Starry Night at La Silla  (credit: ESO/H. Dahle, via Wikimedia Commons)

Acquiring the cultural model of human evolution developed in this book cancels the cynicism of the atheists. Under moral realism, values are real, humanity is going somewhere, and whether we behave morally or immorally 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. First, we see the universe as a consistent, coherent system; second, we see it as conscious; and third, we come to see our values as being connected to the universe in a tangible way.

Why does this third insight matter so much? Because it shakes everything else atheists claim to know. Under the moral realist model, our values are the beliefs that maximize the probability of our survival. The moral realist model guides us to formulate and live by values that work. Thus, it is not trivial. It is vital.

Belief in the realness of values is not trivial just as belief in the consistency of the universe is not trivial. Both beliefs have an effect, via the patterns of behavior they cause in us, on the odds of our survival. In the long haul, Science is good for us. So is Moral Realism, believed and lived. People who carry these programs in their heads outwork, outbreed, outfight, and outlast the competition. Moral Realism's worldview, we can now see, does describe reality. Our reality. 

Thus, belief in the realness of our values enable us to see that the presence that fills the universe doesn’t just stay consistent and maybe even have a kind of awareness. It also favors those living entities that 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 deity. God.

Fourteen billion light years across the known parts of the universe. Googuls of particles. 10⁷⁹ instances of electrons alone, never mind quarks or strings. All integrated parts of one thing, consistent, aware, compassionate, all over, all at once, all the time. 

And these claims describe only the pieces of evidence that we know of. What might exist before and after, in smaller or larger forms, or even the other dimensions that some physicists have postulated? 

And it cares.

    

Every idea about matter or space that I can describe with numbers is a naïve children’s story compared with what is meant by the word infinite. Every idea I can talk about in terms that name bits of what we call time must be set aside when I use the word eternal. For many of us in the West, formulas and graphs, for far too long, have obscured the big ideas, even though most scientists freely admit there is so much that they don’t know.

Isaac Newton said, “I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”⁹  

And it cares. 

With beliefs in Science, Universal Awareness, and Decency firmly in place, Wonder arrives. 

This way of living resolutely by Sense and Decency, guidelines whose consequences may take generations to arrive, is exactly what is meant by the word theistic. Belief in things not seen. Or if you like, this state of mind is what is meant by the word faith.