Faith In The Bible
Many people live their lives based upon their faith in the bible. Explaining this concept of faith isn’t easy because it defies the scientific approach that we give for understanding everything. Faith is something beyond the realm of any kind of scientific explanation, and it is just said to be part of human nature and that we should take it as a given. Of course, that seems to be very hard to comprehend in a world where everything, including the Universe we live in seems to have a basic underlying mathematical explanation. Faith though isn’t confined to just one religion but it is a basic principle of all religions. Still, it becomes very interesting to see that at a philosophical level all religions have the same basic principles at their core. From this point of view, faith in the bible is no different than faith in the Qur’an.
So what is faith in the bible? Well, for starters it’s the fact that you hold everything that is written in the bible as the literal truth of how everything is. Of course, along with modern understanding about how the Universe works, and what the basic fundamental laws of physics dictate along with every discovery ever made in the field of archeology and history, most educated believers in the word of the bible agree to take the writings in the bible as more of a metaphorical outlook, rather than the absolute and literally truth. By this I mean that they don’t believe that the world was created in 7 days and that dinosaurs never existed, but rather that the bible sets a certain moral conduit that is necessary to exist for people to cohabitate happily and efficiently. Of course the question of actual faith in a superior being still remains. And I think that is a private matter that everyone should think about in seclusion. Taking everything said in the Bible at face value doesn’t seem to be very productive. The institution of Judaic and Christian religions is constructed upon faith in the bible. And as an institution, religion has failed its purpose inspiring many wars, and not following any of the basic principles the bible upholds. In this sense faith in the bible can be seen as a negative aspect. In the sense of moral conduct and the rules we should follow, faith in the bible is a good thing.
Another big debate based around faith in the bible is that of intelligent design versus evolution. Evolution of course speculates that the variety of life we see now on earth has slowly evolved over millions of years from very simple organisms. The theory of evolution was presented by English biologist Charles Darwin, in his book “The origin of species” which appeared at the end of the sixth decade of 18 hundreds, stands at the core of all biological understanding we have today. Of course, for the people who believe in the fact that the word of the bible is the literal truth and for whom faith in the bible is the corner stone of their lives, evolution isn’t supposed to exist.
On the other hand, a theory took shape in order to reconcile the theory of evolution with faith in the bible. It’s called intelligent design. The theory speculates that indeed evolution exists but that there had to be an intelligent designer that created the basic organisms from which life evolves. The people who believe in intelligent design challenge the theory of evolution in one of its basic principles. The theory of evolution speculates that every stage of evolution of single biological system had to have benefits on its own. Therefore no small evolution could occur without it being useful. Intelligent design wanted to show that there are some biological systems for which this is not true. In other words, their aim was to find an organism that had no use for every little part of its biological mechanism except after all the pieces had finished evolving. Evolution based on the idea that that specific organ or part of the body will be useful only after several other evolutions in order to make a complete system doesn’t exist. And this is eventually what scientists have proven, and why evolution is the only scientific theory accepted by the US government to be taught in schools.
Still, faith in the bible is very important for a lot of people in every corner of the globe. Science has dismissed the fact that the bible presents the literal truth of how everything happened to be, but the bible seen in a more metaphorical sense is a very good guidebook to what decent, moral human behavior should be. The only problem that I see with faith in the bible is fanaticism. Every religion should be tolerant toward every other religion, and all people should be more tolerant towards everybody else’s thoughts and beliefs.
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