Responding to this reader, another defends faith's reasonability:
Your reader writes:
String theory is a theoretical branch of physics that exists mostly in mathematical models, designed to reconcile two things that we know already to be true (relativity and quantum mechanics). It's an explanation of the gaps in our knowledge, and it may be incomplete. No one is asserting for certain that there are, what, eleven dimensions? They're asserting that if there are, we can explain apparent discrepancies between these two known facts. String theory is an admission of exactly what Aslan is seeking – that our best scientists working with the most advanced technology in the world cannot prove everything.
Much the same can be said about belief in a higher power, at least for me. It is an admittedly incomplete attempt to reconcile apparent discrepancies between known facts. I annoy my fellow believers with my "faith" in science and its ever increasing detail in explaining our physical reality. I know the ridiculous improbability of the divine when compared against all that we can empirically know.
Yet I've had my mother call me from across the country just hours after I was fired, knowing something had gone wrong, down to the minute. I have felt the healing power of Reiki. I have, while blindfolded, "seen" the incoming punch and caught it, while tuned in to (my?) Ki. My wife has been healed of three separate illnesses/syndromes, two of which doctors consider incurable, at two separate Charismatic Christian services. I've met enough people of varying faiths to know that a great many have had very, very hard to explain experiences that Science often dismisses.
I know that these are not empirical evidence; that's kind of the point. I'm a skeptical individual, and have tried to find every possible explanation. All fall short. So I end up with a very skeptical Belief. It is an admission that not everything is provable, an attempt at an explanation of the gaps in what I know to be true. And it grows, shrinks, and changes as I find more things that are true.
So when I bump into the "God probably isn't real" crowd preaching their certainty to me, I am as saddened by their inflexible evangelicalism as I am by the "God is real and he will throw you in Hell if you don't completely surrender to him (in my way, of course) today" crowd. Neither one has much willingness to admit that we see through a glass, dimly.
The Dish 