Faith and reason are not really like trains in collision – they are more like trains in series: One picks up where the other leaves off.
The scientist’s faith in cause and effect is so intense that he will accept as undisputed fact the existence of an activating force, even if it plainly contradicts rationality.
The Rebbe, Mind Over Matter, p.3.
Kids are weird. All the stuff that we clever, worldly grown-ups so sensibly take for granted, children question. Which parent has not fielded such curve- ball queries as:
“Why is the sky blue?”
“Why does daddy have a moustache and you don’t?”
“Why do people die?”
You stop and think. You wonder at her wondering, take pride in her cleverness, and dig deep into the recesses of your mind to dredge up some long- forgotten explanation. Thinking how best to say it, you repackage the idea, trim off some details, choose easy words, and tell it like it is expecting (naively) that your kid will be satisfied and the matter happily laid to rest.
“The sky is blue because the air scatters around the other colors but lets the blue through.”
“Daddy has a moustache because men have a chemical in their blood called testosterone that makes facial hair grow.”
“People die because their bodies wear out.”
So the kid soaks it up, ponders a bit, rolls his toy car, pats her doll, runs a bit around the room and off you go back to your things, thinking the case is closed until one or two hours or days later when you face the next round of reality checking.
“But why doesn’t the air scatter the blue light?”
“Why don’t you have testosterone?”
“Why do bodies wear out?”
Usually not, but sometimes the questioning turns into a game called Let’s-Keep-Mommy-Talking-as-Long-as- Possible-by-Asking-an-Endless-Series-of-Why’s. But even then, a sincere childish curiosity underlies the game, a need to know the explanation of things.
Of course the game is not restricted to children. The fact that most of us outgrow our inherent curiosity about the world is not so much because we know the answers but more because as life grinds on, we become dulled to the wondrous workings of the world around us. By the time we hit our age, the only “why” most of us ask is “why me?” Most of us except scientists of course.
Maybe scientists are more sensitive. Maybe they just never grew up. Or maybe it’s an overactive Why Chromosome on their DNA. Whatever it is, the question remains: Why the Why?
Answering this turns out to be more important than it looks at first, because the uniquely human habit of seeking explanations drives two of the most powerful social forces at work today: science and religion. And since the two seem all too often at loggerheads, it may be worth the effort to investigate how one little question can generate two such radically different answers.
As with many other questions, we can use the Abraham Principle to resolve this too. The Abraham Principle states that when two or more entities have a correlated structure or behavior, this itself is evidence for the existence of some third being or causal force, external to and more powerful than them, which determines their form or mode of behavior.
For the scientist, the question ‘why’ is a journey from effect to cause and getting there is half the fun. The other half is knowing that regardless of what we discover, the original questions somehow remain while new questions abound. For the sincerely religious also, the question ‘why’ is an exploration, but one that ends not with some infinite regress, nor endless stream of questions, but rather with an ultimate answer: That there is a First Cause that seeded the world, planted the ‘why chromosome’ in our psyches, and gave us the logical prowess to infer back to the source, the ultimate Because before which there is no why. And why would He do a thing like that? Well, why not?