Chapter 1 (continued) 

Of course, “Science”, in the modern sense of the word, was not suddenly made possible by one writer’s describing how it should be done. In every era, for centuries, a few rare thinkers had already been using methods pretty much like those Bacon described. They just hadn’t been conscious of the steps in the method. But Bacon’s book on how the material world should be studied gave scholars a new model to use, and to think about and discuss, one much more specific and real-world oriented than any of the earlier models had been.

 

                         St. Peter's Basilica, artistic and scientific marvel of its time

                                 (credit: Patrick Landy, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

Whether Bacon started a revolution or merely articulated what was already taking place in the minds of the creative folk of his time is not important for my case. What matters is that the method Bacon articulated began to get results long before he articulated it. Navigation, architecture, agriculture, medicine, industry, warfare – even the routines of daily life began to undergo radical improvements because of the insights and inventions of Science.

At this point, as Science began to affect people’s material lives, inevitably, its ways began to affect their deeper thinking. For many people who were trying to hang on to a traditional faith, the changes to the old, generally accepted ways of thinking were not welcome. The same still holds true for many today.

                                   

 

                                                               René Descartes 

                        (credit: Frans Hals [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

 

A younger contemporary of Bacon was the man many still see as the leading light of the Renaissance and its new way of thinking, a sickly French parochial-school boy who became a sickly man with a mind like a razor: René Descartes. He spent years maneuvering to get a feel for what the religious leaders of his time would let him say, and only then did he publish his views on how thinking and learning about the material world should be done. (We need to keep in mind that when Rene was 4 years old, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake for spreading views that the Church did not like. Descartes knew all about Bruno’s case. He was understandably wary of offending the authorities of his time.) Descartes offered his readers a way of thinking about thinking that was more nuanced and sensitive to the authorities than was Bacon’s. But Bacon lived in Protestant England; he could get away with being more unorthodox.

Descartes separated Science from Religion and, thus, from moral theory. Under his model, Science can advance our ways of dealing with the physical world, the world of the body, but Religion and its inherent morality must oversee the activities of our minds and souls, which are not in any way physical. For the people of his time, the affairs of souls were seen as being much more important than those of bodies or anything else made of matter. Under Descartes’s model, Religion retains control over our decisions about what we should be doing with our lives, including how we should be using the findings of Science.^3,4

Descartes’s clever maneuver enabled him, in his writing at least, to separate the mind from the body and the realm of faith and morality from the realm of physical experience. It was a move that somewhat ameliorated the religious authorities’ scrutiny of those who studied the physical world and how the things in it worked. But he only delayed the inevitable. Humans have concerns in both “realms”, the concrete/sensory and the abstract/moral, so sooner or later we must deal with the fact that the two realms must interact somehow in order for them both to involve, and matter to, us. Descartes knew full well of this problem in his philosophy, but could find no solution to it.

 

­­­­Chapter 1     Science Gets the Blame

 

 

                          

                                       

                                         Two giants of Western culture

                      Plato (l) and Aristotle (r). From Raphael’s The School of Athens 

                                           (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

I will ease into this project of building a new moral code for us all by first explaining in more detail why I think this project is so urgently required of us.

Science gets the blame – or the credit, depending on your point of view – for having eroded the base out from under the moral systems that our forbears lived by and depended on. For the most part, it fully deserves this blame. Prior to the scientific revolution, people’s lives were brutish and short. Life was hard for nearly all folk and death came soon. Famines, plagues, and wars regularly swept the land. Infant mortality rates are estimated to have been between 30 and 50 percent¹. Life expectancy was under forty years.²

But people expected life to be hard, and, on the upside, they knew where they stood in society, and they knew where they stood – or at least should be trying to stand – in moral terms, in their relationships with other people, from the bottom of society to the top. Kings had their duties, as did nobles, merchants, craftsmen, and serfs – and all their wives – and sins, they believed, had consequences. God was in His heaven; He enforced His rules – harshly but fairly – even if humans couldn’t always see His logic and even if sometimes His justice took decades to arrive, people knew “what goes around comes around.” And if they were good, they knew they would go to a beautiful place after they died. For most folk, all was right with the world.

