Faith found

I’m in my eleventh lustrum now and have finally come to terms with my faith.  It’s perhaps not what many would recognise as a religion but it works for me.  It’s not based upon the worship of a deity or the belief in a messiah or a prophet and it’s not written down in some large tome that requires reading and memorising.  My god doesn’t need me to speak to him or her (it is without gender) but my religion is based upon a faith in the innate willingness of mankind to use all of its strengths and abilities to do good things, to be good.

Throughout history, mankind has strived to understand the environment around him, to understand the elements, disasters, death, disease and love.  He has questioned his very existence and the reason for his presence on the earth and his position within the apparent infinite universe.  But always his knowledge has been bound by the limits of understanding, the limits of science and the limits of experience in which to describe what happens around him.  Beyond that level of understanding god was to be found.

Thunder used to be the anger of the gods and now we understand it as a flash of static breaking the sound barrier as it leaps from earth to cloud to balance the pent up potential.  Natural disasters such as earthquakes used to be considered in a similar way or as acts of vengeance and now we understand them as the release of huge frictional forces built up through the movement of the earth’s crust.  Each time a new discovery is made science leaps forward and god’s realm seems to be pushed back but there is always more to wonder at than the sum of all of our knowledge.  The recent discovery of the Higgs boson pushes the interface apparently further and deeper.

My god is a small word to describe the limits of my understanding.  My god is a small word to describe a very large void.  Everything that lies within my grasp is science and everything that lies beyond it is god.  My religion requires me to push back this limit, continue to improve my knowledge and question everything as only a true understanding can lead to enlightenment.  The more I seem to understand, the less I seem to know.  The closer I get to my knowledge horizon the more unanswered questions are laid out before me. 

And my god is always there, just beyond my intellectual reach.