FAITH

A teacher of mine once told me, something that I will never forget. He told me that knowledge is actually made up of 2 parts. The first part is fact, the second is belief. When someone believes that something is true, this is usually due to obtaining sufficient evidence or proof that has managed to persuade his thinking. Thus as his belief becomes a fact, it becomes imprinted into his brain as knowledge. Yet however, sometimes we can believe in something and yet it might not be a fact. Taken as truth until proven otherwise right? And yet at the same time, there are universal truths that are still not believed by people. An example would be the belief in the middle ages that the sun revolved around the earth, yet is has always been an eternal fact that it’s the earth that revolves around the sun. Yet when your belief is backed up with a fact, one gets an intersection of both worlds and that knowledge becomes faith.

You might be saying that this has nothing to do with whatever I am going to say next but in actual fact it does. I am sure many of you have read or seen in the media about that controversies which have been surrounded the book the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and the upcoming movie starring Tom Hanks as the lead. My belief that the theory as described in this work of fiction is blasphemous but the book is great. I honestly have read most of Dan Brown’s works and I acknowledge that he is a great writer who is able to capture the imagination of the reader with the many twists and turns in the plots. The keyword here is fiction. If you look for this book either in the library or your local bookstore, you would notice that it is placed under the fiction category. Doesn’t that explain it all? If it is fiction, although the book is written by a great writer, why should it be taken as fact? The theory is definitely not a fact as explained in the very genre of the book. How can it be taken as belief? One might say that my view in indeed biased as I am a Christian after all. However if what the book said was true, wouldn’t it be placed under a more suitable category? And of course there is tons of evidence both from religious and non-religious scholars, academics if you would say, which contradicts the theory. Yet there is none concrete enough to support it. Doesn’t that explain it all?

Like I said earlier, knowledge is a mixture of belief and fact, I have my own beliefs, which I personally feel have been supported by fact, either in “hardcopy” or simply by experience. That is simply what I believe and what my faith is based upon. But isn’t everything about faith after all?
:D