Faith v. Reality Part 1
Faith is a quality independent of that in which we believe.
In other words, in order to have faith in something we must first possess the ability to have faith. Some people claim to have great faith and some people claim to have none. The reality is we all have faith, we’re born with it. The question is where we place it.
I personally think it takes a lot more faith to believe in the non-scientific theory that some way, somehow, a particular combination of elements came together in just the right quantities and at just the right time and temperature to create life. The theory claims that this life form then “evolved” into every living thing that has ever inhabited the planet. It’s never been proven or duplicated and by the way Darwin never even came close to hypothesizing it. But yet people, who have never even opened Darwin’s book “The Origins of Life”, hang his name on it as if that makes it undeniable proof and proceed to call it science.
In this case they take the results, that fact that we exist, and devise a theory to match those results. They tell people like me who chose to believe in God’s creation that our faith is out of touch with scientific reality. But in fact reality doesn’t match their theory, a fact even Darwin admitted in his study of flowers. Reality doesn’t allow me to believe that the DNA and life force of everything that has ever lived evolved somehow from a single nondescript living cell. If you’re looking for scientific proof, it’s just not there.
The flip side to altering the theory to match the results is when you have faith in something or someone regardless of the results. It is equally misguided and often the result of simply wanting something to be correct so badly that we are willing to ignore all the evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately in the real world wishing and wanting don’t make it so.
Such is the case we currently face in Washington, when the President of Hope and Change is willing to abandon all that has been proven effective for a misguided faith in systems and policies that have been proven ineffective. While this president claims to be a seeker of common ground his actions are anything but conciliatory. To the contrary, what he is claiming as truth is anything but and what he is claiming as a solution is dangerously close to the policies that allowed foreign terrorists to train and carry out the most lethal attack within the United States in our history.
There were two distinctively different speeches last week in Washington DC, one by President Barack Obama at the National Archives Museum and one by immediate past Vice President Dick Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute. Cheney’s speech had been scheduled for several months. Obama’s speech was moved up several days in an attempt to eclipse the former VP. Obama’s speech ended literally minutes before Cheney’s began and his attempt to get out in front of Cheney’s comments was a complete and utter failure.
Cheney spoke facts. Obama, as always, spoke in terms of hopes and dreams. Even congressional Democrats, who have been yearning for definitive direction from this White House, could only feign enthusiasm for yet another Obama speech that was long on criticism of his predecessor but completely devoid of any firm plans or policies of his own. Obama had hoped that his controlled public image and strong rebukes of Bush era policies would sway House and Senate Democrats to support his closing of Guantanamo Bay Detention Center without having a plan of his own as to what to do with the dangerous terrorists housed there. Much like his attempt to quash Cheney he was completely unsuccessful with his own party lawmakers as well.
I plan to detail some of the stark contrasts in these two speeches using their own words and comparing them to actual facts. I invite you to read again tomorrow for what should be a lesson for us all on faith.
By the way, Darwin never used the term “evolution” either.
