Bad News for Skeptics: You Can't Even Believe it When You See it!

This post is aimed, like a wave/beam of photons (light), at the subject of Faith, and may especially pertain to skeptics of faith.  In a purely rational world, they would be the vast majority instead of the majority who claim to be religious.  However, ours is a world full of mystery - genuine and invented - and is certainly far from purely rational.

 Humans make it hard on themselves.  As if there weren't enough real conundrums, added on top of dilemmas, compounded by a plethora of enigmas, we have to go around stirring the pot with invented puzzles of all kinds.  Simultaneously, we love - and hate - to be mystified.

Religion really doesn't help with this problem.  Adherents of organized religion are asked to accept the deepest truths on faith. And, for Christians, that's a gift either received or not.  Doubters apparently just didn't want the gift badly enough.  At the same time, the holy writings outline all manner of anecdotes and edicts to spell out the evidentiary details.  Is that to convince the fence-sitters?  Don't these two ideas (faith and scripture) sit mostly in opposition to one another?

Those with faith believe that God will take care of all the important stuff.  Many people believe this because others have said it is true.  He'll be the 'decider' about welcoming the good guys into eternal life and damning the others.  Until the Judgment Day comes, many believe He loves everybody equally.  (Ok, maybe not the gays quite as much.  And, He must not really love the animals at all because He put them under our dominion - not the most Intelligent part of the Design.)  People who accept the gift of faith don't need any more details than these.  In many cases, these are their marching orders and off they go.  Theirs is the perspective: I'll see it when I believe it.

Skeptics of faith will believe it, maybe, after they see it.  The problem is there is nothing to see.  I mean this in the most literal sense.  Just as religion is not helpful with the deepest mysteries, neither is science.

When we see water, we are told we are really seeing many mutually-attracting molecules made of two hydrogen atoms combined with one atom of oxygen.  Many people believe this because others have said it is true.  We are told further that each atom is comprised of sub-atomic particles in orbit around the nucleus.  The orbiting particles (electrons and protons) are best imagined as hollow, spherical shells because they can be found somewhere on that shell surface at any given time.  Within these component particle/shells, we are told there are smaller "particles", such as quarks and neutrinos (which are also more recently-conceived of as oscillating "strings"), and that these theoretically might be comprised, in turn, of their own structures.

At this point the size of things is reduced to the domain of ideas, cryptic symbols scratched on a chalkboard, certainly nothing than can be easily explained or observed, and yet these are the building blocks of all "solid" matter.  Presumably, each of these distinct ideas are separated by some amount of space - but what is that made of?  Nothing?  Is the world entirely made up of ideas, interspersed among volumes of nothingness?

How is this fundamentally different from faith in the existence of God, or anything else imaginable?  If, in its essence, matter cannot actually be observed, then what - exactly- are we looking at?  A uniformly-imagined projection of an idea?  And - in another direction - if a thing can be imagined, doesn't it necessarily exist somewhere in an infinite universe?  If the universe is not infinite, then...oh no, let's not go there again.  Never mind.

Advanced theoretical physicists have been dabbling with quantum mechanics for about eighty years, and the widely-held conclusion from them is that nothing really exists until it is observed.  Observation is the organizing principle behind the form of otherwise randomly moving bits of energy and matter.  It also, to some degree, destroys the thing being observed, because the corollary to this is that nothing can be truly observed in its naturally-occurring state.  (One simple example: the act of measuring tire pressure reduces the pressure when the gauge lets some air escape.)  Observation is not a benign force - any parent of a teenager can tell you that.  (It makes me think again about the many times I said, "Jeez, I was just looking!")

So a tree falling in the woods is not only silent, there is no tree and there is no woods.  Oh my...

Where are we left with all this inquiry?  What is real in our world after all?  In my world, I have faith that John Lennon pegged it in 1967:  All You Need is Love.  The only thing that makes sense to me is the purely-nonsensical idea of love.  (If I fail to write a directive elsewhere, somebody please be sure to have this put on my gravestone.  Oh, and please change to past tense.)

If (as I was told as a child) God is love - I'm still buying it - those are my marching orders.

Physicists believe they are close to finding the grail they call The Theory of Everything (T.O.E. - perhaps in the specifically named, "M-Theory", featuring 11 dimensions).  I'd like to sneak into their labs and write on the chalkboard:  T.O.E. = L.O.V.E. (...without any dimensions at all).