How sincere was their faith? Men worked for generations on cathedrals, on top of all the other labor they had to do. They believed they’d gain status in heaven if they served God here on Earth. And cathedrals were but one kind of example. Heroic toils on a local lord’s lands were performed generation after generation, and Crusades were fought in faraway lands by people who trusted nigh on to absolutely the belief system and code of behavior that they’d been taught.  

 

                                                   Francis Bacon (Vanderbank) 

                                                 (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

Then came the Renaissance with its scientific revolution. Most historians see the Renaissance as beginning in the mid-1400’s, but some argue that it really began more gradually earlier, about 1100. In any case, we can agree that life was miserable in the West by modern standards from the fall of the Roman Empire (around 453 A.D.) for at least 600 years. The main idea that drove the Renaissance was expressed most clearly by philosopher Francis Bacon. His book, Novum Organum, explained a new way of seeing and studying the material world.

For centuries before the Renaissance, most people who studied the material world had followed the models that had been laid down in the texts of the ancient Greeks or better yet the Bible. In particular, works by Aristotle told how the natural world worked, from Ontology to Biology to Cosmology.

In addition, on most matters, the Greeks were seen as having merely described in more detail what had been created in the first place by God, as the Bible plainly showed. In most fields, original thought was not resented or despised. It was just absent. Thus, our medieval forebears believed the classic Greek works and the Bible, taken together, contained every kind of wisdom that human beings could want to know. A gentleman’s life duty was to pass on to his sons, intact, the beliefs, morés, and values of his forebears.

 

                                        

                                                             Thomas Aquinas

                                 (credit: Fra Bartolomeo) (Wikimedia Commons) 

 

Was there any risk that the ancient Greek texts and the Bible might contradict each other? No. Many experts, including Aquinas, had shown these two sources were compatible. Even if inconsistencies were found, of course, the divine authority of the Bible resolved them. For the folk of the West, for centuries, the Bible was the word of God, to be believed and obeyed implicitly. 

For hundreds of years in the West, in every field of human knowledge, if you wanted to learn about a subject, you consulted the authorities – your priest or the teachers who taught the wisdom of the sages of old. Or, if you had the skill and time, you read the relevant texts. But for most folk, analyzing events in their own lives or analyzing things the authorities told them wasn’t so much worrying as inconceivable. Over 90 percent of the people were illiterate. They took on faith what their authorities told them. Everyone they knew always had. A mind able to memorize and imitate was valued; a questioning, innovative one was not.

The Renaissance changed all that. Bacon lived and worked late in the Renaissance era (1561 – 1626), but he is usually given credit for articulating the new system of thinking that had been spreading across Europe.

Essentially, what Bacon said was that the authorities were just people. They were fallible. They should be questioned. He proposed that people could learn about this world themselves, by watching real events closely and developing their own ideas about how things worked. Then – and here came the crucial step – they could devise ways to test their theories and create increasingly better models that allowed them to conduct more and more reliable, real-world tests, until they could predict, well in advance, “If I do or see A and B, I know that C will result, within a reasonable time frame.” In short, discover nature’s laws.

This proposed change to the method of learning at first seemed a bit silly and very likely to be a complete waste of time. Why spend months or years carefully observing, thinking, and testing, only to discover that Aristotle or the Bible had been right all along? Most medieval scholars assumed that this was all that would happen. Their confidence in the Church authorities and the classics was near to absolute. Scholars might discuss how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (they really did argue over that one), but the major questions had already been given answers that were beyond debate.

