Belief -an analogy

It struck me recently that, culturally, many Americans don’t believe in God, the spiritual realm, or the importance of faith, because they believe only in themselves: the reasoning powers of the human mind, the scientific method, and proof that requires no risk to believe in, no act of faith. Believing in something as timeless as God is considered by some to be old-fashioned –a throw-back to something people used to explain the forces of nature before there was science, to lean on as a crutch for their weaknesses before there was democracy and moral relativism, or even as just the leftovers of the social/political structure of the Church. For others belief in the Holy Spirit may be dismissed as just another spiritual option on the menu of the New Age pantheon of enlightenment, and Jesus as one of the great teachers alongside Buddha, Mohammed, and others.
So, to the enlightened, free-thinking, scientific modernist, I pose this question wrapped in analogy: Do you believe in the internet?
Bear with me for a minute here. One interacts with the internet via screen, keypad, and whatever other high-tech gizmos enhance the experience. Physically, the internet exists only in the hard drives of some computers –servers- and is accessed by other computers via the hookups necessary (modem, wireless, cable, etc.) to tap into the network of sharing known as the World Wide Web. If you took apart one of those servers, put one of its microchips under a microscope, and looked really hard…would you be able to see all the letters and numbers of code that are the guts projecting the mirage of the internet? I’m no tech-whiz, maybe if you viewed a microchip at some astronomical magnification, you’d see something. The point is, the thing you hold in your hands is only the shell, the body if you will, that the internet resides in; it is not the internet itself. Not to mention, the internet is too big (and getting bigger every time someone generates an e-mail, company website, or a blog post…but that’s another topic) too fit in one computer; it is in many computers around the world.
So it is also with the spiritual life: it is housed in bodies everywhere, accessed daily, yet cannot be seen, touched, or dissected out of us. The spirit of each person has a “webmaster,” and it is either God or some power other than God (Satan, sin, or the natural self/human nature). When we surf the web, we choose where we want to go, what we want to see/hear/find/buy/generate/communicate by interacting with it. When we live, we determine where our spirit goes –and who its webmaster is- by the choices we make.
The analogy starts to fall apart here. C.S. Lewis stated it better (in Mere Christianity), by describing life as the process by which a person’s spirit is shaped and made more perfect in preparation for living forever, if one is a Christian (this is a very basic summary). Back to my analogy, if a person is his or her own god, then that might look something like a website (the spirit) that anyone can post anything on, can be edited at will, has no privacy or legal protection, and the purpose of which is vague and uncertain. The webmaster Self has to determine what stays and what goes, how to react to spam and viruses and hackers and such, without any guarantee that the site will stay afloat or receive any help from someone who knows what’s going on. If the webmaster is God, then a person has 24-hour tech support, a legal defender, a content editor, a framework supervisor, antivirus protection, password encryption, etc. all wrapped into one, overseeing the website of one’s physical and spiritual life. This is starting to get corny, but I think the metaphor can have one other twist as well.
If a person is blindfolded, and has no way to see the internet –much less touch, smell, hear, or get any sense of the context of it- that person might say “I don’t think there is such a thing as the internet. I have no proof of its substance, no way of documenting that such a thing exists. I only have your word for it.” However, that claim by one who cannot see or access the internet does not negate the fact that it does indeed exist, and many are participating in its existence. In this spin on the analogy, the internet represents not just the spiritual life but more specifically a spiritual connection with God via Jesus. The blind person could access the internet simply by choosing to trust that it does exist, resolving to give up past unbelief, and by entering the password. Choice: faith in God. Password: Jesus. Result: unlimited access to God via the Holy Spirit, and thus a changed destiny and a life under constant upgrade toward a new standard. If you are searching, there is no Google here, but there is prayer. And a whole lot more.
So, do you believe in the internet?
Do you believe that the blindfold can be removed?
Or are you vainly searching through physical hardware for proof that God does or does not exist?