Wednesday 23 January 2019

Coffee Hour #2 Have a little faith

Jan 23, 2019

The following is only a pin prick into a bulletin of my thought process.  It's a topic needing more than an hour of mulling over, but this is my caffeine induced journal entry for today.  This is my crumb of thought and my intent is not to upset, but encourage contemplation.  

Parenting teenagers means I often have interesting discussions.  Atheism came up the other day.  A heavy topic to write about while slurping coffee this morning and a view point I admit I struggle to wrap my head around myself.  I live by faith.  With what I have gone through in life, the existence of God for me is an absolute.  For others near and dear to my heart, it is not.

One of my kids' friends told them that they don't believe in God and thus do not have faith in anything.  I told my children even atheists must have faith in something.  It takes faith to believe God does not exist just as we have faith that God does.

At some point our knowledge ends and we must have faith in the interpretations we make of our world, just accept things are the way they are without burning out our finite minds spinning through circular logic in search of an irrefutable landing pad, the quest for concrete basis for everything.  I'm speaking of the basic construction of nature, our perception of existance.  It's not really basic either, it's fabulously and wonderfully complex.  

Ever study fractals?  Random insert here, but pretty cool!  Repeating pattern made up of repeating pattern upon repeating pattern, intricately beautiful.  Look them up!

We grains of sand struggle to fathom the entire desert when we see but one small part of its ever shifting existence as the wind carries us where it may.  It's impossible to see the whole glorious picture as a finite being.  Just imagining is like falling down a rabbit's hole as you try to wrap your mind around it.

Faith as the dictionary puts it is having confidence or trust in something, a person, a belief, in God. Strangely, it also lists obligation to something.  Am I obliged to believe in something?  I guess.  I have to believe that the chair I am sitting on will support me and that the ground will not suddenly sink beneath me in.  I must in order to move in the physical realm -equal and opposing forces.  I must push off in the opposing direction to move in the direction I desire, go backwards to move forwards.

Faith is believing in things unseen, things you can't fully explain.  No one knows everything, not even the most educated and intelligent among us.  The expression, 'the more you know, the more you realize you don't know', comes to mind.  The more educated we become, the more years of study, the more specialized the focus becomes, the more we realize there is to learn.

So at some point taking a leap of faith is required where our knowledge leaves off explanations.  Faith that gravity will continue to keep them grounded.  Faith that the sun will rise again the next morning.  Sounds silly, but can you explain every action of the universe, or further the interaction of universes plural and their gravitational effects on each other, the fabric of time?    

(Time is a favourite topic in our household for many reasons, from the constant battle to keep up with the clock to the paradoxes of time travel.  Love, love, love scifi stories.  As I write this, I am wearing corduroys with the Millennium Falcon embroidered on my back pockets.  And yes, I admit I make my own pants.  Sorry for the tangent.)  

Faith in the knowledge they have been presented with by their predecessors is correct, from the macroscopic to the microscopic.  Faith in the premises they ground their logic on.  The chemist can explain molecular interactions to a certain level, the physicist can explain or theorize the interplay of those molecules and the forces holding them together to a certain scale, increasingly minute.  I love science, but at some point science requires faith.  At some point the explanation stops and we accept what we are told, whether it be at a high school level of study or a Phd.  
Proving or disproving God lies in perception of data and which interpretation is more desirable.   Theories formed from observation or mathematical extrapolation. Either an ordered universe comes from God, a controlled big bang, or an ordered universe spins from a disordered kaboom.  

Random luck results in the building blocks of life meeting and mixing leading to genetic perpetuation of favourable traits along an evolutionary tree.  If aliens seeded life here on earth, who created the aliens....chicken or the egg, repeat.....hmmm.  Sorry, I admit I am a little bias on this one.  I believe in an infinite designer of universes.  Not meaning to ruffle feathers here, my point is none of us were present at the point of the world's creation, let alone the cosmos.  No matter how you believe it happened, it is an act of faith to believe in an explanation.

So the atheist is required to have faith in the idea that God does not exist.  Hopefully my kids walked away from our family debate with an understanding of how they might explain their own viewpoint and turn it into an open discussion with their friends.  They have a great bunch of friends who are thinkers and I love it!  

We come together from different walks of life, different beliefs and trying to clout one another over the head into submission of following the same beliefs is not showing love in the least.  We can love each other and strive to understand one another without demanding conformity under the threat of rejection.  Humanity is a tapestry of beliefs and cultures entwined and beautiful in its own right.  It's a shame when threads become tangled into terrible knots to the point of hatred.  In conflict, we end up seeing only our differences instead of how fundamentally we are the same.  

My point in all this is not to persuade or dissuade you of your beliefs, rather to get you dear reader to think, have faith!

I believe I have had enough coffee today.  This entry has taken a second cup after lunch to finish.  I'll be writing about a lighter topic tomorrow.  Phew!

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