navigate through those patterns. These values were learned through trial and painful error by millions of our ancestors over thousands of years. 

People who live by these values survive. Those who don’t, don’t.

Values have physically observable effects as real as gravity and electro-magnetism. Gravity and magnetism are seen by how they affect the movements of clusters of particles. Values are seen by how they affect the movements of tribes of people. In that data, there are universal patterns clearly discernible. Courage. Wisdom. Freedom. Love. As real as gravity.  

Again, we can ask about this third, big idea: “As opposed to what?”

The idea usually opposed to moral realism in our times is moral relativism. Under it, moral values are mere tastes, and right and wrong depend on where you are. What was right in Rome in the first century is not morally right today, the relativists say; what is right in East Africa is not right in Western Europe. And there are no scientific facts to be found about what is right. For the moral relativists, no values can ever be shown to be grounded in what is real. 

Under the moral relativists’ thinking, there is also no peaceful way to resolve disputes between different cultures because there is no common ground on which to even begin the negotiations. 

In this view, they are mistaken. 

Material reality is the common ground, and we can show that values are based in reality. Then, we can debate how to interpret the data we have observed about ourselves, build models of how human societies work, and then test our models against the evidence of History. Finally, we can find the working model that does explain us and use it to resolve all our disputes peacefully. 

The only things stopping us from creating and maintaining world peace are the anti-morals: cowardice, cupidity, laziness, and bigotry.

So, let us now close in on our long-anticipated main point.

If, as a modern human being in touch with the basics of Science in all its forms, I believe the universe is one coherent thing – even if all its laws are not yet understood – and I further believe it is conscious – even if its consciousness is so vast that humans have barely begun to comprehend it – and I further believe it is morally responsive – even if its moral quality is only discernible in the flows of millions of people over thousands of years – if I believe these three claims, then in my personal way I do believe in God.

What? That’s it?

Yes, my patient reader. That’s it. I still believe in God. My view is a pretty lean one, but every instinct in me tells me that such is life. Adults have to get by on leaner fare than children who seek a bearded man in the sky. 

The best consolation of adult life is the firm belief that the patterns that we see in the flows of events in the world – even patterns that only show in the evidence of centuries of human actions – are real. Your deep intuition that “good” and “right” are real is not naïve or crazy. It’s the sanest belief you have.  

And now, in a personal response to the logic presented so far, let me try to show that this case is enough to maintain my theism. And personal is the most honest word to use to describe my final chapter. It has to be so. Or, to be exact, it has to make the personal universal and the universal personal, as we shall see.

Notes

1. Dennis Overbye, “Laws of Nature, Source Unknown,” New York Times, December 18, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html? pagewanted=all&_r=0.

2. Homer, The Illiad (c. 800–725 BC; Project Gutenberg), p. 91. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-h/6130-h.html#fig120.

3. Nicholas Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities (London, UK: Pentire Press, 1984), pp. 107–109.

4. http://www.wired.com/2013/12/secret-language-of-plants/

5. Joshua Roebke, “The Reality Tests,” Seed magazine, June 4, 2008. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_reality_tests/P1/.

6. Ibid.

7. Chris Gowans, “Moral Relativism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/.