Have Faith

As much as it (occasionally) ticks me off, I have to accept that the entire library of human knowledge and experience can't be held by one person. In other words, if I'm ever gonna have a chance at, you know, figuring it all out, I'm gonna have to borrow. A lot. What I write isn't completely my own; it's an amalgam of anything and everything I've read, heard, thought, or otherwise stumbled across.

What if we're wrong and the atheists are right? What if none of this is real? What if when we die nothing happens? I'd always looked at death as the final moment of truth. When I die, that's when I'd know for sure that Catholicism was "real," because my soul would leave my body and go to Purgatory and then heaven. At that point I considered myself to be an agnostic (Catholic) theist. But before even then, I had considered the whole atheist agnostic theist self descriptors to be on a linear scale. Atheism = don't believe in gods, agnosticism = not sure either way, and theism = believe in god. But then I found this chart. 

It separates belief and knowledge into two dimensions instead of keeping them in one. That made a whole lot more sense to me, especially because at that point I had pretty much accepted it's impossible to scientifically prove that God exists. So that's where I was. I believed but didn't know. 

I'm ditching the chronological narration at this point because it makes what I'm trying to say even more difficult. 

That chart needs to be scrapped, done away with, destroyed, with fire preferably. Lots of fire. It trivializes belief by creating a false separation between it and reason. The words say that they're axes of knowledge and belief, but they implicate that they're axes of rationality and irrationality. And this right here is the big problem in the dialogue between atheism and religion. The misconception that our set of beliefs, our faith, is irrational. From here is where all the nasty criticisms of religion stem. That faith is for the stupid and unenlightened. That to have faith is to throw reason out the window and shut your eyes to the world around you. That it’s a Bronze age understanding of life that has no place in the modern world. We don’t need faith anymore because we have science.

I freaking love science, the whole STEM shebang really. Science, despite its difficulty, despite its seeming convolutedness (cough cough AP Physics B), is beautiful. Science allows us to interact with the world on new and profound levels. We can create food more efficiently, communicate at the speed of light, control disease and make life better. Theoretical science goes even farther, describing phenomena from the micro to macroscopic with incredible precision and completeness, precision and completeness that some interpret as enough to replace God.

If we believed in a God who was just an explanation for things we couldn’t explain, then I’m fairly certain that Christianity would have disappeared just like all the other “gods of the gaps,” you know, Zeus, Thor, Ra, the works. The reason science can never replace God is because science itself is incredibly limited. Science only has one domain in which it can operate, the world of empiricism, the world of the senses. The idea behind the scientific paradigm is that it provides a coherent explanation for all observed phenomena and provides a framework for looking for new problems to solve and then solving them. Sciences is finite but we crave the infinite. That’s why science can never provide the same satisfaction that religion does. It’s good but not good enough. Life is too much trouble, too full strangeness and beauty to arrive at the end and have empirical science as the best explanation. 

You are a subject, an individual, unique perspective of the cosmos, experiencing life in a way that only you will ever know and that no one else will ever be able to replicate, because to do so would mean that they were you. In fact, because it can’t be replicated, how am I supposed to know that you are having the same deep and intensely personal experience I am having? Sure, I can learn things about you on my own, what you look like, where you go to school or work, who your friends are. Yet compile all those together and at the very most, you’re nothing but a cardboard cutout compared to the three dimensional, fully real person that I know myself to be. That is, until we begin to communicate and interact, and suddenly, through your words and actions, a common thread appears between us. I begin to see that you, like me, have desires that drive you, fears that haunt you, experiences that shape you and ideas that define you. Through what you revealed to me, I can come to know that you are also a subject, like me. But these revelations were made by you, not me, I did not come to them on my own. If I am to replace cardboard you with the three dimensional you, I have to trust you and these revelations you made. 

Just as I can use reason to learn about you, I can use reason to learn about God. I can determine that God exists, that God is good, and that God created the universe (I wanna say this as un-hypocritically as possible, but I’d rather not get into the details of these claims - in the interest of not having to preface what I want to say with a few books). But the God we believe in,  the God I believe in, is more than this, just like you are more than your looks and where you go to school. And that is because God, in a way that is similar (and at the same time, as far removed as possible) to the way you reveal yourself to me, has revealed Himself to us. And THAT is where faith, actual faith comes in, as the free assent to the whole truth that a God has revealed  (CCC 150). The Unmoved Mover, the Almighty, the great I AM has revealed itself to be more than an it, as a Father who knew us before we existed (Jer 1:5), who called us by name claimed us as belonging to Him (Is 43:1), who so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life (Jn 3:16).

Exposed to this incredible Truth by the One who can neither deceive nor be deceived, it seems we have no choice but to respond with an act if faith, not because we are being forced, but because anything less than a full commitment if mind, heart, and soul would be inadequate and irrational. Faith opens up to us a new life, a life infused with the love of Love Himself, and thus faith becomes more than a leap into the darkness. It becomes a light. A light shining out of the past from the memory of the perfect life of the Word made flesh. A perfect life that ended with the perfect sacrifice, throwing open the doors of death so that faith not only shines out of the past but radiates from the future as the memory of the promise of eternal life. 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

- John 1:1-5