without purpose, without hope

Saint Paul wrote, “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.”[1] Several centuries later Saint Augustine wrote in a similar vein that “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”[2] Throughout history there have been and continue to be many things which we can neither see nor verify nor prove yet we accept such things because to do otherwise would make no sense.

Dark Matter

Scientific theories abound which contain no small amount of controversy, especially when the subject concerns the unseen and the unknown. One such theory suggests that approximately 95% of the universe consists of unseen, undetectable, and unprovable dark matter and dark energy. Proponents of the theory have hypothesized that the existence of dark matter and dark energy is accounted for by inference through discrepancies they have calculated that exist in the visible universe. Yet “Important as dark matter is thought to be in the cosmos, direct evidence of its existence and a concrete understanding of its nature has remained elusive.”[3]

If such scientific thought requires a notion of faith as previously described by Paul and Augustine, why then are so many unwilling to have faith in God, an immortal soul, and eternal life after death?

Those who argue against the existence of and necessity for God are often devotees of the theory of evolution as proposed by Darwin and are strongly antagonistic toward any notion of a universe purposefully designed and created by an invisible, omnipotent, omnipresent being. While their arguments are plausible to a point, their reasoning is flawed on several critical points, not the least of which is that evolution remains a highly speculative theory with no empirical evidence or proof of its own validity. What is most compelling is that there are three crucial features of life that evolution cannot account for: the beginning of life, human consciousness, and human rationality or morality.[4] It is to these questions that no one who does not have faith in God can answer and it is exactly these questions to which only God can respond.

Far too many have chosen to ignore the weaknesses in the arguments against the existence of God and have chosen to live their lives as if there was no tomorrow, nothing beyond this life but nothing. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy which examines and studies the nature of knowledge and its relationship to the concepts of truth, belief, and justification.  The epistemology of nothing considers things which lack importance, interest, value, relevance, or significance and nothingness as the state of nonexistence or the property of having nothing.

If we are worth nothing and we die into nothingness, are we then nothing more than creatures without purpose, without hope? I cannot, I will not succumb to the desperate darkness of nothingness for I know through faith that God exists and that nothing is but the absence of God.

[1] Heb 11:1.
[2] Augustine of Hippo, Sermones 4.1.1.
[3] Kroupa, P. et al, Local Group tests of dark-matter Concordance Cosmology: Towards a new paradigm for structure formation, Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2010.
[4] Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2007.