 

 

The Science God   (Introduction continued) 

In our time, moral relativism rests mostly on the view of the world called postmodernism. Postmodernism has taken so many forms that it is difficult to define, but it basically says that human thinking cannot get to any solid, reliable conclusions about the real world. All our reasoning depends on our being able to make statements that express our thoughts in ways that at least some of our fellow humans can understand. Statements like “There are seven colors in the rainbow” or “All whales are mammals” or “First degree murderers should be executed by society”. In order to make sense, these statements require clear definitions of the terms that they contain. Unfortunately, terms like “murderer”, “mammal”, and even “color” are so totally shaped by the programming in the upbringing of the person using the terms that communicating ideas between people from different cultures is fraught with pitfalls. In some parts of the world, people are trained from childhood to see fewer colors than in others. They may have a single word for “bluey-green” or “reddish-orange”. It is much more difficult for people from different cultures to communicate clearly about more abstract concepts like “good” or “justice”.

Science is not much help to us in this dilemma because even Physics, the most precise of the sciences, is telling us today that terms like “molecule” or “atom” are really just socially constructed terms that are useful to explain some of the research going on in Physics, but there is much more going on in reality that strays outside of the old, obsolete terms like “atom”. The old terms give us models of reality that have proved useful in the past, and that still prove useful at some levels of resolution, but that are not leading us to better understanding of matter, space, and time in modern research. Terms like “whale” are even more temporary; once whales did not exist and some day they will again cease to exist. Thus, there’s no “Truth” in science. Only temporary “truths” that are discarded when they no longer prove useful. All concepts in all societies can be shown to be culturally constructed and limited in their usefulness to only their own cultural contexts.

The idea of attempting to create a universal moral code is not only absurd for postmodernism, it is even a kind of immoral. Any attempt on my part to build a universal moral code is a violation by me, and the culture which programmed me to want to strive for such a goal, of the other cultures of the world. I have no right or business even attempting such a task.

But postmodernism, as has been shown, is incoherent. If no terms can be clearly defined, then all the writing postmodernists do should be impossible to comprehend or to translate from, for example, French to English. But such translations have been done for nearly all the postmodernists’ essays and books, satisfactorily for the authors and critics. Furthermore, even in their works in their own languages, postmodernists should be unable to say anything meaningful to each other. But they say things that they can debate and criticize to each other all the time. They use the terms and concepts of their own cultures as if others must know what they are talking about. All these attempts to communicate anything with anyone should be hopeless wastes of time if we accept postmodernism in the first place. But the postmodernists themselves apparently don’t see it that way. (See the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on postmodernism, and especially the description near the end of the entry in which Habermas’ critique of this “ism” is described.) ^5.

Furthermore, even in the most controversial branches of science, Anthropology and Sociology, where a lot of postmodernist moral relativists work, strong reasoning has been given to justify doing real, substantive researching and communicating about societies and how they work. The postmodern view in these social science fields, in its extreme forms, argues that social science and even science generally are useless as activities because we can’t find and never will find any general statements about how our world works that state reliable truths about our world or ourselves. They’re all statements of opinion. Always. Some social scientists (e.g. Harris) respond by arguing that science does not pretend to give us irrefutable general rules describing what we see in our world. It only tries to give us generalizations that look likely to be true and that are testable by observation of events in the world. These are not judged by scientists to be perfect statements of truth. They are only ways of organizing and explaining what we are seeing in the real world when we observe it carefully. Science is skeptical about its own models and terms. But it aims to provide useful insights into reality that docile acceptance of the world does not. In a simple example, it is useful to know that smokers are much more likely to get cancer than non-smokers, even though I can’t say which exact smokers will be diagnosed with which forms of cancer when. When you realize that your odds of living long are being reduced with every cigarette you smoke, you become more inclined to quit smoking, even though no one can tell you for certain that you will live longer if you do so. (See Harris’ article in Science, Materialism, and the Study of Culture.) ^6.

We won’t survive if we accept, and live by, the postmodernist view. Not in the world we have now. Our world’s hazards are too great, and they are closing in, becoming more likely to end us with each year that passes. Therefore, a universal moral code is no longer optional; it is mandatory. We must find that universal moral code if we are to survive.

Each of us already has a code that informs and shapes all that each of us does, day in and day out. This is true of people all over the world, even those who say they no longer believe in anything. Codes differ from individual to individual and much more so from culture to culture. But if any one of us truly believed in nothing, that person would sit catatonic and stare. Very few get reduced that.  

