Personal Narrative: My Journey In Physics

Personally, I have found I am most certain about entry level information on topics. I relate this directly to my experience with physics. I started my three-year journey in physics with a general course, which I excelled at. I was covering base level topics and asked to do very little beyond plugging in numbers into known, memorized equations. This ease I felt did not remain constant. I started my next year with IB Physics 1 and felt as if everything I knew was questionable. I began to doubt myself as the information continued to build off of itself. The faith and reason I used to justify my initial knowledge may have been flawed due to the assumptions that the teachers, textbooks, and scientific community’s understanding is correct. Therefore,

Faith is an interesting form of knowing as it relies on one’s highly personal connection and hope that something is as it is supposed to be. It is opposite to reasoning in a lot of ways as it relies limitedly on physical evidence but rather on a mental confidence in something. Religion is a knowledge system that is aimed in answering complex life questions such as existence. During my elementary and part of my middle school years, I moved to a state where I attended a Lutheran school. Through the religion classes, the church, and the bible I developed a sense of faith in God’s existence and power. I operated on a sense of ignorance as what I believe was based solely on the teachings of others as well as my faith in a greater being. As I grew up and my schoolwork or increased knowledge created conflicts with my faith, I began to doubt how certain I was in my knowledge and trust in what I once knew. There are several parts of the bible, which is arguably the basis of a Christian faith’s history, that are contradictory to science. Things such as the theory of evolution, which I accept as fact, contradict with the bible’s description of human evolution. Upon learning about dinosaurs, I began to wonder why my Lutheran teachers never mentioned how they came about. These pieces of added knowledge have only caused doubt in my initial confidence in God’s existence and my assumption on the bible’s truth have faltered. With knowledge systems using faith it is fair to ask how anyone can know for certain anything without evidence? Christianity, unless you are a chosen prophet or a primary source of the bible’s writing would not allow any direct evidence until the after life which, in itself is uncertain thus making it near impossible to know anything for certain in one of the many religious knowledge