There's a Lie In Belief

“There’s a lie in believe.” That’s how my mother taught me to remember how to spell the word believe.

Do you believe that belief is a lie? Do you only believe in what you can see, hear, touch, smell, taste?

If you answered, “Yes!” then I invite you to take a little trip with me into the land of imagination, into the arena of possibility that there is more to the world than meets the eye.

What can the eye see? Here’s a graph of what the eye can see, and all the wavelengths that we can currently measure:


Source: NASA at http://missionscience.nasa.gov/ems/01_intro.html

A Little Slice of the Spectrum

The little rainbow in the tiny slice above the eyeball about 2/3 of the way across, is the area that we can see with our eyes. The colors we see are different wavelengths of light in that tiny band. Bees and butterflies can see in the visible and ultraviolet range, and many flowers have ultraviolet patterns to attract them that we cannot see in visible light. Cats and many other animals can see quite well in the dark while we cannot. Snakes use infrared sensors to help detect prey.

Invisible Light All Around Us

Infrared lightwaves are used in your TV remote control and in thermal imaging, and we can see some of this light with night vision goggles. Did it exist before we discovered it? Of course. Same with X-Rays; we discovered them, we didn’t invent them. They are moving through us and around us right now even though we cannot see or feel them.

So let’s look at some less obvious examples. Ask yourself… Think of someone or something that you love. Can you see love? Touch it, taste it, smell it, hear it?

Can I see my thoughts? Can I prove that they exist? Can they be measured, seen, heard or touched? So do your thoughts exist?

What about the Big Bang? We have scientific descriptions of what happened fractions of a second after it, but cannot measure far back enough to what happened at the moment of creation. If nothing was here, what made it happen?

What Makes Your Heart Beat?

What is it that makes your body breathe and your heart beat? You can say it’s a biological function, an electrical impulse. But what is underneath that? What makes that electrical impulse? How do the heart cells know how to do that? How does the heart know to beat a certain number of times per minute? And how does an intestinal cell know how to allow nutrients into the bloodstream, and keep out that which is not useful?

The other day, a friend studying to be a nurse said, “If you don’t believe in God, study microbiology!” Something astounding is orchestrating it all. Could any human create in a lab a system so complex as a human? Could any human create a tree? Could any human create a solar system? Take a look at the stars and realize that they are floating I a seemingly empty vastness. What keeps them in place? We can explain it scientifically, but what created the laws of gravity and other laws of physics? Why does the universe continuously function according to those laws? What exactly is life? 

I invite you to start asking deeper questions, and to allow a bit of discomfort in the fact that there are some things that we will not be able to explain within our lifetime.

How about you?
Do you believe in things beyond what you can see?