Faith in God

I.
The existence of God remains in doubt. Either he exists or he doesn’t. Or he exists in some of kind of semi-existence, or as a creature birthed by human imagination, like the deities in Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods. Or something completely different.

The problem with the human experience of God is God’s immeasurability. Regardless of his status, it seems unlikely with our current level of technology that we can measure him/she/it. We cannot ask Him to stand with his back to the wall so we can measure His height. We cannot place Him on a scale to find His weight. We have failed to trap Him inside a room. We cannot do interact with him in these ways, by virtue of his apparent absence from our ability to sense the world.

The beautiful thing about the idea of God is that it is both apparently improvable and definitely undeniable. Yes, He could present himself to us, provided he is omnipotent and able to appear and disappear at will. Otherwise, we are left with the hearsay of the religious and their religious texts. The religious texts declare that God’s apparent absence is trivial. They would say that he exists, nonetheless, like an extrasolar planet yet to be discovered, or the ruins of Atlantis. People hundreds of years ago may have unappreciated the existence of extrasolar planets, but those planets did exist when our telescopes could only reach as far as Jupiter (or maybe God is playing a trick on us).

God is unlike the color of the sky. People can agree about the color of the sky because it is there. Outside of whether two people share the same mental concept of ‘blue,’ they will agree that the sky is blue.

Not so with God. His absence insures we cannot disprove his existence. The existence of God in an atheistic world is an example of the ultimate assumption because there would be no God at all to assume God’s existence. In an atheistic world, we made Him up. Even here, however, the assumption dies hard. The nonexistent cannot be disproven. We can disprove erroneous theories of gravity. We can disprove erroneous theories of how water interacts with fire. We fail to disprove imaginary objects and beings, however.

Besides, if he existed, he can evade our methods of detection. An eternity can pass, and humanity’s technological sources can rise exponentially, but an omnipotent God, in an Abrahamic context, has more power in His pinky than we ever could as a collective whole. If God has a pinky, anyway. Some say he does. Some say he doesn't. Some say it is sacriledge to suggest he has a physical form. For any one to state this claims, they must choose to believe in something that cannot be proven, or is yet to be proven. Even atheists need to take a leap of faith in order to say that God is nonexistant. But He could very well exist despite His absense.


II.
With or without God, we are limited creatures. Despite advances in technology, we still struggle with abstract concepts, like duty, love, and peace. Without an agreement on the physical embodiment of such concepts, we continue to live half-lives, kill ourselves, kill each other, eat ourselves to obesity, and waste time on illogical acts like Unrequited Love, and video games.

The trick of this "disagreement" goes further than broad socialculturaleconomicreligioushistorical definitions and buries itself in the consciousness of each individual. This explains why a man in a relgious society will murder his children, commit adultery at the risk of death, and why people contradict themselves, why they become hypocrites, saying one thing and doing something that contradicts the spoken word. Big talk of "Christianity, the military-industrial complex, and Hate" fail to pin down why individuals are so different from one another, and subject to behavior that works outside the bounds of accepted ethics. Individuals, rather than societies, must pin down the idea of God. And this is always the case for individuals make up societies, not the other way around. People find God and value systems for themselves.

Though generations have passed, and the dead leave behind books and books and books of information, the information remains useless as long as the young have yet to discover the information. The experiences of a past generation influence the environment of succeeding generations; but the interpretation of that experience and the interpretation of the environment are up to the succeeding generations. The succeeding generations choose a vaue system--let's say, capitalism or communism--and live their version of the value system. Great Britiain's socialist programs are different from Cuba's socialist programs. To look at this from another angle: even though a son takes after his father, the son's life will be unique from the father's. So even though the son may consider himself to have the same value system as the father, his unique experiences will insure that he interprets his value system in a manner different from how the father interprets his value system.

For example: even though different groups of Christians share the same holy book, their worshop of God differs from one another. Catholics practice in a way different from the practice of Baptists. These different groups interpret the Bible in their own way (and don't get me started about the beliefs of individual members...).

More chaos exists for economic systems, because economic systems are based wholly on theory and must be implemented before it can be accepted or critiqued with authority. Therefore, countries tend to revamp the economy and bank system only after serious economic depression. The regulating bodies of the economy were simply ignorant to the fact that a depression would happen. Experience can teach us what certain events bring about, and experience can lead us to have different interpretations of the same event. The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center will produce a more emotional effect on a war veteran than a 5-year-old from Kansas. Even among veterans, the opinions will vary. Our experiences, the value systems we grew up with, and the value systems we choose to follow, are our Gods.

And this is a chaotic system, because the value systems are unfixed. They change from person-to-person, moment-to-moment. Even among war veterans, the emotional response to the 9/11 attacks will vary. In a sense, because of this chaos of thought, people live without God. At the very least, God refrains from programming us to operate under uniform and specific values...so it would seem; I could be wrong; God could be causing me to type these letters without my knowledge and/or your knoweldge. I cannot prove that God is doing this, and I cannot disprove that he is. When you get down to it, the absence of God leads to this delicious paradox.

We are left, for all intents and purposes, to fend for ourselves. And because nothing is certain, everything relating the value systems is an act of faith. When we point at the point, and say, "This side is America; this side is Mexico," we are a chain in a link of faith that began with the creation of the world, continued when the nomads from Asia settled in what is now the southern United States, continued when they themselves broke into different groups, continued when the European settlers fought with the "Natives" and kicked the Natives out to form "The United States of America, though the land is only the United States of America to anyone who believes what maps say. The only reason the border is where it is is because of an agreement between the US and Mexican governments. Nothing metaphsical, just arbitrary.

Even the effect of war can be artbitary. Though bullets often play the role of the fearsome LORD, but the truth found in bullets must still be interpreted and misinterpretation begins with an interpretation. So if metaphyiscal truth can be found in a bullet, the truth can confuse the truthseeker despite the clear effect of a bullet fired from a gun.


III.
And so when we look for that truth, we are stuck with our assumptions. Not because we want to, but because we have to. Every act is an act of faith. Our first lesson in faith arrives when we are
babies, and assume our parents continue to exist when they hide behind a blanket.

"Peekaboo! You can't see me!" "Mom? Where are you?" We paused, and looked. "Mom? Mom!

Ahhh!"

And then she lowered the blanket and revealed herself.

"Oh, Mom, there you are."

And then she again covered herself with the blanket.

"Ahhhh!"

Sooner or later, we came to assume Mom's existence, even though she was absent from the room. Our relationship with God is similar, and even more one-sided because while we can find our mother if she is physically present, an omnipotent God can choose to remain hidden despite our best efforts to discover Him. Yes, He plays the most fabulous game of Peekaboo.
Yet, we some of us assume God, even without hard evidence of His existence. We assume this as we assume that other people share our mental concept of the color blue. I wrote the first draft of this essay in a subway train in New York City. Your only evidence of this claim, unless you happened to see me, is this very sentence. I may be lying or otherwise incorrect. I am telling the truth. I can't prove it to you, and therefore, your acceptance or declining of these claims is an act of faith. And faith is an act of resignation to reality due to lack of certainty about that reality. We simply believe. Or don't