For a person who has no faith, the butterfly effect can potentially explain a lot of things in life in a rational manner. Distant, insignificant, events can produce competitively outsize outcomes in a different context.
Seen that way, it is not easy to dismiss faith as nonsensical. In the sense that a group of people altering their behaviour as a collective, even for a short period of time, can affect things elsewhere.
Now, it is not a guarantee that things will change, or that it will change in the context the people who have faith want it to happen in; but, it is not a complete impossibility that it won’t happen.
Looked at it that way, faith becomes both an abstraction to understand events that we can’t control and also an unreliable process to affect change that you would like to see.
Considering that even for a person of no faith engineering butterfly effects in a precise manner is an impossibility, the difference becomes one of understanding and coping than the actual action.
I had never thought about it in that manner.
