I Don’t Believe, But I Still Have Faith

I don’t follow a traditional path of faith. I haven’t since–well, ever, to be honest–but I stopped the church-going and the like when I was a teenager. (I would have done it sooner, but escaping required a car.) Some would say that my religion is science and secularism. Perhaps. Even if that is so, I have never been able bring myself to say that I’m an atheist. Why? Here’s why:

This image is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field: this galaxy-studded view represents a “deep” core sample of the universe, cutting across billions of light-years. Those points of light? Not stars but additional far-off galaxies.

Here’s the thing: when you crunch the numbers–how each of those blobs is a galaxy, our own Milky Way galaxy has well over 100,000,000,000 stars, the number of planets orbiting those stars, and so forth…well, you come to realize how amazingly insignificant we are on this little blue marble.

On one hand, this all but takes the idea of deity out of the picture…at least a being who actually gave a flying fig about us. It would be like you caring passionately about the fears and desires of a single microbe on one (and only one) grain of sand not only in the Sahara desert, but in all of the deserts and beaches in the world (and then some). Seems sort of silly.

Yet, on the other hand, this very insignificance still keeps a small ember of faith burning inside me. The idea that there is something bigger than just us puny little lifeforms on this bit of damp rock orbiting a wholly unremarkable star. If there isn’t something more, and if we don’t happen to find a way to infect the universe with our own brilliance in the next few billion years, then it all seems rather pointless. So what if Da Vinci created the Mona Lisa, or the Greeks built the Parthenon? Who’d care that the Beatles conquered America or that Hitler had been thwarted? In the grand scheme, it was totally pointless.

Pointless…unless. And that’s the thing you see. That ineffable something that says that there’s a point, even if any particular person is just the briefest of flashes in the grand universal calendar.

And so, I can’t be an athiest. I still have hope that there is a point. Is it likely? The skeptic in me says no. But I still hope.

That said, I have little patience with organized religion in general and fundamentalism in particular. It seems to me that people who attend services of any faith do so because they don’t truly believe but want to. The fact is that it’s so much easier to believe if someone else is telling you how to do it. Sadly, it also means that you are ceding your own mind to someone else–giving them unwarranted power. It’s just like in school when it’s so much easier to simply copy or recite an answer than to figure out how to do it on your own.

Faith encourages people to assemble the symbols and rituals they need to feel connected with that which they believe to be greater than themselves. Perhaps it’s irrational. Perhaps it’s what many need to survive to the next day. Often that’s called religion. Some might give that label to science. The thing is that it doesn’t matter so long as you strive to be better today than you were yesterday. In the end, it’s really pretty darned simple: Be good to others; try to not be afraid.