Q:
I
am a college student and as I go through my education I learn more of
philosophy.
My problem is I think I can't just believe in God, it's like this with
all the complications and mysteries in this universe how can everything
be answered simply by saying "have faith". I know the philosophies of
Anselm
and Aquinas but its just blind faith in something we can't see or
feel. To be honest, I wish I could believe more
because I feel empty without it. Do I need just blind faith?
A:
When I was in college my
problems usually revolved around finding
enough money for my roommates and I to buy another case of Black Label.
College seems different today.
Well, your concerns about
the relationship between
philosophy and faith are common. But what might be encouraging is that
you can find many philosophers who do believe in God.
The great and ancient
philosophical minds like
Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, etc...believed in a God. An Unmoved Mover.
Now this was before Christianity, of course, so I'm not saying they
believed
in Christianity. But their study of the meaning of life didn't negate
the
possibility of there being a God. And plenty of the great minds in
philosophy
for the past 2,000 years have argued, intellectually, there is a
rational
argument for belief in God.
Faith, of course, is
something that can never
be fully explained and rationalized...or it wouldn't be faith. It is a
gift we need to open ourselves up to receiving - but having a
belief
system does not mean you have to have totally blind faith, either.
We may have to accept that
not everything in our
world can be completely understood intellectually. There are some
questions
of the human heart that simply can't be understood in a scientific or
philosophical
way.
One example is love; a
topic I know absolutely nothing about. But that's another story.
Anyway, love isn't necessarily
something you can over-intellectualize (that's probably not a word, is
it? I'm kind of under-intellectualized, you can tell). And so sometimes
we just have to allow ourselves to be into it.
The fact that you feel an
emptiness inside may
be the very "proof" that there is indeed something out there that will
fulfill you: God. Even a God you can't understand fully. (Though, to be
honest, would you really want to believe in a God you could understand
fully, anyway?)
