What the Universe Taught Me About Faith

ETHAN  EVANS

I believe it takes far more faith to believe there is no God than to believe that God exists.

I was raised as an atheist. Members of my family, led by my father, venerated science. They felt that religion, on the other hand, was unscientific and unproven.

I remember when we were young, my sister confidently asserted that believing in religion should disqualify people from being able to go to college, because it showed that they were just too stupid to attend. Although I was a young child at the time, I argued that they had to attend so they could discover why their beliefs were all wrong.

The surprising thing that I later came to understand is that it actually takes far more faith to be an assured atheist than to believe in God. And the ironic part is that the reasons are largely scientific, versus solely philosophical.

Modern science places the Big Bang at approximately 13.8 billion years ago. Comparatively, the average human lifespan in developed countries covers just over eighty of those years. To help you with this scale, if the entire history of the universe were compressed into five years, a typical human life would last around one fleeting second. Your existence would speedily pass by in much less time than it would take you to read this short sentence. That is the totality of the blink of an eye that we occupy in cosmic history.

Now consider the sprawling expanse of observable space. The same Big Bang left us with a voluminous universe spanning billions of light-years across. We know many stars have planets, and here we are, anchored to just this one. As large as it seems to us, how much of our world has anyone really seen? Even if a person were to spend every second of their life traveling, they could never see more than a small fraction of it. Astronomers suggest that there are more stars in the sky with planets than grains of sand on Earth. Just look at any beach or an aerial view of a sweeping desert and try to contemplate the multiple trillions of grains of sand there. Then imagine: the planets vastly outnumber them all.

In summary, we live for an instant on just one minuscule rock in a huge universe. We are literally less than a tiny fleck on a small speck. That is all we know of this nearly limitless time and space. And yet atheists claim with absolute certainty that they have the answer!

Sure, it takes faith to believe in God. But I believe it takes much more faith to be so certain that in all those billions of years, across all those trillions of planets, that there’s not something larger than ourselves that we don't understand.

This information and logic don’t prove that God exists. I think it clearly demonstrates though that atheism—the lack of belief in God—is a considerably less likely alternative.

And therefore, I choose to believe.