Faith, Hope, Iguanas and Guinness

How is it that faith has become a four letter word in our society today? I mean, it’s clearly made up of five letters, not four…five. It seems that in this day and age, faith is synonymous with foolishness or naiveté.

Our cultural elite look down on faith as if it were something dirty stuck to the bottom of their shoe. Faith is for the superstitious and woefully ignorant. Those who still have faith in God are the subject of scorn in science and academia. Very intelligent people have adopted the idea that if it cannot be directly observed, measured and repeated, it cannot exist. Yet those on the leading edge of science physics are wrestling to explain observable phenomena of superposition.

Superposition is a word used to describe the phenomenon of a single think existing in two places at the same time. Twenty years ago science would have laughed superposition off as nonsense, science fiction. Yet today, the faith of quantum physicists’ in the theory of superposition has paid off. What does superposition have to do with faith? Well, nothing at all…and yet everything.

I will leave the quantum physics research up to the professionals and I certainly won’t insult your intelligence (or display my lack thereof) by trying to dazzle you with an explanation of the theory of everything. The point I am trying to make with regard to superposition is simply that science has been wrong before. The established elites’ attack on faith is another in a long list of miscalculations that will retard the growth of our society in profound ways. Am I saying that I have proof of the existence of God? No…and yes. Can I prove to a devout atheist that God (whatever that may be) exists in a real and profound way? I doubt it. In a strictly philosophical way, I have already proven that God exists. Certainly God exists in the hearts and minds of billions of humans and in a strictly philosophical sense this constitutes proof. It does however stop short of defining what God is or where God exists. And in a biblical sense, there can be no proof of the existence of God because proof would negate the need for faith.

What is faith? Succinctly, faith is a confident belief or trust in the truth or trustworthiness of a person, thing or idea. It is knowing that God exists. Faith stops far short of explaining what God is or what God is capable of or even if God is sentient or merely a collection of positive energy. People of faith must embark on a lifelong quest to define God and we must understand that the quest will yield no solid answers, merely clues if we are astute enough to pick them out. And then there are the ever present hazards we will all eventually run across in our quest, other people. You see my faith might be different from your faith, my understanding of the truth different from yours. Does this make one of us wrong? No…and yes. By understanding what faith is, we start to get a grip on why humans have struggled for thousands of years, why different religions have persecuted each other, why the cultural elite have eschewed faith and all of its human baggage.

Faith is a human condition. It is, in a sense, literally the quest for the Holy Grail. Faith is such a deep and mysterious thing, filled with pitfalls and perils, joys and wonders that it seems to be far too much for some people to wrap their head around. So they give up. They begin to believe that science and modern technology is the only reality. In this way, the smartest and brightest minds are the last ones to understand the equation. Some would say that they have become too smart for their own good. They have placed their faith in science and technology while trying to convince the rest of us that faith is a fool’s game. And what has happened?

Over the last forty years, mankind has witnessed an unprecedented leap in technology, the largest leap in the history of mankind. Man has made discoveries that were once un-dreamed of in medicine, computing, nanotechnology and too many other branches of science to mention. We have begun to scientifically explain such phenomena as near-death experiences, schizophrenia and hypnagogia all of which were considered to be of paranormal origins. The “bright white light” people see in a classic NDE is now explained as a combination of brain chemistry changes and hypoxia, nothing more. Demonic possession is now dismissed as superstition with schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder becoming the cause as believed by the mainstream. Indeed we have grown and evolved past much of the barbaric, superstitious and ignorant treatment that we used to render on other humans. And at the same time we have not. We still imprison addicts despite addiction being labeled a disease by medicine. We still execute murderers who clearly suffer from sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies. As our technology and understanding has advanced, faith has declined.

As faith has declined we see a direct and dramatic corollary rise in crime, drug addiction, obesity and depression. Why is this? Is it God punishing us for not having enough faith? The “smarter” we get, the less we seem to need faith in a God. We place our faith in ourselves and our machines, our money. As we have systematically begun to lose our faith in something bigger than ourselves, we have also begun to lose something else. When there isn’t enough of it we turn to drugs, alcohol or food to comfort ourselves. We turn to things like “ghost hunting” programs to provide what we are starving for. When we lose our faith, we also lose hope.

Humans are funny creatures. Hope is so important to the human being that without it, death comes quicker. Illness sets in easier, depression and anxiety replace a sense of belonging and brotherhood. When we go without hope for too long, humans lose the will to live. When we are low on hope we look for it anywhere we can. We watch “Ghost Hunters and Paranormal State” looking for proof of the existence of life after death…hope for the future. Low on hope we look for patterns that may or may not be there, we find devil faces in pictures of smoke. We look for proof of the existence of other races, we want so badly for that dot of light in the sky to be a UFO that we ignore the facts suggesting that it’s terrestrial in origin. We look for magnetic anomolies and traces of rare alloys in crop circles. And of course, we search the internet or the talk shows or the book stores for stories of people who have been visited by angelic beings or by aliens with messages of hope and love.

We do all of these things because we need hope to keep going. Hope is to our psyche as oxygen is to our body. Without hope, we haven’t long to live or much to live for. When we feel that we are trapped, without hope of escaping our current circumstances we turn to drugs and alcohol to numb the pain. Is it really any wonder why a nation so technologically advances as ours suffers from the highest rates of obesity, addiction to drugs and alcohol, depression and suicide than any other nation on the planet?

Yet we allow the attack on faith to go on unabated and unchecked. We allow people like Richard Dawkins to tell us that “God is a delusion” and that essentially anyone who has faith in something “bigger” is mentally ill. We take it in like Pablum because Dawkins is a Neo-Darwinian zoologist…”Well he MUST be right about God, he’s a British zoologist after all!” Yet we don’t even think for a second that maybe he wrote a controversial book called “The God Delusion” to garner international attention and raise book sales.

The bottom line is that if we want to help our nation to begin to heal, we must not be afraid to stand up for faith. We don’t have to dictate WHAT people have faith in, but it seems pretty well cut and dried that in order to be happy and healthy we must have faith in something. We must have hope that there is more to this life than the mortgage, the SUV and television. We need to learn to find happiness in the journey and not only the destination. Having faith in God, Yahweh, Ganesh, Allah, Jesus, or even in a universal consciousness isn’t something to be ashamed of or hidden. Faith provides hope and hope in something bigger and better keeps us being kind to one another and the circle goes around and around.

Last but not least, if I live according to my faith and it turns out that there is no God waiting to greet me, I’ve at least lived my life by a set of values. I leave this world a little bit better than when I found it and I’m remembered by those who loved me as a faithful and decent person. But if Dawkins is wrong and I am right, my God will still accept him lovingly, but sit him down for a pint of Guinness and a mild scolding before sending him back to be reincarnated (with his current mind and memories) over and over again as an iguana with syphilis for the next thousand years. Here’s to fond wishes…cheers.