ILLUMINATING FAITH

Faith has been so derided in modern day culture that those who exercise it are labeled ‘foolish’ and the stylish term ‘blind faith’ sums up the current thought- the physical world is all there is and to trust the invisible is akin to becoming blind.

The exercise of faith on the other hand makes man lean on to the invisible and connects what is seen with what is invisible. Faith is a characteristic that definitively presumes that there is an invisible reality outside of the physical world. Faith gathers that it is not possible to know everything in this world. Faith logically arrives at the conclusion that for this physical world to be meaningful, there needs to be an infinite God who created this world. Let us examine these three premises.

Is reality comprised only of visible things? Even for the physical things in the universe, there are many that are just beyond our sight. In our experience as we go through this world, there are far too many things that cannot be seen or measured but are nevertheless real. How do we measure love or gratitude? We cannot deny their existence nor can we dispel their value. In sports, we talk of encouragement that players receive from the home crowd. How do we understand the fact that, when the team plays in front of their home crowd, it perform better? Is that not the invisible coming to affect the physical world? We plan so many things, but rarely does everything go exactly according to our plans, because the hidden invisible forces connive to upset our cartwheel.

Man is finite and he cannot know everything in this world- the fact is we know just a fraction of what is. Yet, we live as though we know for sure. When we examine the food we are about to swallow, we believe it is good, not poisonous and free of harmful germs. We do not know for sure, but we do arrive at that conclusion on the basis of what we know about that food and what we see in front of us. We don’t endeavor to send a sample of the food to the laboratory just to be sure before we swallow it down. When we get on to a plane, we are not given a tour of the cockpit to demonstrate that all is OK, and even if we were, most of us would have no clue of what we see. We are not taken to meet the pilot just to make sure he is not inebriated and has a valid pilot license. Yet none of this prevents us from trusting our lives with the airline and depending on them to take us to our destination. Faith is active in our day-to-day lives and without it, life would be unlivable.

All things seen in this world have a cause behind it. This is the theory of causation. If we were to assign a physical, finite cause behind what is being considered, we then have to ask what the cause behind that cause is. This leads us to an infinite regress of causes, at the end of which the only rational explanation would be to say that behind this finite world stands the infinite eternal God as the ultimate cause. To accept God as real, you then do need faith because, if God were limited to the physical, verifiable reality, faith would not be necessary and such a God would be no God at all.

Examining the world methodically leads man to the reality of the infinite, invisible, eternal God and to link our physical world with God, faith becomes necessary. And when we see faith in such a manner, it is no longer blind faith but illuminating faith.

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