David Chen

9/17/02

Prof. Lappin

Human Psych.

I was running down the hall at 2:00 am stressed out, but just slightly energized. Here I was, living on the very end of the hall running all the way to the other side of the hall without even knowing why. Why did I go over there towards the one glowing light that shone bright on a school night? I could have shut my door and hopped into bed, which was probably what I should have done. I had school the next morning at 8:00 am! I didn’t though, maybe it was because I was hyper and just wanted to run around to see what other people were up to or maybe something unexplainable was pulling me over. However I look at it now, the only thing that matters is that I was there. Now you wonder, what could be so interesting about being in another guy’s dorm room at 2:00 am on a school night? That is what I thought to; when I walked in, there were two guys just chilling out talking about something related to the bible and church. What made me want to stay? I will never know because I just stayed. It didn’t seem all that interesting at first, but the more they talked, the more curious I got, and the more they told me about Christianity and God, the more I wanted to listen and find out more. At first, I couldn’t understand how in the world people could follow something so blindly without actually knowing if what they believed in was the truth. Then, after two hours of talking, arguing, discussing, questioning, laughing, and even guitar strumming…it finally hit me. We as humans have the innate desire to know and understand everything that relates to us. Adopting a religion, a God, is a way for people to know everything they feel they need to know. Not knowing why we are alive on this planet and not knowing what will happen after we die are two questions that I think every single human being on this earth would want to know.

These are two questions that are probably the most thought about, yet still the most undefined and mysterious. Yes, there are always new scientific discoveries that try to explain the unexplainable questions but these explanations do not make us feel like we have anything to look forward to after life, it makes us seem insignificant. We as humans want to feel like we are actually worth something and that is where religion plays a part. Perhaps there really is a God and everything in the bible is true. However, even if there is not, the millions of people who are religious still truly believe that they have found the answers to the world’s most difficult questions. For these people, answering these questions with the word of God may make them feel more special than anything else they can do with their lives. Now, here I was at 5:00 am walking back to my room after seeing and almost understanding a whole new world of beliefs and lifestyles. When I thought about it some more I realized that I understood more of why religion was important to some. However, the doubts I have garnered from years of schooling in the sciences kept me from truly believing in something that addresses my most difficult questions. I guess those who have decided to whole-heartedly believe in religion or science have acquired that essential human knowledge. There is no right or wrong thing to believe because when it comes down to it, none of us really know. I guess all we can do is play games with our brain and believe in whatever makes us feel content with ourselves.

It’s quite amazing how big a part language affects our morals, ideas, and beliefs. Half of the things we believe to have experienced and learned from arise out of books, and for the religious people, the bible. The bible, words that have been read and preached for hundreds upon hundreds of years, is the perfect example of how huge an impact language has affected how people live their lives. People quote passages from sections of the bible to point out something they are trying to get across to others. They also use passages as moral motivation, and to some extent, certain bible features are actually incorporated into the societal norm such as the Ten Commandments. Some people may say, "yeah, I believe in God but I’m not going to waste my time going to church and learning about the bible." After talking with those two guys in my dorm the other night, I realized that going to church and learning about the bible are ways of communicating to God that is comprehensible to humans. Using language through speech and words on a page, they are able to "create a system for creating, comprehending, and communicating their ideas and images" about everything from the morals that God wishes for them to uphold to the rich history of the Christian religion. Without language there to aid them in their religious endeavors, the path to the "kingdom of heaven" would not only be much harder to arrive at, it would be difficult to just find it.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, science seeks the answers to those unexplainable questions not by relying on faith but human fact and intuition. When a scientific theory turns into fact, almost no one doubts it. Millions of people may doubt the existence of a God, but I do not think anyone doubts that 4 + 4 = 8. Then why doesn’t everyone just believe in science since it provides answers to questions that people have proven to be true? The problem is that science does not provide a perfect answer for every question. Questions of existence, life, and death can only be answered based on observations and ultimately, theories. No matter how sophisticated current scientific instruments may be, there are still some questions they can’t answer. Nowadays, they are able to do gene mapping to find out what characteristics you have when you are still a baby, however, they still cannot find out what happens to us after we die. Scientifically speaking, we get recycled back into the ground. The particles that used to make us up no longer make us up for they become dispersed into the earth and the air. Sure, we can all agree that this is what happens to our physical body after we die but what happens to our spiritual belonging. Would our soul continue to live on? Would we still have free will? Consciousness? A concept of self? Hooking our bodies up to a brain imaging machine after we have died would suggest that there is no longer any brain activity, which would suggest that in eventual time we will lose the things that the brain allows for us to do. Isn’t this a more realistic way of looking at our existence? From this perspective, one can finally understand why there are so many people who believe in a religion, and yet why so many people do not.

Science and religion are two very different but closely joined ways of looking at the questions that hover over our essence of life on earth and beyond. They try to answer the same questions but come up with completely different answers. So which one are we supposed to believe? Science is logical, intuitive, and for the most part reliable. I can see why some people believe in all the theories scientists have come up with to explain our existence on this planet and this universe. They base their theories on facts! Their ideas are consistent with everything else that we have experienced on this earth. We know that there is pain, suffering, and injustice…life is not supposed to be explained in a nutshell. It only seems logical that once we die, our life has ended and our existence has ended. We are but only a miniscule part of this vast universe. We are but one person in a million people, one organism within billions of organisms, one dot on a planet, one speck of a particle in a gigantic galaxy filled with particles. In the scientific grand scheme of things, we are virtually nothing.

However, that is a difficult concept for many of us to understand and accept. We want to believe that our existence is much more special. We want to believe that we are living for something worthwhile and that we ourselves are important. Religion gives people that outlook. Connecting us to God, making him our Father gives us the ability to feel safe that our Father will watch over us and give us a purpose to live. No longer are we just a speck of a particle; we are the sons and daughters of the most powerful being in our world. I’m not saying that religious people found a way to escape from the inevitable, scientific truth because we honestly do not know the truth. Perhaps we are just a speck, and perhaps we are the children of God…the important thing is to live our life in a way consistent with what we believe in.

Our brains are made for us to think and acquire knowledge. When we doubt what we think about and what we believe to be true knowledge, we need to take a leap into faith. The faith does not have to be in God, the faith does not have to be in science, but it has to be in something. If we don’t have faith in something than we cannot encompass all the beauties of life, love, passion, and happiness. In essence, our lives no longer become worth living. However, judging from all the happy people I see every single day, I would say that most of us definitely do have faith in at least something.

Laying in bed on that early school morning/night, I couldn’t help but start to think what I wanted to truly believe in and have faith in. When people ask me what I believe in, I tell them "I don’t know yet". They immediately say, "So you don’t believe in anything?" I now realize that it’s not that I don’t believe in anything, it’s just that I haven’t found what I believe in. I know I have faith in something and I believe it’s something worthwhile and righteous. For the moment however, all I can do is live my life and have faith that whatever it is that I believe in will be brought to me one day. The next time someone asks me what I believe in, I’ll tell them what I tell people when they ask me what my major is… "Undecided".