Current mood:	peaceful
Current music:	Science - System of a Down

It's Faith.
You live by faith everyday. I'll define faith as putting trust in something you cannot directly prove to be true; while dictionary.com defines faith as:

1 Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.
2 Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.

You put faith in the fact that when you close your eyes, the world around you still exists, despite the fact that you cannot see it. You put faith in atoms, and even subatomic particles, that they exist, even though even the most powerful of electron microscopes can only offer strange computer-enchances images of atoms; and we cannot see subatomic particles. You put faith that the earth has gravity and that the sun and other stars and that other planets exist even though you can't wake up and see pluto out of your window in the night sky. You trust that pluto is even a planet, and not some rogue asteroid.

The absolute minimun faith and the absolute maximun in radical scepticism would be existentialism: "I think, therefore I am." that, the only thing you can be sure of is your own existence and the rest is mere speculation and probability.

But here's the problem: you cannot live without faith. The ultimate in existentialism is a really crappy life, and eventually suicide.

Take it one step further. I was sitting in church this morning and my pastor was trying to prove the ressurection of Christ scientifically. He tried, but all the while I was thinking that the ressurection, like so many other things, boils down to faith. You have to trust that there are some things that just cannot be proven through the scientific method, or human reasoning. How arrogant would we be to place ourselves at the center of the universe, and how foolish and stupid it would be to think that our 8 pounds of fleshy mass we call our brain, could ever comprehend some of the universe's greatest mysteries. The pyramids? You can speculate all you want but you have to trust that you may never know why the hell they even exist.

Getting back on track though, I'm not suggesting that the ressurection of Christ is purely a matter of faith. Because, believe me, there are a boatload of scientific reasons why historians argue either side. But it's a matter of faith, if you are even going to believe them, or even trust the evidence, or even the existence of truth.

Perhaps, then, humbleness is the greatest of all virtues. Realizing that you don't and cannot know everything. and you know what? It's okay. You don't have to. Trying to reason out everything will eventually lead you back to where you started - empty, alone and stupid.

As Socrates has demonstrated, to be wise is to know your own ignorance.