Chapter 1             Part C

                                   

         In 1543, Copernicus proposed a model of our universe in which the Earth was not at the center, while the rest of the heavenly bodies like the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars revolved around it. In his model, the sun was at the center of our solar system, and the Earth was just one more planet – along with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – revolving around the sun. His idea was, supposedly, only proposed for discussion purposes - an engaging, entertaining mental exercise, nothing more - so he was not attacked by the religious leaders of his time. But in the 1600’s, Galileo and, later, Newton took up and refined the Copernican model. They discovered a set of natural laws that described both events in the cosmos and events on the earth in subtle mathematical formulae that gave precise predictions about phenomena like falling objects, fired cannonballs, eclipses, comets, and planetary orbits – phenomena that had previously been given only inaccurate, conceptually messy, ad hoc explanations. 

         Today, Galileo and Newton’s picture of the solar system and how it works seems intuitive and obvious to most people. But Galileo in his time was seen by religious leaders as a demon. The Bible said God had made man as His special darling creation. The Earth had been created, along with all of its life forms, as a special home for us. The Earth had to be the center of the universe. Ptolemy also had said so, over a thousand years before, and his model of the cosmos fit neatly together with the teachings of the Church. Besides, the sun, the moon and the stars moved across the sky from east to west. These things would not be if the Earth were not the center. What fool could question these obvious truths?

         Galileo did and almost paid with his life. He was forced to recant under the threat of horrible torture. Galileo had begun his higher education studying medicine. He knew what they could make him say once they began to apply their racks and thumbscrews. With his telescope to back him up, he tried very hard to persuade the pope and his agents that the evidence proved the Copernican model was correct. They weren’t interested. In fact, they got angrier. So he signed where they told him to sign. But according to one version of his story, as he left the building, he pointed up at the moon and said: “It still moves.”

         That statement deeply reveals the way of thinking on which it is predicated. It could stand as a statement of the fundamental belief of Science. Material reality is what it is. Our role is to learn about it by observing it, formulating theories about it, and doing experiments to test those theories. We can’t impose our views on reality. If one of our theories goes against what has long been society’s received wisdom on any subject, this contradiction, for scientists, means nothing. What matters is whether it fits the evidence.

         Aristotle and the authors of the Bible and even last year’s scientific theories have no more of a monopoly on truth than any one of us. Most crucially, we can always go back to physical reality and test again. Let reality be the arbiter. That is the method and belief system that scientists are committed to. (The Catholic Church pardoned Galileo in 1992, nearly 360 years after his “offense”. The Copernican model of the solar system, the one that Galileo championed, has been generally accepted as the correct model since about 1700.)  

Chapter 1.                      Part B 

            Of course, Science, in the modern sense of the word, was not suddenly made possible by one writer’s pronouncing how it could and should work. A few rare thinkers had already been using methods pretty much like what Bacon was describing, arguably, for centuries. They simply hadn’t been conscious of the steps in the method. However, Bacon’s book on how the real world could and should be studied did give the Medieval scholars, who lived mainly in their books, a new model to think about and discuss, one that was much more specific and material-world oriented than any of its predecessors had been. 

                          St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, architectural marvel of the Renaissance 

 
            But whether Bacon started a revolution or merely articulated what was already taking place in the minds of the curious and creative men of his time is not important for my case. What matters is that the method to which Bacon gave voice began, more and more, to get useful results. Navigation, architecture, agriculture, medicine, industry, law, warfare, even the routines of daily life began to be more and more frequently improved by the discoveries and inventions of Science.

         At this point, as Science began to affect people’s material lives, it inevitably began to affect their deeper ways of thinking. For many people, then and now, who were, or still are, trying to hang on to a traditional style of faith, some of the large-scale changes to the generally held ways of thinking that “everyone” had subscribed to for so long were not happy changes.

                                                                                                                                           Descartes 

         A younger contemporary of Bacon was the man whom many still see as the leading light of the Renaissance and its new way thinking, the sickly French parochial-school boy who became a sickly man with a mind like a razor: Rene 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 should be done. 

         He separated Science from religion and morality. Under his model, Science can advance our ways of dealing with the physical world of the body, but religion, and the morality it implies, must still oversee the activities of our minds and souls. For the people of his time, the affairs of souls were seen as being much more important than those of our bodies or any other things made out of matter. Under his model, religion retains primary 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 devised a very clever maneuver 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. Sooner or later, human beings were going to have to deal with the logical conclusion that the two realms had to interact somehow in order for them both to involve, and make sense to, beings like us, who have issues and concerns in both realms, the sensory and the abstract.