We all have codes in our heads that tell us what matters as we move through our day and what we should do about those things in order to get to tomorrow and take up the task again. That is what moral codes do. In other words, those codes must be updated and brought into matching ever more closely, from person to person and culture to culture, if we are to get busy on fixing our problems, the two worst being ecosystem degradation and the spread of nuclear weapons. Moral relativism does not enable that kind of cooperation.  

On the other hand, moral realism says that there must be a logical, evidence-based explanation for our moral codes. A basic tenet of science is that all phenomena in reality can be explained by careful observations of reality and careful formulating and testing of hypotheses that attempt to explain those observations. Then, by research, thought, and discussion, we arrive at models of the phenomena we’re studying that more and more effectively explain them – what the phenomena have done and what they will do. Moral realism sets out to find such an explanation for our moral codes – the mental software that informs and shapes the choices that we make and the things that we do.

In this book, I will work out a solution to our moral dilemma, a solution based not on holy texts or personal epiphanies, but on logical arguments supported by replicable evidence. However, I admit that readers will have to give their full attention to following the arguments I present here. This book aims to fill a tall order; its thesis and the case for that thesis can’t be put in a line or two.

I also begin with a warning. I will try hard to make my case objective, but I know that at times it is also going to become personal. I don’t apologize for this. I will discuss matters that I believe are profoundly important for us all – in all aspects of our lives, from international relations to daily social interactions.

The big question in our era, the Age of Science, is this: How can an informed human being in modern times find balance between Morality and Science? These two domains of knowledge are usually viewed nowadays as being incompatible.  

The answer is that they are so far from incompatible that the pronoun “they” doesn’t fit here. In reality, only a single, giant system of ideas is being discussed. There is a way of understanding all that we know, a way that integrates all our models of the events we experience, including both the scientific ones and the moral ones. Therefore, I reiterate: correctly understood, Science is Religion.

In making my case, I know that I am trying to do what Philosophers call "derive ought from is.” Show there is a scientific base for a moral code (the "ought" part) clearly discernible in the facts of the physical world (the "is" part). In short, we can see what “right” is in the events we see in the real world. And we can figure that code out by looking at the evidence – in science, in history, and in daily life. This claim will then serve, at the very end of the book, as the core of my case for a sort of theism.

                       

                       Human facing raw nature Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog

                      (credit: Caspar David Friedrich, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

We’ll begin with a summary of the background to the problem and why it’s so important for us to solve it. Then, we’ll proceed to a summary of a few of the high points of the history of the West. Then, a discussion of the methods by which all theories and laws are proposed and proven. Then, my model of how our history has worked and some testing of that model. To close the case, some further discussion of the model’s implications. And finally, as a corollary, some speculation on whether this model leads us to a modern concept of God.

 

This book is an attempt to solve the dilemma of our time. I think I’ve untangled this dilemma. I believe that someone has to solve this dilemma or we’re going to destroy ourselves.

 

I have to try.    

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

1. Emrys Westacott, “Moral Relativism,” International Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012.http://www.iep.utm.edu/moral-re/#SH3b.

 

2. Albert Einstein, Leopold Infeld, “The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta,” (Touchstone Books, 1934).

 

3. Benedict, Ruth "Anthropology and the Abnormal," Journal of General Psychology, 10, 1934.

4. Albert Einstein, from a telegram to prominent Americans, May 24, 1946.

5. Postmodernism, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed Feb. 13, 2021.

6. Martin M. Murphy, Maxine L. Margolis; Science, Materialism, and the Study of Culture; University Press of Florida, 1995.

 

 

The Science God (Introduction continued) 

Our era sees itself as the most comprehensively logical era in the history of our species. Science and the methods of science are increasing in influence in our world with every day that passes. We celebrate that fact because we have seen too often in our history that most of the cruelties done by humans to other humans were rooted in false beliefs. When a false belief gets widely accepted in a society, soon some members of that society are deemed by many in the tribe to be in violation of the rules that derive from that false belief. Persecution of these members then quickly becomes “normal”. It’s easy to burn witches once you have proved to your satisfaction that there really are witches all over.

