Faith vs. Logic

I still remember that as a kid I used to wake up with a present under my pillow each year on Christmas mornings. I obviously thought it was Santa Claus, but one fine day while I was bragging about my Christmas presents in school, my friend asked me if I knew that it was all a hoax. I confronted my parents and they told me that it was them all this while. And then, suddenly everything fell into place, those secret shopping trips, the leftover gift wraps, everything!

Now when I think about it, God is the Santa Claus and science plays the role of parents. News flash: It was science the whole time. And science has been trying to tell us that it is not God who delivers these presents all the way from North Pole but Science who actually observes and then takes the time to find the presents. But we just won’t listen, like a stubborn kid who wants to hang on to the illusion of a fat man with a long beard carrying a bag full of presents.

But, for a brief period of time, this illusion actually made me feel better, and the presents helped me get through those mundane Christmas mornings. So, does faith hold a stronger position in human consciousness than logic? After all, we need a false beacon of hope to guide us to better days, till our logic gets us there.

People like order. They like when things are explained, even if they are not true. They think that the universe and its existence is as simple as they can imagine. But the reality is, it’s not! Back in those days we were too ignorant to understand the concepts of space-time, relativity etc. So we made up lies. We made up lies to fill these holes, and we kept filling them up till we were comfortable with how it stands.

However, faith in itself is a strong force that binds us all together. Belonging to a certain community that shares their beliefs and follows the same moral standards makes us feel better about ourselves. But when did all this imposition come into the picture? What if I want to be a part of another community that believes in Stephen Hawking?

 Denying religion altogether seems nonsensical to me. We can never have a world full of rational people who talk in fluent Physics and believe that Mathematics is the programming language of reality. But we also can’t live in a world solely comprising of hope, love and faith with no logic behind our actions whatsoever.

I don’t know if I’m an atheist or an agnostic, basically, I don’t want to logic my way out of this. Some days of the year it’s nice to sit back and hope that somebody out there will take care of everything, eventually. And some days it’s nice to debate with Nikhil about the existence of molten iron rain on brown dwarf stars.

Well, what can I say? If you have faith that you can slide inside a black hole into another dimension without being stretched like spaghetti, then maybe science fiction is your reality!