a leap of faith

As a number of my childhood friends were watching the highly anticipated rematch between Canelo Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin, I spent the entire evening on the balcony listening to the person who gave me my first Bible explain to me why he doesn’t believe in God anymore. I will spare you the three hour conversation, but it essentially boiled down to the desire for empirical certainty. We no longer accept things on the basis of the testimony of others. We find ourselves saying, “How shall I know this?” when presented with the biblical narrative.

At a recent school mass, a student seated next to me was confused by the gospel passage that was read. I explained the story of Jesus fasting in the desert as he looked at me skeptically. He candidly responded that the story went against his reason which left him in a place where he did not know if he believed in God at all. In a world that is defined by the natural and predictable, what room is there for the supernatural?

Our world is not so different from first century Israel. Zechariah and his wife were well beyond their years of fertility, so when the angel of Lord appeared to him announcing the imminent pregnancy of his wife Zechariah responds with incredulity. Though he served as a priest at the altar of God, he still expected the world to operate in a natural and predictable pattern. But what happens when it doesn’t? Does the limitations we place on what is possible restrict our ability to perceive God?

If you are looking for the epistemological justification of Christianity, I encourage you to read Warranted Christian Belief by Alvin Plantinga, the former John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. I personally stopped trying engage in arguments about the existence of God because I don’t think they produce a knowledge of God. Experience does.

As I watched Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse with my daughter, I was struck by a scene where the young Miles Morales asks the middle-aged Peter Parker, “When will I know that I am Spider-Man?” It seems as though this desire for certainty pervades even our comic mythologies. Peter responds, “You won’t. That's all it is Miles. A leap of faith.” This leap of faith use to scare me when I was younger because I viewed it as being inferior to empirical data. I no longer feel this way. Age and experience has taught me to embrace the fall because at the bottom is not uncertainty, but rather the expansion of my realm of possibility. As my perception expands, the depths of the beauty and richness of creation and its creator becomes clearer. I get closer to reality.

Author: Koob Yohannes, Social Studies Dept and Campus Ministry Team