'Cause you gotta have faith.

I said in my last post I was going to discuss abortion, I will still discuss the issue, but I have not finished researching and putting my thoughts to paper. I will keep working on it and post it at a later date. For now, I wanted to explain a little bit as to why I do have faith in God.

Most of my life I spent working on the rational and orderly portions of my mind. Science, history, math, etc. You take a stenohaline species of fish like a Largemouth Bass, put it in salwater and it dies. Heck, you memorize those facts, your good to go. You can even analyze why it happens by looking at the cells, seeing how the salt draws the moisture from them and watch the cells as they go under lysis. But, I never spent time thinking about the things that you could not touch, hold or analyze. Things such as emotions, God and why people do things that are totally against common sense, drinking and driving, etc. I was comfortable in my own little world, everything was ordered and neat. But, my wife got me to start trying to broaden my horizons and think about the things that had no clear cut answer. I then started to realize that everything I assumed were facts I held so dearly and true were not necessarily facts, but opinions with dogmatic views behind them. You can take two very educated people, who have differing stances on a belief; guns for example. They can both debate on the issue, and bring up verifiable facts as to why each is right. Yet, each person in turn, is able to reason in their own world view that the opposing persons facts do not imply what they say. It was then I started to realize not everything had a black and white answer, but a lot depended on the world view of the persons interpretation of them.

Then out of curiosity and gentle prodding from my wife I started researching this whole God thing. I started to think that maybe all of the facts I had against the existence of God, may be there only because I refused to listen to anyone else's interpretation of their world view.
Instead of looking at a human life as a collection of cells, I started seeing the breathtaking wonder of a child growing. Instead of a blastocyst I saw something that was going to go under awesome changes over the next few months. From a few cells, we grow into an amazing organism that can think, love, hate and wonder. Science could answer me the specifics of what happens during each stage of development. But, it couldn't answer why? Why does it happen that way, why are we here. I know it may sound kinda flaky, but if you just stop and think about how unbelievably complex life is, it's staggering. And yes, I am a theistic evolutionist, we can discuss more on that later. For me, it just makes even more sense, as God would start the chain reaction so everything to go in a way that results in the outcome he wanted, us. It doesn't matter to me whether we started out as a simian species, a lizard or a newt. We are here, and we are at the points God designed for us to be at.

I couldn't wrap my mind that it was all a lottery game. For me, I wasn't comfortable stating that life is here because of a cosmic roll of the dice. That all the parameters for life as we know it lay on a razors edge. A lot of crazy things have happened in my life, some would call it chance, but yet if each of those things hadn't of happened (good or bad) I wouldn't be the person I am now, I wouldn't be where I am. I cannot accept that it's all just a chance and that there isn't a higher power that created all of this wonderful life. Besides, I am too horrible at gambling to believe i'd ever be on the good side of chance

Instead of trying to view everything in duality, I started looking for things in a plurality. I started realizing that science is great at answering facts, but it really sucks at answering the whys. And I started shifting my focus onto the why questions. I could no longer feel comfortable just spouting out numbers, studies, etc. I wanted to find if I could a base reason for the universe. Science cannot even come close to answering those questions. Science and religion for me don't really mix in that they each tell different sides of life. Science tells us the mechanics of life and cold hard facts and religion tells us the emotions, and the root singular cause. It's not just making sense of favorable coincidences, it's just realizing that each area has their own place. I was trying to make science do something it wasn't designed to do. Once I realized that I had a dogmatic view of science, it's when I started searching outside of science.

For instance, take falling in love for an example. Science can tell us the hormonal changes the increased brain activity in certain areas, increased heart rate, etc. But yet for all of those cold details, it can't tell us what love is to each of us. While everyone falls in love, it's amazing that while we can all share common themes, it is different for each one of us. I cannot explain the feelings you have when you smile thinking about your loved one. All it can give you are the effects, not the causes. It can probably tell you the muscles involved, and the sectors of the brain. But take all those facts and they pale to the feelings YOU get when you are in love. We are emotional creatures and when we only focus on the rational parts of our psyche we suffer. And if we only focus on the emotional side, that causes problems as well. When we don't balance out our lives, we miss out the TRUE joys of being alive.