I once enjoyed airplane turbulence. In my twenties, I even preferred a bumpy flight to a smooth one; it felt like a roller coaster ride. On one flight, when I was twenty-six, the plane hit an air pocket that sent the entire contents of my beverage hovering in front of my eyes before they came splashing down into my lap. I was wet, cold, and delighted.
Right now, I am the opposite of delighted. I’m on a Boeing 737 that is flying like the pilot is in a dogfight with the Red Baron. I’m not panicking, but I’m not happy. What was wrong with me fourteen years ago, when I enjoyed this? This sucks. Maybe it’s because I have back problems now and I don’t like getting jerked around. Or maybe middle age has enough adrenaline spikes without turbulence. But I suspect my wife and kids figure most prominently in my new airborne anxiety. At twenty-six, my untimely demise would have made a lot of people sad, but nobody relied on me for anything. The stakes if I explode now are much higher.
The other thing that occurs to me during a break in my stomach’s acrobatics routine is how much faith we all have in the pilot. We believe his calm reassurances that we will be through the choppy air in a few minutes. I guess he has faith in the airplane. He trusts his instruments to guide him through the storm. He has faith in the people who built the airplane. They, in turn, had faith in the people who designed it. The designers had faith in the people who taught them how to build planes. Though scientific principles undergird the whole enterprise, I’m struck by how much faith it requires. Faith is the only thing between the passengers and existential horror as we bounce around, miles above the surface of the planet.
Now the turbulence is over, and … wait, someone needs to scoot by me to get to the bathroom. I should probably go, too. God knows how long this serenity will last.
Okay, I’m back with an empty bladder and concerns about the digestive health of the person who was in before me.
I was about to say that we all live lives of faith. Even if you don’t believe in God, you can’t get by without faith. Caustic atheist blowhards like Christopher Hitchens claim that only the deluded and dull have faith, but that ain’t so. Think about how many times we all rely on faith to get us through the day. Driving a car on the freeway, for example, means propelling two tons of metal at high velocity alongside other two-ton hunks of metal going just as fast. One wrong move, and you’re screwed. But most of us still drive. Even if we don’t, we take public transportation with the same risks (watch Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock sweat their way through Speed if you don’t believe me). Buying food at the grocery store, mailing a letter, launching your computer onto the Internet, and drinking water from a faucet … I don’t care if you think religious folks like me are bonkers—you live a life of faith.
“No, I don’t,” you might retort. “I trust things like science and human self-regulation. Preservation of the species guides group behavior. We base our actions on observable data.” I agree completely. But we still rely on faith. It takes only one look at the news to realize that human systems fail all the time. A tragic story on the news this very morning proved their fallacy and brought tears to my eyes. In fact, it’s so sad I can’t bear to retell it. Scientific errors and lapses in reason have left nasty pockmarks across all of human history. We know that bad things happen, but we venture forth anyway.
