Flotsam and Jetsam

I decided not to go to work today. I cannot say that I stayed home either, because I don’t really have a proper ‘home’ at the moment. My belongings are partly in South City, and partly in the new house in Pinggiran Putra. And I stayed at Dawn’s place last night. I made up my mind to make sure I move all the other things today. I managed to clean my aquarium before transporting it and my bed to the new house. After setting up the aquarium (there was one casualty though. One of my rummy-nosed tetras died), I reconstructed the table that I had dismantled and then went back to South City for another trip. On the way back, I bought some sponges for my aquarium filter, bought clay to fix the leaking toilet, and bought metal bars so that I can hang my curtain. Now I only need to borrow the drill from Alvin.

I drove Agnes car to Puchong so that she could get it repaired. Then we went for dinner together at Secret Recipe. We went back to South City again to get my car and the remaining stuff in the house. Finally, it was back to Dawn’s apartment for a bath and some rest. I picked up ‘Finding Faith’ by McLaren (which I bought while at One Utama on Sunday) and read a little.

McLaren gives a list of descriptors of what he would consider as ‘bad faith’.

1. Bad faith is based solely on unquestioned authority
2. Bad faith is based on pressure or coercion
3. Bad faith is often the result of a psychological need for belonging
4. Bad faith appeals to self-interest and base motives (to be rich, comfortable, lazy etc.)
5. Bad faith is arrogant and unteachable
6. Bad faith is dishonest
7. Bad faith is apathetic (meaning it does not inspire action)
8. Bad faith is a step backward (an excuse for immaturity, so that others can make decisions for me)

As Christians, we all live by faith. There are a lot of things and ideas that we cannot know for certain, but which we can believe by taking a giant leap of faith. Even for those Christians who claim to have the answers because they say that the Bible provides a direct revelation from God, there is still a large amount of faith involved. How do we know for certain that the Bible is the direct revelation from God? How do we know that in all the years of copying and passing down of the manuscripts that the Bible has not been corrupted? How do we know if the translations of the Bible that we have convey the correct meaning of the passage which the original author intended? How do we know if our interpretation and understanding of the Bible is completely accurate?

On the other hand, science too, involves a huge amount of faith. The fact that we assume that everything in the universe must obey the laws of logic is in itself a step of faith. We have faith in consistent empirical data and measurements, even though history has shown time and time again, that our theories can be wrong or incomplete. We make all sorts of assumptions in our mathematical formulations and we have faith that these assumptions are plausible. We have faith that the information other researchers report is true. Even though the theory of evolution still has lots of gaps and problems to which we have yet to find solutions, many of us already believe in it by faith. Albert Einstein has a few things to say:

As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

The mechanics of discovery are neither logical nor intellectual. It’s a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure, intelligence and analysis and experiment confirm (or invalidate) the intuition. But initially there is a great leap of the imagination.