Faith- why, and how?

There is a line in "Miracle on 34th Street" that you may remember. Maureen O'Hara, as the mother, has always taught her child a strict pragmatic view of the world. Late in the film, she has come to realize that just maybe the old fellow, Kris Kringle, who claims to be Santa Claus, actually is Santa- and if he isn't, he personifies what a Santa Claus should be, and she is trying to explain to her young daughter her sudden change of heart. So by way of explanation, she says, "Faith is believing in things when commonsense tells you not to."

In an article on CNN Belief Blog, Stephen Prothero compares the response of the Puritans to the August 1635 hurricane to the modern secular response to Hurricane Irene. He notes that the Puritans viewed their hurricane as a judgment from God, while our more secular response relies on the predictions of meteorologists and experts. We know how hurricanes form, we know how to predict their movement with some confidence, we know how to predict strengthening and weakening. But knowing the "how" does nothing to help us with the "why."

You see, the forecasters tell us there is a certain chance that a tropical storm will form, but they can't say why precisely that storm at that time. If it had been a day sooner or later, the wind and water strength and temperatures would have been different; it would have been a different storm.

That holds true everywhere. Not all seeds germinate, for example, and while farmers know this and can often predict a germination rate, it doesn't explain why, and it certainly does not indicate what seeds will lie dormant. Meteorologists predict scattered showers, but they can't tell whether your ballgame will be rained out or whether the shower will pass you by. A motorist traveling hundreds of miles is killed in a collision- accidents are statistically predictable, but why that particular motorist, when out of all those hundreds of miles, being 50 feet ahead or behind the point of accident would have made all the difference.

In modern culture, we assume there is no "why" and that all processes are the result of random chance. It is such a basic assumption that Prothero doesn't even address it. However, that is nothing but an arrogant assumption based on a secular faith that there is no God who can choose to cause a particular event for a reason, so randomness must be the cause. Yet God can indeed be the "why" behind an event.

Which brings us back to Maureen O'Hara. The faith she talks about is not faith, but only credulous gullibility. The Christianity on which America was built is based on a secure foundation of history, evidence and logic, and that is what the Puritans understood. They understood that there could be a "why." Without having satellites, computers, and mathematics, they knew full well that God could for his own purposes nudge a thousand variables into place. We have gained some understanding of "how," but in the process have lost the ability to comprehend, and in fact have become too intellectually weak to discuss or even admit the possibility, that there can by a "why."