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What is your faith? Some of my atheist friends will say, “I don't have a faith,” but that is not true. The Bible defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). The Greek word for “substance” in this verse is hupostasis, which comes from two words meaning “stand” and “upon.” It is literally our “foundation.” What is your foundational faith?
For most of us, our foundational faith has more to do with our intellectual understanding, values, morals, and decision-making. Hebrews 11 identifies some of those things with scientific accuracy, and most of us can agree on them. Verse 3 says, “By faith we understand that the universe was formed … so that what is seen was not made of what was visible.” Whether you are a Christian or an atheist, you can have faith in that part of the verse. However, the middle of that verse says it was formed “at God's command.” An atheist would disagree that God had anything to do with it but would still agree that “what is seen was not made of what was visible.”
IS YOUR FAITH BLIND?
That raises an important point. Is faith blind? The answer is clearly “no!” We have faith in gravity because, for all our lives, it has functioned the same way. We trust gravity and have faith in it because we have seen it work. We cannot directly see that God commanded the formation of the cosmos. Having faith in the cause of the universe requires a different kind of evidence, because we cannot directly observe the creation of time, space, matter/energy, and life.
Science gives us examples of faith in things we cannot directly see. For many years, scientists debated whether light was a wave or a particle. Scientists who believed light was a wave proved it by showing that light waves exhibited destructive interference. Two light waves can intersect and cancel each other, leaving darkness. Waves can cancel each other, but particles cannot. Experiments also show that light waves can be polarized, and particles cannot. You can shine a light through certain types of crystals, and the crystals will allow only light vibrating in one plane to pass through. There was overwhelming evidence that light is a wave, and 400 years ago that was the faith of most scientists.
The problem with that faith was that there were things light could do that waves could not. Light shining on certain materials could knock out electrons. This is called the photoelectric effect, and we use it in photosensors and solar cells. Waves such as sound waves cannot go through a vacuum because they need a medium to “wave.” Particles can go through a vacuum. Some scientists had such strong faith that light was a wave that they explained how light reaches us from the Sun by saying that space is not a vacuum. They made up a substance they called “aether,” which they said filled the universe and through which waves could pass.
Scientists today have faith in the dual nature of light. It is both a wave and a particle, and aether does not exist. The point is that our faith can change when we see new evidence.
Even our understanding of what God is affects us in a variety of ways. In the distant past, people thought of gods as physical beings that looked like humans. Roman and Greek gods were humans with superpowers. Some people today still view God as a human with human emotions and desires. Life experiences can weaken or destroy that kind of faith. When someone rejects faith in God because of a tragedy in life, the root cause of that rejection is a flawed concept of who God is.
FAITH OR LACK OF FAITH IN GOD
Faith or lack of faith in God can determine the foundation of our lives. The question we must ask is, “What is the foundation (faith) on which I base my life?” For my father, who was an atheist, the foundation of his life was education. His father was a minister, and that faith did not appeal to my father. Instead, he pursued the highest level of education possible, earning a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University under one of the leading educators in his field. He then became a full professor at Indiana University and was recognized as one of the top experts in his field.
After a long career with numerous awards and recognitions, my father retired. None of those achievements and recognitions provided a foundation for him. He dealt with the stress and frustration of his work by drinking. He attended social events only because he had to, and alcohol was the foundation, the lubricant that enabled him to function socially.
Shortly after his retirement, my father developed leukemia. The end of his life was a constant battle to survive, and death was the ultimate tragedy because he died without hope of anything better.
The other problem with my father's lack of faith in God was what it did to and for my mother and my two brothers. My mother was forced to become the family's social director. Social events were her life, and her foundation was recognition from her peers. After my father died, she became the leader of the retirement center where she lived, commanding the respect of everyone there. When she suffered a stroke and was moved to the care center, she was not even allowed to eat with her peers, much less play a role in the social events. She was so mortified and miserable that I had to move her 200 miles to a facility near me, where she was still miserable.
My parents depended on alcohol as a foundation for life, believing it would make everything else function normally. This rubbed off on the rest of the family. Like many people in today's world, the negativity destroyed not only my father's faith but my mother's and brother's faith as well. Faith or lack of faith in God will determine the course of your life.
