⛰️Choosing Faith

People often say science disproves the divine. The world wasn’t created in seven days; the universe unfolded over billions of years. Yet in the Lex Friedman/Dr. Kirtley podcast, when Lex asked Dr. Kirtley what surprised him most, he answered simply: “That it all works.” The strong force, the weak force, gravity, the Earth’s precise orbit… so many variables must align perfectly for life to exist at all. The more we learn, the more improbable it seems, and the more questions emerge.

One of the oldest is the problem of evil: If God exists, why do bad things happen? Is God unable to stop suffering, or unwilling? It is a difficult tension with no tidy resolution.

Somewhere in that uncertainty, faith emerges. If proof were abundant, it wouldn’t be faith; it would just be fact. Faith is believing in something when the evidence challenges your logic. It is choosing to trust in goodness even when you have seen enough of life to know how much darkness there can be.

The older I get, the more good and bad I encounter, and the harder that choice becomes. I recently learned that Theodore Roosevelt lost his wife and his beloved mother on the same day. In his diary he wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.” And yet, somehow, he found light again. He chose faith in people, in purpose, in life.

I hope that at the end of mine, I can say the same: that despite all the evidence of the bad, I chose the good.