I just watched Contact again with Pita. I came to the real­iza­tion that what Ellie (Jodie Foster) expe­ri­enced allowed her to under­stand the ground­ing of Johnson’s (Matthew McConaughey) beliefs. Johnson was a per­son who had a faith in God from his expe­ri­ence. He had expe­ri­enced some­thing God-like first hand, giv­ing him his faith. Ellie could never under­stand the way he arrived to this belief, since she hadn’t expe­ri­enced the same thing. To her, every­thing was just a delusion.

Yet by the end of the movie, she expe­ri­ences com­mu­ni­ca­tion with another life-form. No one believes her, because she has no proof. She is put in the same sit­u­a­tion that she puts Johnson in; the ques­tion of faith based on expe­ri­ence. And as she had no proof of the expe­ri­ence with extra ter­res­tri­als, much like Johnson has no proof about God, she is mocked.

Therein lies the fun­da­men­tal build­ing block of belief. It is some­thing that can­not (and should not) be trans­mit­ted from com­mu­ni­ca­tion alone; it must be experienced.

It is under­stand­able that Ellie was skep­ti­cal about Johnson’s belief. In the end, how­ever, she comes to the under­stand­ing about the way peo­ple arrive at their beliefs. That no one can truly chal­lenge them, because not every­one has been through the same experiences.

I used fol­low Ellie’s beliefs in the begin­ning of the movie. Beliefs such as need­ing empir­i­cal evi­dence to believe in God, and that God does not exist because there has been no evi­dence. Now I have come to under­stand that although I haven’t expe­ri­enced him yet, it doesn’t mean that I won’t in the future. I now believe that I have no idea whether God exists or not, and that the answer may be revealed to me later on. It’s not athe­ist, it’s not the­ist, it’s not agnos­tic. It was some­thing that took me a while to understand.

And yet I under­stand nothing.