From my recent attempts at unlocking the mysteries of the intangible, I realized that faith is crucial to seeing beyond that which can be seen. The problem is that we are an extremely materialistic society – we love that which is tangible and can be logically reasoned.
That is perhaps why we have a seemingly ingrained attraction to the scientific theories of our existence. For most of us that believe and used to believe in these theories, it seems that few have actually sought to test them. The rest of us just believed in it simply because it was there. It was something that was created by man, and could be observed through the senses.
Take imagination as an example as to how much we like the tangible items of our universe. Imagination is simply the manipulation of mental images that had previously been created through sense perception, but yet we still ridicule it as if it didn’t exist. All the things or thoughts that we imagine must have had some kind of source or occurrence within our lives, but to us, we feel like it had been pulled out of the vacuum of space.
Imagine how we would take to a being that wasn’t at all, in our minds, perceivable. We cannot at all imagine its figure, for it has none that we can hope to observe, even if we were ‘right next to it’. God is such a being. We cannot see him, we cannot smell him, we cannot feel him, we cannot taste him, we cannot establish a mental image of him. But does that mean that he does not exist? This is where I am stuck, at faith. The well-studied and diligent persons of our race have been able (to my knowledge) to logically deduce its existence. But is that all? Is the cup half-full or is it half-empty? Have we reached all that we desire to reach, or have we lost what we used to have?
I am stuck within a dilemma. Imagine you are the captain of a ship, sailing into unknown waters. Your country’s finest map-makers have logically reasoned out a map of the waters, but there is much still unknown. Then, a stranger hands you a chart of the waters ahead. You have the choice of following your own maps, which, though desperately unfinished, are completely accurate as to what they say, or follow the new found map, which, if incorrect, may lead you into a watery grave. To believe in the new map would be to have faith in the revelations that God has given us, through his scriptures or otherwise. But though it may actually be that there is no harm in having faith, it seems like a murky and dangerous area to tread into. Almost as if through a wrong step you might fall into an untimely doom. But alas, the treasure is worth having. Knowledge lies at the end of the hallway, but would you take the first and perhaps last step?
SMIC Perspectives 