Belief is More Powerful

Belief is more powerful than knowledge.

We know lots of things, trivial and vital.   We know why the sun sets (it actually does not set, we do, so to speak), why it rains, how time is calculated, where lies the center of the earth, how gravity works and what makes two-year-olds have tantrums.  For many years, mankind believed that science would be the harbinger of Utopia.  All we need to do, they reasoned, is understand what makes life run and we will achieve a deep and abiding universal peace.  Ignorance makes us frightened little people while knowledge heightens our awareness and strengthens our best qualities.

What we discovered on the next decades was that this is not necessarily true.  Religion is not primitive to the psyche and knowledge is not the key to unlock the door to the messianic era.  Instead, modernity has brought about weapons of mass terror and destruction.  Now we can maim and kill thousands without lifting a sword or putting a bullet into a gun.  So much for progress.

All of us will, in our lives, face terrible pain. Will knowledge of the disease or understanding of the odds that tragedy will strike ease our suffering? If hurricanes rend the shoreline, buildings or crops fail how will a scientific understanding help us to cope emotionally? It cannot.  So what if we know the underlying causes of a myocardial infarction?  A heart attack is simply devastating.  Explaining why the stock market crashed will not help those who lost a fortune.

Religion helps to restore the balance where knowledge fails us.  It is the belief of a healing, helping God, which enables.  It is precisely the presence of God that allows a human being to be released from the grip of death and overcome the depression of failure.

More than anyone else, the author of Psalms confronts and tackles the real tragedies of life.  He writes:

Have mercy of me, O Lord,

for I am in distress;

my eyes are wasted by vexation,

my soul and body too.

For my life is spent in sorrow,

and my years in groaning,

my strength fails me because of my flaws,

and my bones waste away.

My fate is in Your hand;

save me from the hands of my enemies and pursuers.

Shine Your face upon your servant,

deliver me in your grace.

Belief is more powerful than knowledge.  It saves us from inner destruction.