         Describing all the ways in which Science sometimes eroded, sometimes blasted, the traditional beliefs of the majority of people would fill a whole encyclopedia. We can be content with looking closely at just three such ways. I chose these three because I believe they are paradigmatic, as did Freud. (5.)

Chapter 1         Science Gets The Blame                  Part A 

                      

                       Plato (l.) and Aristotle (r.) (from Raphael's 'The School of Athens')   

            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 forefathers lived by and depended on. For the most part, it fully deserves this blame. Prior to the scientific revolution, people were pretty miserable in terms of their physical lives. Life was hard for nearly all folk and death came soon. Famines, plagues, and wars periodically swept the land. Infant mortality rates are estimated to have been 30% to 50% (1.), and life expectancy was under forty years. (2.) 

            But people 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 just as noblemen, serfs, and craftsmen did, and all of their wives did, and sins 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 His justice sometimes took generations to arrive. People knew "what goes around comes around". For most folk, all was right with the world.

            

                                   

                                                                  Francis Bacon

         What the scientific revolution began from was basically a new method for studying the physical world, a method stated most articulately by Renaissance philosopher, Francis Bacon. For centuries before the Renaissance, people who had studied the material world had nearly all followed the models of reality that had been laid down in the texts of the ancient Greeks, or even better, in the Bible. Works by Aristotle, in particular, described how the natural world worked in almost every one of its aspects, from atomic theory to biology to cosmology.

            Of course, 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 simply absent. Thus, the classic Greek works and the Bible, when taken together, were believed to contain every kind of wisdom that nearly all of our forebears for over a thousand years (from ancient Roman times to the Renaissance) could want to know. A true gentleman’s life duty was to pass on, intact, to his sons, the beliefs, morés, and values of his ancestors.

                                                           

                                                                  Thomas Aquinas

                                                       
            Was there any danger that the ancient Greek texts and the Bible might irreconcilably contradict one another? No. Several experts, including Aquinas, had shown that these two sources were compatible with each other. Even if inconsistencies had been found, of course, the divine authority of the Bible would have "saved the day". For most of the folk of the West, for centuries, the Bible was the word of God, absolute and final.

                
            In every field, if you wanted to learn about a subject, you consulted the authorities – your priest or the teachers of the classic works. For most folk, analyzing the things that the authorities told them wasn’t so much worrying as inconceivable. Over ninety percent of the people were illiterate. They took on faith what the authorities told them because everyone they knew always had. A mind capable of memorization and imitation was valued; a questioning, innovative one was not.

               
            The Renaissance changed all of that. Bacon came late in the Renaissance era, but he is usually given credit for being the one who articulated the new system of thinking that had been sweeping over Europe for more than a hundred years by the time that he came on the scene.

            What Bacon said, essentially, was that he didn’t think the authorities were infallible. In fact, he proposed that people could learn about this world on their own, by watching the real world very closely and getting good ideas about how it worked. Then – and here came the crucial step – they could devise ways to test their models and theories of reality and keep coming up with better and better models that let them do more and more reliable, material-world tests, until they could predict precisely, in advance, something like: “If I do or see A and B, I know that C will result, within a reasonable time frame.”

            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? The majority of 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.  

          How could a rational human being in the modern era feel full, confident allegiance to both of these ways of viewing this world and our place in it - the theistic and the scientific? These two ways that are generally considered by people today to be incompatible? The answer is that they are so far from incompatible that there should be no “they” pronoun involved here. There is a way of understanding and reconciling all that we know, a way that integrates it all, from our observations of events around us, to the memories that are stored in our brains, to all the concepts that we use as we strive to understand what we see and recall, and then to design effective responses to life. In short, when correctly understood, science is religion.  

       

          This book is about what I call “reasoned faith”: a set of ideas that connects Science to morality. I have worked out a system that integrates all that we know, and that is justified, as Science is, by reasoning and evidence alone. This system is consistent with my deepest instincts, with all the conceptual models used in Science, and with all of the sense data and memories of sense data that lie between these poles of instinct and reason.

In this book, I will construct an argument in everyday language which proves that the current belief about the incompatibility of Science and Faith is wrong. My hope is that all readers who have struggled, and are still struggling, with this dilemma, the biggest dilemma of our time, and even those who claim to have committed themselves to one side of the debate or the other, and to have stopped thinking about the matter, will find resolution at the end of this book. 

I believe that all decisions to stop thinking about this dilemma are deluded and unsustainable. None of the jingoists, atheist or theist, nor the discouraged ones in the middle - ever truly stop thinking about the dilemma. Instead they live in anxiety and they keep returning to it – via the pathways of daily human experience – again and again. I want to give them all a way to solve it, not permanently but repeatedly, and with growing confidence in a comprehensive system of thought that enables them to do that work.

