Dear readers: 

I am not posting my final chapter until tomorrow mainly because I was so dissatisfied with my post yesterday that I re-wrote it with the aim of making it clearer and more coherent. I am not sure that I have achieved those goals so I have left yesterday's post in its original form up as well. In comparing the two, you can see my painfully inadequate mind at work. But I had to try. 

Here then, is what I believe is a better conclusion to my second last chapter for you to peruse before we go on to that final chapter that I hope will make my theism seem rational and sincere to you all. 

                                                      Dwight 

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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 base my daily thoughts and acts. Beginning from a model of the universe that sees it as being both consistent and aware, seems to me, after much careful thought, to be the most rational, most Bayesian answer to some questions that, one way or another, must be answered. 

These questions are fundamental to existence; they are not optional. One way or another, they must be answered by all of us everyday.

Because I don’t like pain, I want to know: how does this world around me work? How can I navigate through it with the minimum of pain and the maximum of health? Because memories of individual bits of experience are not much use as guides to avoiding pain in the varied new experiences that I keep encountering, I want to know: what general principles are embedded in the majority of experiences that I have had so far? What guidelines for living can I derive from these general principles so that my decisions and actions are fast and effective?

And when I see how useful this trick of generalizing can be, I wonder: what do the general principles that I have derived from my experiences so far tell me about the deep nature of my reality? What is this place? How does it work? What are the profound principles that sum up all the other principles?   

Entropy is a fact of existence for everything all the time. We have learned to handle it by courage, wisdom, and their hybrid – work. Uncertainty is a fact of existence for everything all the time. We have learned to handle it by being venturesome in our lifestyles and considerate of our neighbors. The hybrid of these is democracy. These are solid values to live by all the time.

Now …what does it all mean in the most profound level available to human beings?   

       

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 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 transmitted 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 observable effects as real as those caused by gravity and electro-magnetism. Gravity and magnetism are seen by how they affect the movements of groups of particles. Values are seen in how they affect the activities of tribes of people.  In that data we call History, there are 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. In its view, values are only 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 or general conclusions to draw about what is right. For the moral relativists, no values can ever be shown to be grounded in what is physically real.

Under the moral relativists’ thinking, there is 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 then use it to settle all our disputes peacefully.

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

But world peace is not our main point. It is only a potential consequence of large numbers of us seeing the main point. Our main point is the one that refutes moral relativism. It is the principle that sums up all the principles.

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 do still believe in God. My view is a pretty lean one. No sacred texts, no holy men, no miracles, no rituals. But every instinct in me tells me that it is a wise, sane, Bayesian gamble at the base of my thinking where I must gamble on something. I can't be neutral or uninvolved about the roots of my own sanity. 

And as far as its leanness goes ...such is life. Adults have to get by on leaner fare than children who seek a bearded man in the sky. For adult citizens in a democracy, life is labor and hardship much of the time. But …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 is the sanest belief you have.  

So now, in a personal response to the argument presented so far, let me try to show in my closing chapter 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.