Thus, superstitions nearly always lead to cruelty. Whether or not a woman is a witch can’t be determined by throwing her in deep water to see whether she floats. There are no witches in the first place and never were. Belief in witches created this cruelty. Science gradually freed us from it.

However, at the same time, science has all but destroyed the moral codes we once used to guide us as we made choices, acted, and moved through our lives. The old moral codes haven’t held up well under the pressures of science.

Most people today are aware of this dilemma.

Science has given us many wondrous technologies, but so far it has refused to tell us when, or even whether, we should use these wonders.   

From the old codes of right and wrong, we keep getting directions that we can see are obsolete. For example, executing murderers, an ancient custom in many lands, can easily be shown to be counterproductive. But in the meantime, the new gurus of the West – scientists – when they are asked to define right and wrong, say science can’t comment on morality or, worse yet, some flatly assert that all moral values are only fantasies, about as real as Santa Claus.^1.

As Einstein saw it, “Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be; [but] outside of its domain, value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.” ^2. On the other hand, Ruth Benedict, one of the leading anthropologists of the twentieth century, went further. She asserted that “morality differs in every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits.” ^3.

Science has given us the capacity to do harm on a planetary scale. Because of that, we need guidance; we need moral guidelines and not just piecemeal ones. We need a comprehensive moral system that can tell us, as we choose among the myriads of actions that we could do, which ones we should do. 

Thus, the finding of a new moral code is desperately urgent in our time. 

Science is the method for approaching truth that is trusted the most in these times. Our records tell us that in the past,  we've had plenty of mystics, texts, and personal epiphanies, but they have too often been at odds with each other, and their practical results often have proved inconsistent. They look unreliable. So, the world's people are more and more looking to science and scientists to do all sorts of tasks, among them to create a moral code for us all to live by. However, in response to this call, science has refused to even attempt to say anything useful about what makes "right" right or "wrong" wrong. 

 

                                   (Kentaro IEMOTO) (via Wikimedia Commons) 

And with no comprehensive moral code to guide us, where are we by trial and error going to end up? Environmental scientists describe for us a nightmare planet with such toxic air, water, and soil that human life is no longer viable on this planet, except, perhaps, in a few places under plexiglass domes.

The physicist’s nightmare is even more horrifying. Einstein said our gaining control of nuclear energy set us drifting toward “unparalleled catastrophe.” ^4.

 

                   Hiroshima after atomic bombing  (credit: Wikipedia Commons)

 

We have a reasonable chance of surviving the hazards that we’ve created if and only if we can work out a new moral code that we can all agree to live by. Not a moral code that prescribes every citizen’s behavior in every detail. That would be unrealistic. But one that provides guidelines that motivate us all, regardless of culture, to treat each other with respect and to let others live their way as long as it is not directly harming ours. A code by which individuals and groups right up to the size of whole nations can resolve disputes.  A set of principles that will enable a global rule of law. A few empires of the past, containing many nations inside wide borders, have aimed for, and for long stretches of time, even achieved, societies close to this ideal. In our time, we must do better still.

This book attempts to solve the dilemma of our time, the dilemma that has left us not so much struggling to live up to our moral values, as wondering what those values are, and whether such things as moral values are even relevant in our world today. Do right and wrong even really exist?

Moral relativism is the position in Philosophy that says there is no basis in the factual, material world for any moral “values”. Right and wrong are words that may make sense in a particular society at a particular time, but they are only tastes that most of the people in that society agree on for the time being. They change from era to era and place to place. In short, the only honest thing one can say about morality, according to moral relativists, is: "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."

 

 

The Science God: Thinking, Values, and Faith

         

 

 

      by Dwight Wendell

 

Introduction

In this book, the main thing I’ll try to do is reason my way to a moral code that is grounded in observations of the physical world. Only after that task is done will I talk about how grasping that code then leads us to further conclude that there is, likely, a consciousness present in the physical world. A being like what humans have long called “God”.  

