Without Faith

And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. (Hebrews 11:6) 

          One of the broad areas of disagreement in our society is over the concepts of faith and God. Some people think it is foolish to have faith or to believe in God. Others believe it is foolish not to have faith or not to believe in God. Philosopher David Hume wrote about causes, effects, and faith back in the 1700s. He concluded that it was impossible to know that an effect was actually caused by the cause and that said cause would always produce that effect. Just because the bread you ate for breakfast keep you alive, does not mean that eating bread for breakfast tomorrow won't result in your death. The fact that said bread has repeatedly kept you alive and has never killed you is not actually proof that it will continue to do so. You could develop an allergy to something in the bread, or someone could poison it. 

         You might be able to go through life entertaining doubts about your bread, but the problem is that we face the same challenge with everything.. We can't know that the car won't explode when we turn the key. We can't know that gravity is going to continue to function. Should we go through life tying ourselves to things that are fastened to the ground? But we can't know that the rope won't break or that the thing to which we've tied it will continue to exist, let alone remain fastened to the ground. We can't know that the person we go to bed with won't turn out to be patient zero of the next great pandemic. Is your hairbrush a hairbrush or a scorpion? 

          It is impossible to function without faith. You can't please God without it because you can't live without it and dead people don't please God. Admittedly, faith in what you can see, hear, smell, taste and touch is comparatively easy. There aren't many who don't have this sort of basic faith. Even animals have this sort of faith. If wisdom is interacting with reality in a beneficial, productive manner,  faith of this sort is wise, and a declared lack of faith is folly.

          What of faith in what you can't see, hear, smell, taste or touch? Is it wise to have faith when you don't have direct, personal, experiential evidence?  Again, we operate on this sort of faith. Have we learned the alphabet through our experience with it, or have we learned it because someone told us that the marks on the page have meaning? Did we discover that y=mx+b is a line, or did someone tell us, and we took it by faith? How is it that we know that a circle's circumference is 2pr? How do you know that Uranus, Neptune or Pluto exist? How about the planets that orbit other stars - stars that you haven't actually seen? Have you actually seen a living giant squid? Or a  blue whale? (video doesn't count) Have you been to the North Pole? Most of us have been taught these things. They have been revealed to us by someone who supposedly has more experience or more wisdom, and we have faith in these things because we have faith in the person who taught us about them.  Our society seems to have a lot of faith in some people who reveal things to us: teachers, scientists, the media, the government.... In fact, it's not unusual for people to verbally attack those who don't believe what these folks reveal. Want proof? Tell someone you believe the earth is flat, or that life on earth didn't develop as the result of evolutionary processes, or that vaccinations given to kids can be dangerous.

         So, we have faith based either on direct experience or on revelation by a trusted authority. That brings us to God. On what is our faith in God based? The exact same things. Scripture is the record of the God experiences of others, of God's revelation of Himself to others including statements about things that had not happened at the time of the experience, but did happen later. Archeological findings have verified historical claims made in Scripture.  Critical analysis of Scripture have verified the reliability of the contents of Scripture. 

      In addition to Scripture, there is the history of the Church, both good and bad. What has been made clear repeatedly throughout history is that when Scripture forms the foundation of the life of the Church, good things happen. When the world and its methodology forms the foundation of the life of the Church, bad things happen. 

       Without faith, it is impossible to please God - or anyone else. Without faith, it is impossible to function in the universe. God demands faith for precisely this reason.