In philosophical terms, my main thesis can be characterized as “deriving ought from is”, which means I will prove that there is a code of right and wrong embedded in the processes of the real world, and that we can figure that code out just from looking at the evidence in Science, in History, and in our daily lives. Then I will show that once we see that there is such a code – and we see what that code is telling us about how a human life could and should be lived – we are gradually and inescapably led on to the further conclusion that there is a God in this universe. A “sort of a God”, if you like. I am content with the term “sort of a God”. The more unique and personal the view of God that each of my readers arrives at by time he or she has finished reading this book, the happier I'll be. That concept has to be unique and personal or it's nothing at all. 

I have been mulling over this problem for more than fifty years, from the time that I was a child, through a long career teaching in the public school system, eight years of formal post-secondary study, three degrees (two undergraduate, one graduate), stints in agriculture, six rock bands, and business, time spent raising three kids, and a lot of life. However, all these facts together, I feel, neither add to, nor detract from, my case. They aren’t relevant. The case must stand on its own.

It is also worth noting here that the ideas, historical records, texts, and perspectives that I discuss in this book are mostly those of a man who was born into, and molded by, a Western culture. There are plenty of other usable perspectives around in the world today.  

But I am a son of the West. I can only speak with at least some useful degree of conviction on the ideas and historical experiences that I learned about in my country and its schools. However, this is also a good place in which to say that I believe the conclusions that I draw in this book are universal; they can be extracted by logic from the historical records and daily life circumstances of any nation.     

This book is an attempt to solve the dilemma of our time. I think I've untangled that dilemma. My hope is that those who stay with this book will find that the reward in the end – a thinking system that enables them to organize all their ideas, professional, moral, and personal, into one clear, consistent, coherent whole – will more than compensate them for the effort that they have invested in reading right to the end.

               

        I have to try. 

                

Notes    

1. Westacott,Emrys; “Moral Relativism”;http://www.iep.utm.edu/moral-  

  re/#SH3b; 2012.

2. Carson, Rachel: “Silent Spring”; Mariner Books; 2002.

3. Suzuki, David; “The Sacred Balance”; Greystone Books; 1997.

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

   1946.  

5. Hume, David; "A Treatise of Human Nature" 2.3.3.4; first published 1739. 

One way to ease into the topic of moral realism and its implications is to explain how I came to be obsessed with it.

When I was in grade nine, I was lucky enough to have a really fine teacher for Science. He liked Science, and he liked kids, and he liked getting the two together, which is all a good teacher ever really has to do. He impressed the thinking technique called “the scientific method” very deeply into my mind. You get an idea about, or you imagine a model of, how some part of the world around you works – how event A connects to event B. You think of a practical, real-world way to test the idea. You set up the apparatus that you need, then you do the test. All the while, you keep careful records of what you observe. 

Then, you analyze the data to see whether there are patterns in them, patterns that tend to support this theory or model of yours. You then get more ideas for subtler theories or more decisive tests, and you keep on researching. Sometimes you find a way to use your new insights about how the universe works to create technologies that enable humans to live with a little more health and a little less pain. Once in a while, you find a way to formulate one of the basic laws of this universe.   

       

      I could see that by using this method, sharing their findings, and doing more and more research, scientists had expanded human knowledge, created so many helpful technologies, and cured diseases, in a steady march of progress. They had brought most of my way of life to its current state, one that was far safer, more comfortable, and more interesting than that known to any of my ancestors. I was filled with a rush of emotion as I realized not only what had been accomplished, but what might be still to come. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that we are destined for the stars.

               

        On the other hand, between the ages of six and eleven I had spent most of my Sunday mornings attending Sunday school at St. Stephen’s United Church. I had felt similar profound emotions when I had learned about the Being who had made this universe and who loved everything in it. My six-year-old heart ached when I thought that human beings had lost their relationship with God. The evidence which showed that they had was easy to see for myself. Humans are not very moral or even logical most of the time. Even as a boy, I could see this truth in events all about me, from the schoolyard to the Cold War.

But I was uplifted when I was told of one man who had explained to human beings how they might strike a new deal: if they could just learn to truly love one another – to follow his example – then they could regain their relationships with each other and then, finally, their relationship with God. The key thing to see was that following Jesus’ way was what mattered, not whether he really was some kind of "divine" being, and not whether the people I met belonged to one particular group or sect. Love each other. Really love each other. Then peace, progress, and prosperity will all come. All of this was six-year-old naïve, I admit. But it seemed then, and it seems to me now, more profound than the beliefs of many adults because it was clear, heartfelt, and unabashed. 

