This will probably run along the lines of Worldview part 2, but that’s OK, let’s get it cranked up and see where we go.
Let me start off by saying there are things I don’t know.
To be honest with you there are things I don’t want to know, but that’s another story. There are books I haven’t read, movies I haven’t seen and there are books and movies I don’t want to see.
I remember having a copy of a booked called Swallows and Amazon’s, and for the life of me I couldn’t get past the first page. One day I might find a copy and read it and figure out why.
But here we have one of life’s puzzles. I’m sure there are people who loved that book when they read it as kids. Just as I loved, and still love Winnie the Pooh, and Wind in the Willows. There are people who dislike those books. How can you not like dear old Pooh? Ah well.
It’s like some folk like mango. I will eat it but I’m not a huge fan. I prefer Pawpaw. Sorry, I refuse to call it papaya.
Food seems to be one of those like or don’t like things. Brussel’s sprouts seems to divide nations. I enjoy cabbage, I just find the flavour of Brussel’s sprouts too strong. My beautiful wife loves them.
But why does one person like something and not another?
I will put that into my “I have no idea,” box.
Yes, I accept that a lot of it is environmental, what you are exposed to when you are growing up, some of it is influenced by the people around you. This is the footy team I follow because Dad follows them, that kind of thing. But that doesn’t answer all of the wonderful differences between each person.
They can tell me with some confidence that thoughts are tiny little electrical impulses that hop from one neuron in the brain to another. Millions of them every second.
What isn’t clear is why? Why does that work out as a thought? And how and why does this thing I call “me” recognise it as such? And what is “me” anyway?
Some of these little pole vaulting sparks don’t get to the point of being thoughts, they zap out as physical sensations, responses to heat, or cold, to touch, or smell. Some are set to work in the vision areas of the brain, helping us to recognise our favourite colour, and to have arguments with our friends as to exactly what “beige” is.
Why is it like that? Why? Why? Why?
I had a book that went almost everywhere with me, “Tell me why.” It got to the point where the pages of it were dog eared and the cover grubby and battered. I poured over explanations and pictures of volcanoes and earthquakes, space flight, spiders, Vikings, explorers … and almost everything else.
But there were some things I didn’t find in that book, and I still had to ask why?
I think I must have been a very annoying child!
Depending on the question Mum would tell me at this point to go ask my father, in that tone, you know the one?
But if I asked Dad I’d get the medical explanation of it in great depth and detail, and interesting and satisfying as that might have been in and of itself, if a little technical and a lot over my head, it still wouldn’t answer my fundamental question.
I’d know how, but my question is deeper than how.
And look, in some things, even the experts can only give speculation as to “how” let alone “why.”
It all gets a bit exasperating, really.
I have read a book or two about how the brain works, and at the end of it, the highly credentialed expert with several dozen letters after their name basically calls time and hedges around saying “I dunno” without coming across as a few sparks short of a coherent thought.
They should be honest and say they just don’t know. Or is that a credibility thing? Works against tenure?
It really ends up being one of those Faith things.
A round-about way of getting there, but we have arrived.
Faith.
It’s a little word, but it has big consequences, and it would seem big shoulders.
For a start, try grabbing a pen and some paper and jotting down a definition.
Because I have spent a bit of time reading the Bible the obvious starting point is the verse we find in the book of Hebrews. (Which by the way has nothing much to do with a man brewing his own coffee.)
"Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see."
If we can see it, touch it, taste is and smell it, then we are pretty sure it's real.
Anything else we have to look at from a different angle. If I sit down and listen to a piece of music, then I have an experience of what I have heard, but I can't touch it, I can't smell it, I certainly can't taste it.
So, how can I be certain of music?
Let's consider something else. Beauty. I know what it is when I see it. And yet, there is an unreality to it. If you were to ask me to tell you what constitutes beauty, I wouldn't be able to do it. I'd have to show you the physical object and even then you might not find it beautiful.
I have nothing physical available to me to help me with my definition of either music or beauty. For me it just IS.
I can't see it, I can't touch it, and yet I know that it is real, because I have experience of it. I have an emotional reaction to it. It gives me enjoyment.
If I were to tell you about my wife, I can show you photos, I can tell you what she likes and what she doesn't, and we can do this with most people we know. But, how can I begin to tell you about my love for her?
It's not something I can grab hold of, and yet for me it is something that is so very real, something that is of deep and real meaning to me.
It is only through this thing called faith that I can know and appreciate the existence of music, or beauty or love.
Not everything has substance. And yet we believe it. We trust in its existence, we trust in its reality.
I have to pause here and clarify, that I am not looking at this in terms of philosophy. I am not a philosopher.
My aim is to try and grasp this concept of faith in terms of theology, which is our understanding and relationship with God.
But you see, theology is not something we are taught in school. God has been thrown out with the bath water. Science has done its best over several hundred years to kill Him by simple fact of reason. A reason that quite often is without it's own essential evidence and proof and with it's own call to and assumption of faith.
And yet, faith doesn't contradict reason at all. It adds to it. It goes beyond it. It's a shift from objectivity to subjectivity to that willingness to admit the reality, the existence of something, someone beyond ourselves, someone who not only exists but is the reason for our existence and the meaning of our existence.
A someone we have never met, a someone we don't know, a someone we can't know in physical reality.
Faith enables us to go beyond what we can see, and more to the point what we can prove through the presentation of hard solid arguable evidence.
If we look at Hebrews again, chapter 11 and verse 3 we see that "By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen."
And in looking deeply and fully at what God created, we can start to see the evidence and reality of the Creator. It becomes a willingness within me to fully trust in not just what I think and see and hear and touch and taste and feel, but in who God reveals Himself to be through what he has created and what He has written, through the Son He has given, and the Holy Spirit He has bestowed.