Life / Religion / Philosophy / Science / Polictics

Tag: proof

  • Where Is My Faith?

    Faith is a difficult thing.  It shouldn’t be, but it is.  Faith permeates our lives in every way imaginable and yet we struggle with it where it matters most.

    Simply put, Faith is a belief that is held that is not based on a proof.  We utilize faith in our lives each and every day in all realms of our existence.

    We are basically beings of three parts.  In the simplest description we are physical beings.  We have a body that has needs and interacts with the physical world.  We are also emotional, intellectual, and social beings.  We have a soul.  We experience joy, and sorrow.  And we are spiritual beings.  We are individuals, unique unto ourselves.  We are all one-of-a-kind instantiations of the human kind and we know who we are inside of our own being.

    Within the physical world we exercise faith on an almost daily basis.  When we sit in a chair, when we get into a vehicle and start the engine, when we browse the Internet.  We do not prove these things to be working and reliable.  We simply accept them on faith.  We trust that the chair will hold up our weight when we sit in it.  Before we examine it, test it, or certify it as OK to sit in.  We trust that our vehicles will start.  That they will work without a mechanic testing the parts of the vehicle and confirming for us that it is OK.  We trust that the Internet is up, and working.  We do not call our Internet Service Provider and verify that everything is working before we attempt to bring up our FaceBook page, we simply believe that it will work.

    Within our souls, our emotions, our intellect, we have faith in our relationships, our favorite pastimes, our challenges.  We trust that our spouses are faithful to us, and we trust ourselves to be faithful to them.  We trust our families, our neighbors, and our friends.  We believe in the humanity around us.  How many times I’ve been told by someone that they have a lot of faith (lower case) but not much Faith (upper case).

    And we continue to have faith even when it is shattered within our lives.  When our car doesn’t start, or a chair breaks when we sit in it (causing us to fall), or when we find that our Internet connection really is down and we cannot get to our FaceBook page.  We do not lose hope in the physical world around us, rather we accept things and move on, still exercising our faith.

    Within our souls we are constantly failed.  Spouses cheat on one another.  We are lied to.  We experience ridicule and scorn.  And yet we continue to go on, and we continue to have faith in humanity.

    And yes, I know that anyone can be beaten down to the point of giving up or losing all hope.  Individuals may experience so many problems with a particular vehicle that they lose faith in it ever doing its job again.  We may be hurt by loved ones or friends so much that we give up on life and begin to believe it is us against the world.

    But these are not the norm.  We label these cases as phobias or disorders.  We say that people become depressed or despondent and that their ability to function is impaired.  I am focusing on the general case here, the norm, what the average person experiences within their lives.  And that norm is one of exercising faith.

    Why is it then, that when it comes to the faith that really matters, the one our world view is built on top of, the one that affects our Spirit (that which defines us individually), that we suddenly become dysfunctional?

    Dr. Richard Dawkins has stated unequivocally that evolution is a fact.  A fact as sure as the sunrise or the sunset.  It is established and true.  When he knows perfectly well that it is not.  Evolution is a theory.  He may think it a good theory, he may even find parts of it to be reasonable and practicable.  But he knows it is not a fact.  He knows he cannot prove it, either scientifically, through a repeatable process, or otherwise.  No, he accepts it as fact based upon his faith in the improvable.

    My world view accepts the existence of a Deity.  A supernatural being.  A God.  A world view I am perfectly willing to accept on Faith.  I believe there is just as much evidence for my world view as Dr. Dawkins seems to find for his.  Both world views are accepted upon faith, and yet their is a difference.

    In Dr. Dawkins world view, my Faith is to be mocked, ridiculed, belittled.  He has stated as much.  My Faith cannot be taught in Public Schools, cannot be exercised within some Government spaces, and in many parts of the world is persecuted.  And yet the opposite world view, for many that hold it, is to be accepted as the only faith one may have.

    Atheists that hold their particular world views are oblivious to the fact that they are actually strengthening my world view by their very attempts to discredit my Faith.

    In my world view the testing of my Spiritual Faith works for good in my life.  It is the trials of my Faith that actually builds the foundation that my world view is built on and brings me through stronger and more resolved than ever before.

    One might ask the question though, if your world view does not hold a Faith in God, what does the testing of your Faith gain you?  I would contend nothing.  How can it?  What could it possibly matter in the vastness of all eternity?

    Another question that might be asked is why is it so important that the evolutionary faith triumph over a Faith in God?  Are they not both Spiritual Faith?  So why then is one taught as a foundational truth within our Public Schools while the other is deviously cast aside under the guise of Separation of Church and State?

    Faith is hard.  I would contend that Faith in God is harder.  And given such, whose world view would you say has the better developed Faith?

  • Where Did The Void (Nothingness) Come From?

    To be honest, I had developed a schedule of sorts for my blog.  I had intended to introduce, and comment on, a series of items that interest me within the topics of Life / Religion / Politics / Science / and Philosophy in some sort of loosely structured but coherent order.  But I am already violating that schedule.  I had also intended to blog about relevant topics of the day as they came up in news sources and general conversations with family and friends.

