In what do you place your faith?
Merriam Webster’s defines faith as a noun - a thing - trust; a firm belief in something for which there is no proof. Or a verb - an action - to believe or to trust - especially in a system of loyalty to religious beliefs. But it is not any old verb. It is a transitive verb, which means faith must have an object. In other words, you must have faith in some literal thing. So let me ask my question again…
In what do you place your trust? - Your firm belief for which there is no proof? What is the object of your faith? Where do you place your trust? What do you firmly believe even though there is no empirical/verifiable evidence?
Webster's defines faith with a religious connotation; however, an atheist, by definition, believes in no god. I’ve never met an atheist who didn’t place his/her faith somewhere in something - a spouse, a child, a job, a project, a social justice cause...the list is endless. I believe faith permeates our DNA. As humans, we cannot control our insatiable need to find fulfilling faith somewhere, even if we elevate our own inner self as the object of our trust and belief.
The key word to that last statement is fulfilling. How many people spend a lifetime misplacing their precious faith, only to be rewarded with heartache, bankruptcy, addiction... The first and foremost faith question that must be resolved before anyone can pursue a life of fulfilling faith must be to finally once and for all put to bed any lingering personal doubts about God, his existence, and his worthiness of our faith.
To help anyone reading this who may be a little like me, when I typed the male pronoun his in reference to God in the previous paragraph, I twinged a tiny bit. Assigning God a gender pronoun bothers me. (Sorry daddy - I went there) Pronouns are limiting, and a human/English language construct. But since I am American, and I am writing in English, I will do the best I can and stick to the gendered pronouns I was taught in which to reference my Lord, simply noting my objections here.
You see - questions and irritations and little pebbles of sand in my shoe have plagued me all my life. I would love to be a person so filled with unquestioning faith that I awake with effervescent worship each and every morning and sing with the birds God’s praises. This, however, is not my character. I ask a lot of questions. I quiver with doubt and struggle with why my journey seems to be filled with large boulders and massive curve balls. How many times have I cried out, I do believe; help my unbelief! Mark 9:24 (CSB)
I am beginning this faith lesson journey for anyone who has struggled with a difficult question such as:
Why is everyone so excited about getting to heaven? I want to stay right here on earth…
God must not be too good because how could he ever allow a child to be abused and unloved…
I’m a good person, and I live a good life. I’m doing just fine. Why do I need God…
The Bible is too old and irrelevant for modern life…
I could keep going, but you get the picture. Full disclosure and honesty time. I’ve asked all of these questions at some point in the last thirty years. Thankfully, I committed my life to Jesus Christ many many years ago, and he never untethered me during all my questioning and doubting. Now, I am compelled to share my journey of faith beginning with Step 1.
Does God Exist?
The December 26, 2013 edition of Psychology Today published an article written by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic Ph.D titled, Why Are Religious People (Generally) Less Intelligent?
Understanding the negative relationship between IQ and religiosity. If you live in the Bible belt, this title may shock you, but if you’ve spent any time traveling, you are acutely aware that this attitude pervades many regions of our nation, particularly our larger urban centers. Following are Chamorro-Premuzic’s three main points:
1. Intelligent people are generally more analytical and data-driven, and formal religions are the antithesis:
2. Intelligent people are less likely to conform, and, in most societies, religiosity is closer to the norm than atheism is.
3. Humans will always crave meaning. Religion – unlike science and logical reasoning – provides them with a comprehensive framework or system to make meaningful interpretations of the world.
For a mainstream science publication to accept a peer reviewed article this scathing toward a person of a religious worldview, this attitude did not percolate overnight. The explanation is long and detailed and can be found recorded much more effectively than I will relate here in Nancy Pearcey's Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity. I will; however, try to briefly summarize some of Pearcey’s main points on how the American mainstream came to view those who hold strong religious beliefs as less intelligent than those who place their faith in science.
All of us are growing up in a time period referred to as Post–Modernism. That simply means that all of our educational instruction has taken place since the Industrial Revolution. Charles Darwin published his Theory of Evolution in 1859. So understand – while machines were being invented, Darwin was writing simultaneously. All of the wondrous new changes making life easier came about as Darwin wrote.
Then came the idea of Pragmatism: life evolved so the mind must evolve too. Proof of this surrounded everyone. The mind must be evolving because now a machine could pick the seeds out of cotton instead of having to do the impossible task by hand. A modern analogy would be googling in five seconds when the cotton gin was invented, how it worked, and why it was so important what 25 years ago would have taken hours researching in a physical library!
Here’s the issue that has come about in the decades that followed Darwin. The Theory of Evolution simultaneously began to represent modern science. With all our new machines and new knowledge, science became reality- tangible, provable explanations of our surrounding world. Proof existed all around that the human mind evolved just like I no longer need to own a physical set of encyclopedias. Faith became something completely and totally separate because faith could not be proven; therefore, faith evolved as inferior to science.
There’s only one tiny problem, and I call it ….
The heart of the MATTER!
At the end of the day, a person can place all the faith he/she has in science, but the question cannot be answered, where did the matter come from? There are a lot of theories about quarks, and anti-matter, and dark matter (google CERN). But at the end of the day, what is a theory?
Theory - a proposed explanation subject to experimentation, in contrast to well-established fact, and still subject to testing.
Now that good old definition of a theory came from my paper Merriam Webster's circa 1980 located in the bookcase next to my paper encyclopedias. The new online definition goes a little easier on the scientist and defines a theory as a well-substantiated explanation of the natural world. I can only assume people of lower IQ were not supposed to notice the burden of proof on a theory somehow magically lowered a smidge in the last forty years. (I would say pardon my sarcasm if I truly meant it.)
So at the end of the day, no matter your IQ everyone has to decide if he/she believes God created the matter of the universe or if science simply hasn’t figured out yet the source of the matter. Either way a person places faith in something that ultimately has no proof, because something generated matter - the substance of all life - be it a quark or a god - or maybe God is quark?
More on that in Lesson 2
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