faith

Some­times i wish it all wouldn’t matter. Every­body would just live their lives as they see fit, applying var­ious eth­ical sys­tems, or not, but if this is all a big random coin­ci­dence that mankind formed on this planet, then nothing mat­ters. If i waste away my life and never fulfil my poten­tial and never manage to live a mean­ingful, pur­poseful life, it’s irrel­e­vant because every­body just returns to dust, the atoms dis­perse and become part of every­thing, and the earth spins on and flies around the sun and the sun around the milky way and the galaxy whizzes through our cluster, and we’re just specs of dust on an infi­nite canvas. My sin and fail­ures wouldn’t matter, but nei­ther would any achievements.

But though it would be easier, i simply can never ever get myself to believe this.

If there is a cre­ator and S/He made this all inten­tion­ally and with a sense of pro­por­tion, sym­metry and beauty, as nature clearly shows, then my thoughts and actions count, and this makes my life all the more pre­car­ious, as all the knowl­edge i’ve accu­mu­lated starts calling out against me, asking why my actions lack so far behind my under­standing. Only then any­thing mat­ters really. It’s easier to hide behind thoughts like “maybe all these strug­gles of faith are just a delu­sion” or “maybe i’m just imag­ining a Cre­ator in order to pull myself up on this rope of reli­gion, to make myself feel better and imbue my life with a meaning it oth­er­wise lacks” – but this is also a degree of sit­ting on the fence.

But then, rad­ical action is somehow incred­ibly dif­fi­cult, as i’m bound up in making a living and caring for a family that does not share my beliefs, and i’m already bad enough suc­ceeding at the day job, how would i even become a useful tool in my Maker’s hands?

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What gets you out of bed in the morning? A sense of pur­pose, or at least duty, or just rou­tine, daily grind? Live can be exciting, every day. Just imagine an all-pow­erful and loving being was guiding you, and you could awake every day with a readi­ness for the extra­or­di­nary to happen. It would become normal to dis­cover new ter­ri­tory, new ideas, new people, and progress on a journey towards eter­nity. You can totally have that. In fact I believe this is the greatest wish of the cre­ator for each life.

Faith should start with awe, with a real­i­sa­tion that this G•d is the only truly mag­nif­i­cent being worthy of praise. Sci­en­tists are begin­ning to realise that this space between the sub­atomic par­ti­cles isn’t really just a void, it is a field of quantum pos­si­bil­i­ties; Stephen Hawking calls it “the mind of G•d”, Max Planck in called it a “matrix” in 1944:

Gen­tlemen, as physi­cist who ded­i­cated his whole life to strict sci­ence, researching the essence of matter, I surely should not be thought of as an infat­u­ated spirit. And thus I tell you now this, after my study of the atom: There is no matter as such. All matter comes into being only through a force, which brings the atomic par­ti­cles into res­o­nance and holds this tiniest solar system of the uni­verse together. Because there is no intel­li­gent or eternal force in the entire uni­verse – mankind did not suc­ceed in cre­ating the much yearned-for per­petuum mobile – we must pre­sume a con­scious, intel­li­gent spirit behind this force. This spirit is the source of all matter. Not the vis­ible, but tran­sient matter is real, true, man­i­fest – for matter would not exist without the spirit –, but the invis­ible, immortal spirit is the real thing! Since spirit cannot exist as such, but every spirit belongs to a being, we are com­pelled to pre­sume spirit beings. Now since even spirit beings cannot exist out of them­selves but have to be cre­ated, I do not shy away from calling this mys­te­rious cre­ator the same as all cul­tures of the earth have called him in pre­vious mil­lennia: G•d! With this the physi­cist who has to deal with matter gets from the realm of sub­stance into the matter of spirit. And with this, our task is fin­ished and we have to pass on our studies into the hands of philosophy.
[own trans­la­tion of Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter], speech at Flo­rence, Italy (1944) from Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797]

In this light it makes per­fect sense that G•d is totally in con­trol, that He is dwelling in unap­proach­able light, yet is not far from any of us, in fact He is infi­nitely close, per­me­ating every­thing. Isn’t that exciting, that we cannot just talk to him, but every breath we take is a gift from Him, He suf­fuses our every con­scious moment with meaning. Based on that aware­ness we can seek pur­pose and life itself.

It is then no longer a chore to help others, but I’m driven to do so because the home­less drug addict in the street is my brother, fellow lov­ingly cre­ated being filled with G•d’s poten­tial love and energy, maybe unaware, like me, and stricken with unhealthy habits and decep­tions and sin, like me. Maybe we could help one another, or at least I could share G•d’s love, as much as I’ve tapped into it. It is eternal and infi­nite, and the more con­duc­tive I become and less selfish and ego­cen­tric, the more this love will channel through me.

“Flat­land cover”. Licensed under Public domain
via Wiki­media Com­mons.

The thought exper­i­ment is a bit worn, but it’s useful to imaging a two-dimen­sional world with two-dimen­sional beings. If there was a three-dimen­sional being tra­versing their plane of exis­tence, they would per­ceive this move­ment as a sequence of time - if it was say a pencil, they’d first see the tip, then the shaft with the engraved let­ters, then the fer­rule and finally the rubber eraser. They would not realise that this object had a com­pletely dif­ferent dimen­sion of exis­tence and could appear and dis­ap­pear from the two-dimen­sional plane at will.

We know now sci­en­tif­i­cally that this world has more than three spa­tial dimen­sions. We know that quantum states (par­ti­cles) change in the past and into the future, i.e. past, present and future are only illu­sions, like the pencil through the two-dimen­sional plane is just a perception.

Maybe faith is the irra­tional con­vic­tion that despite being inac­ces­sible to us, we can still stretch out into those spheres of the unknown. Whichever way to stretch, it will be, in some sense, upwards, toward greater refine­ment, greater purpose.

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