What I Believe.

I was once asked by a child of three, what is god? This question had never been asked of me and for the first time I wondered. The answer I gave the child was that god is the unseemly order behind things, the “something from nothing”, basically when you could not rationally explain why something worked out the way it did that is god. Then I grew older, I went through many changes in mind and body and when I was a junior in high school I was again asked by my first professor, what is god?

By then I had a better answer, I had refined god down to everything. By everything I meant that all things came about due to random happenstance, a moment in time where things could have gone awry but did not. I was marveled by things where there was no human hand, yet peaceful balance existed. Things like ecosystems, the water cycle, evolution, or metabolisms. Millions of actions and reactions that happened with no person directing them, a symphony with no conductor. This to me is what I firmly believed god to be.

Finally I achieved the graduation of high school, and was college bound. I was sitting in my economics class and I was presented with the idea of an invisible hand that seemed to guided cultures and civilizations forward through mutual self-interest. This blew my mind, here I was seeing the same thing that I called and knew as god being explored and presented in how human’s decisions are made. It was astounding how much logical sense it made, things work out because people want what they think is best. They aren’t always perfect solutions that make all parties involved totally satisfied, but statistically it has improved nearly all aspects of human life by having better thing happen then bad.

What struck me most was that I chose to worship this concept before I even knew it was a part of economics. I trust that this spontaneous order that appears is not a giant bearded man in the clouds. When I tell someone that the lord works in mysterious ways and that he always has a plan I mean it. I trust but do not understand, and that is where my faith lies. I trust that the invisible hand is there, and I understand it won’t always be working in my personal self-interest. That is also why I love it.