                              photo of witnesses seeing the miracle at Fatima (Portugal, 1917)   

        Even as a child, I did not believe in "miracles", i.e. events that lie beyond all rational explanation. Still don't. Nor do I believe in the divinity of Jesus. Or, to be exact, I thought then and think now, he had a spark of the divine in him, but so do all living things. He just had a lot more than most of us. But he differed from us in degree, not in kind. And miracles? They turn out to have rational explanations in the end. 

          I knew even as a child that the important thing to understand was what the new deal that Jesus offered humanity represented. The principles being represented in the stories were what mattered, and they seemed to me absolutely bang on. Solve for “x” and a clear path to survival - that is, to humanity’s living in both decency and sense - becomes visible before us. In other words, once a critical mass of humans on this planet share a model of reality that shows them how to fit into the natural world and to get long-term, survival-oriented results there, then, by a few more millions in each generation, humanity will choose to join the walk along that path. Decency and sense will prove fitter than cruelty and folly. Rational persuasion will prevail.

               

        My faith was not destroyed when I gained an understanding of the scientific method. Nor was my passion for Science destroyed by my spiritual beliefs. The two clashed at times, my faith wavered for a while, but as a man, I gradually worked out a way to integrate the two and then to synthesize them into a new belief system, a single, unified, coherent one, whose power to guide, nourish, and inspire is greater than any power residing in science alone or religion alone could ever be.

               

          The question in this Age of Science is “How?”

                                           The Science God:

                                    Theism By Reason Alone

 

 

 

 

 

 

             by Dwight Wendell

Preface

          Faith and Reason are not enemies. They can’t really even be called friends. They are different aspects of the same thing. Science is simply the form that Religion has taken in the modern world and Science has both Faith and Reason embedded in it. That is the message of this book. But I know that I am going to have to make my case well if I am to get my readers to see that what I am asserting is so.

          We live in an age that we like to think of as an age of reason par excellence. We assume Science and the methods of Science are increasing in influence in our world with every day that passes, and we celebrate that fact because we have seen over and over that the majority of the cruel and stupid abuses of the past can be traced directly to the unscientific superstitions of the societies in which they occurred.

          But at the same time, the moral codes that we need simply to move through our daily lives, from the personal level to the global, have suffered serious damage in the last four centuries, largely because these moral codes haven’t held up under the scrutiny of this same Science. The majority of citizens know this as well. We are bolstered and encouraged by the material progress Science has brought us, but we are also frightened by the amorality of its worldview. 

           From the old codes of right and wrong, we keep getting directions that we can see are obsolete. Executing murderers, for example, is totally counter-productive. In the meantime, however, the new gurus of Western society, namely the scientists, when they are questioned directly on what right and wrong are, say that Science cannot comment on morality or, worse yet, they flatly assert that all moral values are no more than fantasy concoctions, about as empirically real as Santa Claus. (1.)  

          Science has given us the capacity to do harm on a planetary scale. Therefore, we need guidance; we need answers and not just piecemeal ones. We need a general moral system that can tell us which of our actions are at least tending toward right and which are not. We can’t go on doing things like building nuclear weapons and polluting our planet and not, sooner or later, have to face consequences. Environmentalists from Rachel Carson to David Suzuki have said we have to stop the madness (2., 3.).

 

     

          The nuclear physicists’ nightmare is even more horrifying, so much so that Einstein himself said that the unleashing of the power of the atom had set us drifting toward “unparalleled catastrophe” (4.).

          We have a reasonable chance of surviving on into the future if and only if we can work out a new moral code that we can all agree to live by. Every other path into the future is shadowed by a high probability of disaster. That is the dark side of the power that Science has given us.     

This book is an attempt to solve the dilemma of our time, the moral dilemma that has left us not so much struggling to live up to our ideals as wondering what those ideals are, and whether such things as ideals are even relevant in our world today. In this book, I will work out a solution to that dilemma, a solution based not on “holy texts” or personal epiphanies, but on reason backed by replicable evidence. However, I admit that readers are going to have to give their full attention to following the arguments that I present here. My arguments aim to fill a very tall order; they can’t be explained in a line or two.

I will try very hard to make my overall case a rigorously logical one, but I know that it is also very much a personal one. Saying so is an admission for which I don’t apologize. I am going to discuss matters that I believe are profoundly important for us all. My case is both logical and anecdotal, and my tone has to be both rational and personal. As Hume said, feelings drive thoughts and actions, not vice-versa.(5.)