Seeing Is Not Believing ?

Dear friends:

Seeing is believing, right?  Think again! Don't we see Sun rise, Sun set, everyday? Do we believe the Sun rises in the east everyday? No more, why? (Since Copernicus' discovery of Sun centered solar system, we no longer believe what we see about sunrises, sunsets.)

Can our eyes fool us? You bet! All the optical illusions, stunt magic shows can easily fool us. When we are driving, if we believe what we see, every road disappears at the far end, right? That shows simple limitation of our eyesight. But our brains adjust the perspectives and common sense make us bravely drive further ahead knowing that is continuity of the road. We do believe the road ahead continues though our eyes seem to tell us otherwise, right? That is a very basic faith (seeing is not believing or believing contrary to what we see with our eyes.) we exercise all the time when we drive, right?

Let me recall my first experience of driving through the most crookedest street in SF( or in the world? Owing to the protests of the residents along the Lombard street, ( see the above picture ) non-residents are no longer allowed to drive through that crookedest section on weekends since June 2014.)

That was more than 35 yrs ago when I was still quite young.  One day my cousins and their families from LA visited us. My husband had to work that day, so I had the responsibilities to drive them around for sightseeing in Bay Area. Guess what? They wanted to visit the most crooked street in SF--that is Lombard St. At first, I wanted to let my cousin-in-law drive our full sized Ford station wagon but he, being a quite new driver, shrank from doing so. So the duty fell on my shoulder though I hadn't driven through that section myself up to that time. I gathered all my courage to drive there. It was scary, because the street looked so narrow to me as if I would bump into the curves anytime. However, when I drove into it, to my great relief, it was still wide enough for the full sized wagon to winding around. After we went through the most crooked street, I parked the station wagon down the slope in an area with slanting parallel parking spaces. So we took pictures there for my historical virgin drive. Then I encountered the problem; because of the extreme long hood of the 8 cylinder station wagon, I couldn't see the street under my car when I sat at the driver seat. So I had to drive with faith--believing that down there is a street under my station wagon for me to drive down the sharp hilly slope. Nevertheless, this faith is not a blind faith, because I did check the street down there before entering my station wagon.Likewise, a person shouldn't leap into a dark swimming pool without first checking if the pool has filled with water. Our faith shouldn't be blind and out of checking of reality. Agree?

I'd like to share this link and some of its content with you below for you to think further.

What If You Can't Be Reasonable Without Faith?

...For example, your senses may tell you that the Sun circles the Earth. If we look up, we watch it; we can see it with our eyes. Isn't that enough proof? No, it isn't. Isn't that empirical evidence? Yes, but just a bit of empirical evidence alone may lead you astray. Just because we see something with our eyes it is not necessarily the end of the matter. How do we know that our eyes are not telling us the truth? We have to find new facts and we then use our reason to compare different sets of data.

When Copernicus offered his model of the solar system where the earth circles the sun, part of the driving nature to his belief is that the Creator of the world would prefer simpler and more beautifully designed way to arrange the planets' motion:

For Copernicus as for many ancient philosophers the sky is the visible God; therefore the study of the movement of the celestial bodies is the most excellent way to the invisible God. The Creator is the great architect of all things; in the cognition of the mathematically simple structure of the universe man will become united with Him. It is suggested that these theological ideas gave Copernicus the pertinacity to work out his heliocentric system despite the misgivings of contemporary Aristotelian physicists.2

Copernicus, then, sought to explain the universe that was as satisfying to his faith as it was to his eye. He dedicated the book containing his findings to Pope Paul III and said:

I am not so much in love with my conclusions as not to weigh what others will think about them, and although I know that the meditations of a philosopher are far removed from the judgment of the laity, because his endeavor is to seek out the truth in all things, so far as this is permitted by God to the human reason, I still believe that one must avoid theories altogether foreign to orthodoxy.3

There was no way to deduce Copernicus' view using sense data alone. Copernicus showed mathematically why his model made more sense, and part of the attractiveness of his model was its simplicity and beauty. But Copernicus says that he wished to remain orthodox in his understanding of the world and it was his use of reason as given by God that led him to his view of a sun-centered solar system. Metaphysical faith helped propel the Copernican model forward.

When one seeks to be reasonable, it means that he must weigh all the information at his disposal. That may include considering ideas that are not based in empirical observation alone, but ones that have a basis outside of nature. If God's existence makes more sense out of things like the emergence of life from nonlife, the emergence of consciousness and the orderly nature of the universe, then, barring actual evidence to the contrary, it would be unreasonable for us to believe there is no God.