BUILGING A FOUNDATIONAL FAITH
One facet of faith is that we often share it within families. When a family member rejects the rest of the family's faith, that creates conflict. My parents strongly emphasized education as the foundation on which to build your life. They viewed religion as irrational nonsense that enslaved and restricted humans. At every opportunity, my parents ridiculed religious faith. Hypocrisy, racism, violence, war, and waste provided a constant barrage of good reasons for them to reject faith in God.
One facet of faith is that we often share it within families. When a family member rejects the rest of the family's faith, that creates conflict. My parents strongly emphasized education as the foundation on which to build your life. They viewed religion as irrational nonsense that enslaved and restricted humans. At every opportunity, my parents ridiculed religious faith. Hypocrisy, racism, violence, war, and waste provided a constant barrage of good reasons for them to reject faith in God.
By the time I was eight years old, I adopted my parents' lack of faith and took a leading role in atheism. In junior high, I had a science teacher named Wayne Gross, who made it clear that he believed there was academic evidence that God exists and that the Bible is true. In high school, I had a strong interest and some aptitude in science. In addition, I became infatuated with an attractive young lady who was one of the top students in my high school class.
I did not have any moral values because my parents taught me that educated people realize that life is “survival of the fittest.” I found that this attractive young lady was morally uncompromising, and she based her morality on the Bible. To get her to compromise her morality, I wanted to show her that faith in God and the Bible was educationally absurd. I set out to prove to this girl and to Mr. Gross that educated people who read the Bible would not believe anything in it. Mr. Gross encouraged me to start with Genesis 1. I had stolen a Bible from a motel (there were no Bibles in my parents' library), and I started reading it and researching the words in the original manuscripts to prove it wrong.
As I read the Bible and examined the scientific evidence, I began to reject everything my parents, my peers, and the religious experts of the day told me. In doing so, I began to understand that everything I had ever been told about God and the Bible was wrong. Education was leading me to a new faith, and my parents did not handle it well. They denigrated the faith of Mr. Gross, my girlfriend, and myself.
How faith works in our lives determines the direction we take. Several years later, I was faced with what to do with a child who was born blind, mentally challenged, and with both cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy. This polarized my faith and my parents' faith. My father used a parallel example of buying a car and finding it was defective. “What do you do?” he asked. “You take it back and demand a refund.” Because of my faith, I refused to do that.
EXAMINE YOUR FAITH
I hope you will examine your faith. Look at your foundation and how it shapes the building of your life. Here are some suggestions:
1. DEAL WITH CREATION. You have two choices about how the cosmos came into existence. Either it has always existed, or it had a beginning. As an atheist, I believed that matter/energy was eternal. The Bible clearly states there was a beginning to space, time, and matter/energy.
As I learned about the laws of thermodynamics, it became increasingly clear that matter/energy could not be eternal. If there was a beginning, it had to be caused. We can say we do not know enough to understand the cause. However, the deeper our understanding, the more obvious it is that space and time had a cause outside of space and time. The existence of purpose and design in the cosmos also eliminates chance as a cause.
2. DEAL WITH WHERE YOUR FAITH TAKES YOU. Where did my father's faith in education take him? Did it make him happy, secure, and fulfilled? Examine your faith. Does it give you a reason to live, a purpose in existing? Does your faith allow you to deal with the problems that life brings to us all?
All of us know people who have tried to base their lives on alternatives to faith in God. Does making a lot of money lead to a meaningful life? Does becoming a political leader bring joy, contentment, and peace? Do recreational drugs fulfill us as humans? I have had a lot of adversity in my life, including having a multiple-handicapped child, losing my wife to death, never having much money, and having physical problems and pain. I have struggled, wept, and wondered why, but I have had a good life and have enjoyed it. Do other foundations enable a person to deal with life's problems?
3. LOOK TO THE FUTURE. Now I am nearing the end of my life, but that is only the end of my physical existence. My faith allows me to be confident that something better lies ahead. I have hope and peace in the fact that I will die. I see that I have had a purpose in living, and my feeble existence has left the world a better place than I found it. That is because I have been able to share my faith with others and enable them to find joy in living.
Jesus makes a promise to those who choose to build their lives on faith in God. “Come unto me all of you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and LEARN of me for I am meek and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Matthew 11:28-30). Do not listen to religion or philosophy or the pleasure peddlers of our world who will give you an unproven faith that does not work. Examine your faith and build it by learning and growing in your understanding of God based on his Word.
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Scripture links/references are from BibleGateway.com. Unhighlighted scriptures can be looked up at their website.