Sunrise

Often in a conversation on the meaning of faith, someone will invoke the idea of the sunrise to underline their point. They may say "I have faith that the sun will rise in the morning" or "I am certain the sun will rise in the morning." They probably won't say "I believe the sun will rise in the morning" and are even less likely to say "I hope the sun rises in the morning" unless they are wishing for cloudless skies.

Often, such discussions take place in the evening when the sun is not visible directly. But we "know", we “have faith” that it is shining somewhere and that it will return to us the next day. Otherwise it isn't something we normally think about; we simply take it for granted.

But when we look at the sun, how certain are we that it is really there?

Behind the veil

It is mildly ironic that we use the sunrise to illustrate what faith means - because it’s not that straightforward.

Have you ever considered what would happen if the sun winked out of existence? Just suddenly catastrophically removed itself from our universe? Of course it would get very dark and cold - and very quickly we would all die. But what is the first thing that would happen?

"It would suddenly go dark" would be the most common answer. Is that right? It takes 8 minutes for the light from the sun to reach us on earth; we are seeing it as it was in the very recent past. So it would continue to shine for 8 minutes even if it wasn't actually there.

Some smart person might then suggest that it would continue to shine but reduce in size. Why? Because the earth is in orbit around the sun. If the sun's gravity no longer held us we would break free and start drifting off into empty space, moving away from where the sun had once been so that it appeared to start shrinking in our sky.

Clever eh? So the first thing that would happen is that the earth would abandon its normal trajectory.

But hold on. Aren't we told that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light? If the sun starts to shrink in the sky, indicating that the earth has broken free of the sun's orbit and that the sun is therefore no longer there, then that information has reached us faster than the light from the sun (or lack of it). And that breaks a fundamental law of physics...

This is what is known as a thought experiment, one that in this case might lead to a protracted discussion on Einstein's general theory of relativity - too much of a digression here. The point is that something we all take for granted - that if the sun shines it must be there - is actually subject to a much more complicated dynamic than most of us have thought about.

The faith conundrum

And so it is with faith. We Christians refer to it constantly but rarely do we define it. After all, we know what it means - until we think about it.

We have heard that we are justified by faith; that salvation comes through our faith. (1 Peter 1:9, 2 Timothy 3:15)

We feel that it is in some way a stronger, more convicted form of hope, and that it must be better than belief. For the Devil, it is said, believes in God but isn't of the faith.

We know that faith isn't certainty because certainty implies no doubt, and something about faith suggests the possibility of doubt.

But we are often taught that doubt is a sin. So is faith good and doubt bad, even though the two seem to go together like two sides of a coin? Can we have one without the other?

"Faith is believing something you know ain't true," said Mark Twain. And that would certainly distinguish it from hope, or belief, or certainty.

The Bible says…

But the Bible has it's own definition in Hebrews 11:1:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. (NIV)

It's an utterly perplexing verse. It seems to state both that your dreams will come true and, while not quite confirming Mark Twain's definition, to imply that faith makes the uncertain certain, which is illogical. Either something is or it isn't.

Faith: this tiny word with so much mystery and so many contradictions. What does it really mean?

I invite you to join me on a journey of exploration, in a series of upcoming articles that attempts to discover the essence of what faith is really all about.