    But as I write, things occur to me that I feel like ought to be addressed, and they would eventually come up anyway, so why not just deal with them now while they are staring me in the face?  Today is such a day.

    A couple of days ago I mentioned Dr. Stephen Hawking and his latest book The Grand Design.  Dr. Hawking is a fascinating individual to me and he is a brilliant Physicist.  But I find his Theology to be greatly lacking.  In his second latest work he mentions some poignant questions that he himself acknowledges as deserving an answer.  I referenced some of those questions in my previous post.  Specifically:

    “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
    “Why do we exist?”
    “Why this particular set of law and not some other?”

    From this point he goes on to say:

    “Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a God who chose to create the universe that way.  It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God.  In this view it is accepted that some entity exists that needs no creator, and that entity is called God.  We claim, however, that it is possible to answer these questions  purely within the realm of science, and with-out invoking any divine beings.”

    (The Grand Design, pg. 164 – 165)  Dr. Hawking has spent a great deal of his works defining physical interactions based upon known laws and today’s understanding of their relationships with each other.  In The Grand Design, Dr. Hawking brilliantly ties a number of current scientific theory together to explain how something could literally come from nothing.  He does acknowledge that deist need only stop with whatever deity created the universe, but he wants to claim that the universe came from nothing on its own.  If it is fair for Dr. Hawking to ask the question “Who or what created God?” then I believe it only fair to ask “Who or what created nothingness?”

    Before I get to that, allow me to point out that Dr. Hawking bases his work upon a vast amount of theory.  A lot of it is also hypothesis and conjecture.  I reject the definition of a principle, law, or doctrine as synonyms for theory.  A theory is just that, a theory.  It is not a principle, law, or doctrine.  It is not proven, and within its own definition it is recognized to be “commonly regarded as correct” but is in no way, shape, or form, known to be correct.  It is not proven, it is not necessarily repeatable, and it is not established as truth.

    Dr. Hawking has to rest his theory (and theories) on many assumptions that we are only just beginning to explore and know little to nothing about.  Such theories as String Theory, The Big Bang, and Quantum Physics.  All of these Sciences are just what they claim to be, theories.  They are not concrete truths, rather they are a set of beliefs accepted on current observations (the keyword here is current – they are actually in flux as we learn new things each day).  Dr. Hawking accepts these things (as do many, many Scientists) based upon (dare I say it?) faith.  Literally a belief not based upon a proof.  He has no evidence to establish these things as true.  He accepts them based upon faith and is tainted by his own World View.

    Indeed, within String Theory itself is the notion that there are a seemingly infinite numbers of possibilities (and occurrences of) physical laws and physical universes.  A totally unproven and unobserved phenomenon.  Given the current definition of String Theory and its principles, I fail to see how Dr. Hawking could not conceive of a scenario where the physical interactions of the universe actually created (or produced) god (a deity) that then used supernatural capabilities to recreate the process into what is observed today.

    Dr. Hawking does a brilliant job of determining (mathematically) that something did indeed come from nothing as long as that nothing originally existed as both Matter and Anti-Matter (literally a positive – +1 and a negative – -1, which add up to zero, that then exploded into their respective parts.

    However his zero, which is absolutely nothing (a void), only exits with the realm of something – matter and anti-matter).

    One might beg the question as to where that nothingness came from.  Consider the fact that nothing (the vast emptiness of space), the void as it were, is actually as much a part of the physical universe as all of the real matter we can touch, taste, smell, feel, and experience.  We know it is cold, and yet it can be hot.  Light may travel in it and through it.  It allows gravity to work (to be true to its nature).  The emptiness of space is actually a part of the physical.

    So where did the void come from?  Dr. Hawking simply accepts this on faith.  Exactly the same way I accept God on faith.  Dr. Hawking can no more explain the void and its apparent existence, than I can explain God.  It is based upon faith.  His faith just happens to be different than mine.

    Isn’t it funny though that I don’t need to prove the existence of God.  But Dr. Hawking feels compelled to prove the non-existence of God.  In my world view the void is explained by creation.  God is not a physical being.  God created the physical, void included.  Dr. Hawking, for all his science and mathematics has yet to explain where the Zero, the nothingness came from to begin with and why there is so much of it out there.

    To get something from nothing, you have to have nothing to begin with.  There has to be the spark of (in Dr. Hawking’s parlance) matter and anti-matter to create the -1 and the 1.

    Perhaps the something and the nothing (all the physical) came from another, as yet, unknown source.  The Spiritual.  The something that exists outside of the physical.

    And isn’t it interesting that Dr. Hawking will acknowledge an almost infinite number (for all practicable purposes what we would perceive as infinite) of different scenarios of physical laws and physical universes, except for one occurrence and one occurrence only.  The existence of a God.  I am to accept that there may be billions upon billions of different quantum harmonics all over the physical creation, creating a plethora of different possibilities, but I am not to accept that even one of those could have a God.

    Find the void, and then step out of it, out of the physical, and into the other side, and there you will find God.