Faith like a Transistor

Have you ever wondered how a computer works? One way to explain them is to start with something called a transistor, which is an electronics component that uses one electrical charge to control the flow of another. Think of it kind of like how by using your finger to toggle a light switch, you can change whether the bulbs in your room are on or off. Now, say you take a transistor and decide to yourself that if electricity is flowing through it, you will call that on-state “1” and if electricity is not flowing through it, that you will call that off-state “0”. Well if you decide to do that, what you are suddenly capable of doing is using transistors to display any number in a format called binary. Say you then decide to take that binary format and also say to yourself that certain numbers will be stand-ins for letters and symbols. Well, now you can use transistors to display not only every number but also every word and sentence too.

Now say, you take those transistors, and wire them up so that the electrical flow of one goes on to influence the state of another. There are a number of ways you can choose to do that, all of which are called logic gates. These groups of transistors are called that because depending on how the transistors are wired to one another, the state of one transistor can impact the outcome of what another shows in a predictable way. There is a logic to it. Now say you wire up multiple of these transistor logic gates to one another. Well then, it actually becomes possible by doing nothing more than turning individual transistors on and off, to do entire calculations in binary. And just like that, you have a basic computer.

A modern computer, like the one you are reading this on, has a number more levels of complexity under its hood - for starters, instead of a handful of transistors, it very likely holds north of 8 billion of them - but all of that complexity ultimately boils down to what is explained in the previous paragraphs. Using transistors to control the flow of electricity through other transistors and then using binary to do math with the numbers they represent. That is how your calculator works. That is how the game Words with Friends works. That is how the internet itself chugs along.

There is, however, another popular explanation for how computers work that I think is a lot more prevalent among people today. They are straight-up magic.

And you know what, for most people throughout their day-to-day lives, this explanation works. You don’t need to know much about how computers work in order to boot up Pokemon Go. That is just a button press and a tap for most people, so whether the process that is bringing you that wonderful gaming experience is a complex and rapidly executing series of binary computations, or is instead understood to be a little wizard who shrunk himself into the device you hold in your hand doesn’t much matter. For you, the game plays the same.

At least, that is, until things start to go wrong. Because how you approach dealing with broken electronics changes quite a bit depending on how you think your device works. If you understand that there is a logic to it, you will likely first approach its malfunction as something fixable. You may ask yourself, “what was I doing when it started to go wonky.” You may look up what other people who have had the same problem as you did to sort the problem. You may actually read the manual. And then when it is working as it should again, you will reflect and take precautions to not do whatever it was that caused the problem in the first place.

But if you instead simply operate under the assumption that all electronics are magic and work in ‘mysterious ways,’ you will more likely than not begin with the understanding that your little computer isn’t working because it “hates you,” and throw it out for a new one. Then, when your shiny new device arrives, you will go right back to the same sketchy websites and mysterious email attachments that likely caused all your issues in the first place, beginning the cycle anew.

While the metaphor is by no means perfect, I think roughly the same kind of problem happens to many Christians during our faith journeys. Many believers are quite comfortable in assuming that God only works in ‘mysterious ways,’ that are simply beyond our comprehension. And in our day-to-day lives, this assumption usually works fine for us. More than fine even. The larger the number of things in our faith we say are simply beyond our knowing, the lower the number of things about our faith that we have an obligation to attempt to understand. After all, if we think something is simply beyond human comprehension, then what point is there in us spending our limited time trying to make heads or tails of it? Instead, it is much easier to simply have faith that God knows what he is doing, and to blindly do as he commands.

And while it is true that ours is a faith that holds a number of mysteries that we will not understand until we are one day face to face with our saviour, it is also true - by my experience as a pastor who has spent quite a large amount of time exploring the Bible - that there are not nearly so many of those mysteries as we may believe. The core of the human condition hasn’t changed all that much between today and the days in which scripture was still being written. If you find your way into your Bibles regularly, more likely than not you will find that the big questions of life that you may have, are talked about and struggles with those pages. And of the things that are not, the overarching principles, theologies and teachings of scripture do keep you in a good stead. The ways our Lord guides us to live are not apart from these struggles, principles, theologies and teachings, and as a result for most things that He would lead us to do, there is a rationale; a reason to the rhyme.

Is there still ambiguity? are there still mysteries? Is there still the unknown? Of course! God is a god, and we are not. There is always going to be a certain amount of things that he does and commands that are simply unknowable, just not nearly as many as a surface-level faith might assume.

And so here is what I say to you. Open your bibles, and seek to not only find how God commands us to act but also struggle to answer the question of “why” he commands us in that way. The humdrum of life does give way to times of hardship and temptation. The computer does break down. And if in those difficult times, what your faith has to fall back upon is just that God only ever works in “mysterious ways”, then I suspect you will end yourself in a similar situation to those among us that simply think of electronics as being magic. You will begin your struggle by assuming that God hates you, only to then throw your faith out for the time being and if you do come back to it when things are going well again, likely you will go right back to living in the same way that caused you to fall into the temptations you had in the first place.