Faith is personal: it comes from the heart

If science deals with hypothesis and theory, and philosophy with systems and patterns of belief, it is faith that is required to grasp the existence of God, suggests Mark Buckle.

Ever considered a creator of all things? I still have the letter I received from a young lady in a communist country approximately one year after my return to New Zealand.

Raised in an education system that carefully taught atheism, she was confused when we told her about belief in God.

Before we left her city a few days later a remarkable thing happened: she believed in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

How can someone so quickly change their unbelief to belief?In my experience most people consider the thought of a God, a supreme being, at various times throughout their lives.

Some people who are in no way "believers" find themselves positively obsessed with the notion and for others it is nothing but a passing thought that flits in, finds no place to perch, and exits, leaving no trace of ever being there.

Perhaps for most though, speaking of "non-believers", the experience is somewhere in between these extremes.

Such a concept is of such magnitude that it rates, perhaps, almost as highly as issues of climate change and "global warming".

(Oh, how my hopes have been so far falsely raised on hearing that Dunedin's temperature would steadily increase!)But seriously, if a supreme being exists, we find an extensive raft of questions that require answers.

To begin with, as human beings, despite our recent attempts to "love our planet", our actions show clearly that we see ourselves at the very top of the food chain and answer to no-one.

If God as supreme exists, wouldn't we would have to completely reassess this viewpoint? Perhaps many of us would like to conclude the search there, just in case we actually find something!But as I've heard so many ask, how can we ever be certain that God exists?What reasons are there to believe?Science deals with hypothesis and theory.

An idea is proposed; if experiments cannot disprove it, it is accepted as a theory.

If we were to seek God using some form of science alone, we would strike a major problem straight away: exactly what, rather who, are we looking for? Suddenly we turn from science to philosophy.

While philosophy deals with systems or patterns of belief, the existence of God, and in what form or nature, can not be proved or, for that matter, disproved.

Philosophy only gives us frameworks to understand ideas.

Something of a different realm altogether is required to grasp such things as the existence of God - that thing is faith.

Faith is a very personal matter because it comes from the very heart of a person and cannot truly be engineered from the outside.

It may be shaken, stirred or even dislodged by external factors, but only with some involvement from the individual's will.

Faith is what is believed as fact to the point that tangible action is taken upon it, even upon it alone.

Faith is where the spiritual world transcends into the physical.

Belief can be an extremely subjective thing. Just ask any practising psychiatrist about religious delusions and you will see that simply because someone believes something with all their heart, it does not necessarily make that thing true.

Therefore, perhaps, the closest thing to evidence of an unseen supreme being is in the lives that are joined to him by faith, becoming more like the image of himself as he has previously described.

But the only way to really know is to exercise faith for yourself.

To quote directly from the letter I mentioned at the beginning (grammar original):"After our meeting every day is a new day, the Spirit is just like golden light from the God, the evil things is faded away and the smell is sweet."

As a Christian and pastor I have consistently seen numerous lives changed for the best by faith in Jesus Christ - people who have never "seen" or "touched" God, but are becoming like the nature he described and recorded in the Bible long ago.

A true follower of Christ may be the only Bible you have ever read.

•Mark Buckle is pastor of Fernhill Church, Dunedin. 

Faith and Reason is a new Friday column in which a broad range of ideas on religion and philosophy will be explored. 

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