I claim it is reasonable for us to say that a “sort of God” does exist. The term “sort of God” describes a personal concept of a deity, which is what I believe every person’s idea of God must be if they are to truly hold such a concept at all. Each person’s idea of God has to shape her or his daily actions, or that idea has no real meaning in that person’s life. So it has to be personal. My aim is to make that personal, pragmatic, rational idea of God reachable for every reader.   

I know that a lot of modern readers will be tempted to stop reading this book right here. I’m asking them to hang in there and give it a chance. In return, I will save the “God conclusion” till the very end. We’ll focus first on making the case for a universal moral code, a code of right and wrong. God can wait a bit.

 

 

                       

                                        Boat-building Near Flatford Mill 1815 

(human thought engaging physical reality) (Constable; Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

 

            Liberty Leading The People (Human thought engaging human reality)

                            (credit: Eugène Delacroix, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

For those readers who feel a writer’s personal background must be understood if readers are to understand his thinking, I will say that I have been studying this problem of what moral means – what makes “right” right – for more than 50 years. From the time I was a boy, through a long career teaching in the British Columbia schools, eight years of post-secondary study, three degrees (two undergraduate, one graduate), time in agriculture, six rock bands, and small business, time spent raising three kids, and a lot of life. However, in my view, all these experiences neither add to, nor detract from, my case. The case must stand on its own. Thus, but for the odd anecdote used to illustrate a point, there will be no more about me.

It is also worth noting here that the ideas, historical records, perspectives, and texts I discuss in this book are mainly those of a man who was born into, and moulded by, Western culture. I know that plenty of other effective ways of handling the world – in other words, other ways of life – are available today. I will also say from the outset that I know that in every era in history, nations rise to dominance over their neighbors usually for only a few generations. Then, the dominant one gets passed by a competitor, almost always by war.

But one of this book’s goals is to show that a moral code which is true in all cultures exists and is available to all humans via their capacity to reason. A case built on reasoning and evidence can lead us to a moral code that is valid in all cultures. This code, once it is understood by many informed, resolute people, could then lead us to a way out of our war habit. 

I’ll say more on the possibilities of our species’ finding a way to evolve without war as we go along. For now, I’ll be content to say that this dream is not far-fetched or ridiculous. In my lifetime, I saw the USSR go from being a monolithic super-power to a footnote in history. Without a world war. I sometimes still can’t quite believe it. Furthermore, there have been civilizations in the past in which large areas and populations existed under one umbrella of law. Large scale order and stability are possible. The trick for us will be to learn to bring about that order without war. And it will begin from patient, diligent, focused efforts by a determined few who are guided by a moral model that works.

I will also say to my doubters at the outset: if you’re cynical about our species’ ability to live by both reason and love, then you haven’t contemplated the alternatives: ignorance and hostility. In this century, these could lead to our asphyxiating in an atmosphere too toxic to breathe. Or worse. Whole nations scorched in nuclear wars. Let those images renew your resolve.

We can do this. If we, the human race, can reason our way to an understanding of ourselves as we are, one that explains the facts of our history, we can then lay out a path to that world that we presently only dream of. People working from a valid model of human societies could still save our species from itself.

It’s true that I am a son of the West. I tend to think and speak using the ideas and terms that I learned in my country and its schools. However, I believe the conclusions I draw in this book are universal. They can be extracted by logic from observations of the physical, biological, and human aspects of reality as it is revealed in the historical records and daily life experiences of all nations.

The system of ideas that I will construct for readers of this book will then lead logically to a modern theism. In short, Faith and Reason aren’t enemies. They shouldn’t even be called friends. They’re different aspects of the same thing.

The version of “Reason” I will use in this book will be the inductive one called “science”. I will show that science and its way of thinking support a model of cultural evolution on which we can build a universal moral code, one which, with a few other models from science added, can lead us to belief in a deity.

 

We can use the scientific method, apply it to evidence, and reason our way, via a small number of steps, to belief in good and in God. That is the point of this book.