God isn't a Placebo nor is Rationalism the only Source of Truth

This post relates to an article/blog that was featured in "On Faith" in the Washington Post on 28AUG13:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/post/is-faith-the-worlds-most-effective-placebo/2013/08/28/b4e3958c-0ff1-11e3-a2b3-5e107edf9897_blog.html?wpmk=MK0000205

Interesting. He states that, " I just happened to find that when I started talking to an imaginary friend, certain struggles began to evaporate. It became easier to act according to my conscience." Yet he doesn't believe in the supernatural (ironically things just mysteriously got easier?).

I am no expert on Atheism. That said, at some point, perhaps we need to move beyond God, faith, and religion as being all about the boogie man and science is the only truth that has any real meaning. God isn't merely placebo any more than having an ethical conscious is merely a chemical action in the brain. Praying to a non-existent God is akin to doing a scientific experiment to measure the weight of the soul.

God exists, and the proof is that we believe he does. Does that mean that belief is merely a psychological condition that the human mind is geared to exhibit by default? That sounds reasonable. Likewise, should our exploration of how this universe works be ignorant of what human intuition has taught through the centuries, because its not "rational"? Perhaps we have to recognize that religion and faith has been a construct to explain phenomena that passes our understanding and is the key to opening the doors of deeper exploration.

I am a Christian, so I certainly have a faith bias. I am also an Engineer who depends on cold hard science, so I have a rationalism bias. So when I hear Christ say "I am the vine, you are the branches" I get that he is speaking in his religious context, but because I believe he is God, I can jump to the understanding that what he was also talking about is the immutable portion of the human mind that has been constructed to enable prayer to be an effective psychological tool. And when I do structural analysis and contend with gravitational, seismic, wind, and other forces and how, even after of millennia of human knowledge, experience, and experimentation, that there are point in which we still have to "approximate" because the precise and absolute performance of the structure to any scenario is still a mystery (a big enough mystery that "acts of God" still can knock down many a resistant building).

God isn't a placebo nor is rationalism/science the only source of truth, so lets get serious and stop with the non-sense that I see both in this article/post and the criticisms that he has received to his original article.

Being rational means believing. You believe in the power of science. Being faithful means questioning and exploring. You know that the power of faith is found in the crucible of facing hard realities. We can dispense with blind faith and ignorant rationalism, lets coalesce on the ultimate truism that both explain the world and neither completely so.