What is faith?Program 152

by Ernest O'Neill

What is faith? Well, faith is setting your alarm and going to sleep with absolute confidence that the alarm will awaken you at the right time in the morning; and this, in spite of the fact that the alarm at times, the alarm has rum out of power if it's battery powered, or at times, if it is a very old alarm, its mechanism has stopped working and you have actually missed getting up in time. Yet, you continue to set the alarm in absolute confidence that it will awaken you in the morning.

So, that is faith. It is belief plus action based on reasonable evidence. You get up them and you go into the bathroom, and you confidently turn on the faucet absolutely certain that water will come out. Cold water out of the cold water faucet, hot water out of the hot water faucet, in spite of the fact on some occasions, that has mot happened. Yet, you live by the faith that these things will do what you have observed them doing over a big period of time. And so, your life goes on through the day, by faith. Not absolutely mathematical and scientific certainty, mot absolute precision. But a sure faith and confidence in the light of evidence that you have observed.

If I asked you to bet the life of your dearest little child on the fact that your alarm will go off in the morning, I'm mot sure but that you would mot hesitate and say, "Well, wait a minute." And that's of course what brings in the truth that most of life has to be lived on the basis of faith that is mot absolutely what we would call mathematical certainty.

Indeed, even our mathematical certainty is hardly that. We as scientists say that rays are made up of particles. Them we change our minds and say that they are made up of beams or rays. And so, we're always changing our stance according to either new evidence that has come in or according to better observations that we are able to make of the evidence that we originally observed. And so, even in science, we work to the closest tolerances we cam, but ultimately, we are working to approximations even when we talk about to the nearest millionth of am inch. We're talking imprecisely. And so, most of our life is lived on the basis of faith, and we wouldn't dream of trying to live it any other way.

Now, what we are doing these mornings is beginning to apply faith to the most important of all the basis of our life, the very origin of the world itself. We're saying what is reasonable to believe about the origin of the world. And of course, what I'm suggesting is that it is very reasonable to believe that this world, as we see it today, resulted from a massive explosion-what really was a big bang. That's how the earth was created. And it's reasonable to have faith that that is so, and therefore, that you are on this world as a result of a chance explosion of atoms and neutrons, and that's all the sense there is to it.

And so, you say to me, "Well, wait a minute, now that's certainly not the way this automobile was created, and it's certainly not nearly as complex as this world. Do you really think it's reasonable to believe that?" And then you say to me, "Do you realize that all the ships and the buildings and the villages and the cities that we men have actually put on this earth, they all come to at the most 300 cubic miles, and indeed some would say not more than 100 cubic miles, but the earth itself in comparison to all the man-made buildings and the manmade manufactured objects that we have on the earth, the earth itself is composed of 260,000 million of such cubic miles? Now wait a minute. If it has taken us so much care and so much mental concentration and so much development and evolution of our own abilities to produce 300 cubic miles of creation on the earth in the way of buildings and cities and ships and cars, then is it reasonable really to believe that 260,000 million cubic miles of world itself, with the mountains and the rivers and all the complex mechanisms right down to the smallest amoeba and smallest insect and fly, is it reasonable to have faith that that all was created by an explosion, by a big bang?"

And of course, it is true that it is even more amazing when you expand your consideration to the size of the universe itself beyond the world because the sun is actually far bigger than the earth. And it actually has room for one and one quarter million earths, the sun itself. It's that much bigger than our world. And of course if you go beyond the sun, it itself is only one star among a mighty spherically shaped group of four hundred stars. And the whole relationship of the stars and milky way to one another is another massive creation. In fact, the distances are absolutely almost immeasurable. Light travels at about 187,000 miles a second and the equator of the earth is between 24,000 and 25,000 miles in length. And to star 61 in the Swan, our third nearest neighbor among the fixed stars, even if you were travelling in the fastest express train we have, it would have to travel 60 million years, or 9.7 light years to reach that particular star. And of course if you go into the other constellations, it is even more incredible. In the Pliades, on a photographic plate there are 1681 stars upon an area of the heaven not larger than the disc of the moon, and in the further vicinity, about 5000 more. And the distances between these stars are thousands of millions of light years.

And so, the massiveness of space itself is incredible and mind-boggling. And it's increasingly difficult to believe that all this was created by an explosion. We have not succeeded in creating anything but chaos by explosions. Anybody in Beirut or anybody in Belfast in Northern Ireland will tell you, "Believe me. You might not know it, but explosions don't create, they don't create order. They create disorder. They take the things that we men have made, and they lay them on the ground as shear rubble." So, you may not know it as a scientist, however big bang you have, you don't get things created except chaos.

And so, it would be reasonable for you to say to me that you're expecting me to have faith that all this magnificent creation that we see around us was the result of a big bang? Well that's not consistent with the faith that I express in my everyday life. I don't believe that kind of thing about the things that people make here. I don't look at a RX 7 or I don't look at a Cadilac and say, "That certainly was a massive explosion that produced that complicated piece of mechanism,---1 don't! However many million of years ago the big bang might have taken place, I still don't ever think that a complex mechanism such as we men and women make here on earth, could have been produced by a big band. And I certainly don't think this about something as massive as our universe.

1 don't know if you realize it, but the stars, in regard to space, are incredibly thinly scattered. Actually, if you wanted to look at it as it really is, it's like having a single pinhead every 20 or 60 miles. Or as if one quart of water was scattered over the whole surface of the earth. That is, over about 196 million square miles, you scattered a quart of water, that's about the thinness of the scattering of the stars in space. Now, did all that come about by a big bang? it isn't surely reasonable to have faith in that.