A Gaint Leap for Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong 1930-2012

The first man to set foot on the moon has died, at age 82. He died of complications from heart surgery. There has been a spontaneous outpouring of mourning for him. I think he represents a moment of greatness for the whole human race. As he himself put it, "a small step for a man...a giant leap for mankind." No one heard "a man." It sounded like he said "a small step for man and giant leap for man kind." Leaving me to wonder for years what is the difference between man and mankind? This is one of those events we can all remember exactly where we were at the time. I was at my old childhood home, in sixth grade, in the upstairs bedroom (my room) watching the event on tv with my parents and brother. My mother was reading the bible for some reason. She always read the bible when important stuff happened. She read the passage covering the creation of the mood about a dozen times, out loud. That's one of those things mothers do that drives you up the wall but you love them anyway. Like how she would go to sleep in the first five minutes of mission impossible, wake up in the last five and go "what's been happening?"

The moon landing was one of those things that only means something one time, you don't think much about it from then on but it's always important. Subsequent landings just seemed passe. I felt like it was suppose to become routine. But on the day of the first landing I felt like i had just witnessed the most important event in human history. Humanity had become a space going race. We were just about to take our place amid the Klingons and Vulcans and fulfill the destiny of Rocky Jones, Flash Gorden, and all the si fi schlock I had ever watched as a kid. I fully expected at that time that we would just continue to develop and eventually as an old man I might be living in a domed city on Mars. I was in sixth grade. Latter in high school I came to realize that our own natural anonymity and selfishness as a species would corrupt our attempts to outgrow our own parochialism. I also began to feel "if we can't solve our problems here how would we solve them up there?" I think there's a certain truth to that, involving human nature.

I think everyone sensed that something major was about to happen. I went to the nursing home to see my grandmother just a month before the landing and she was crying. I found out she was afraid because she herd that man might bring back a back form the moon that we would could not cure and it would destroy the human race. She also cried when she hear about Woodstock, she figured it signaled the end of civilization. I told her there was no air on the moon so there couldn't bein any living organisms. That calmed her down. I think that brings up the point I wanted to make about it all. One thing that struck me at that time was a combination newspaper editorial where someone talked about all the ideas of what might be found on the moon. There had been hoax in the early 20th century here someone claimed to have seen a civilization on the moon. There was a lot of talk about how no one could look at the moon anymore with the kind of feelings of mystery and romance that they once had. I was reminded of some childhood experiences of my Grandmother telling me about how people use to think about the moon when she was girl, how older people saw a Rabbit in the moon rather than a man.


earth rise from moon


Even though I never again looked at the moon with the same sense of mystery it never lost it's special nature for me. I think about that time overtime I look at it. I think about how it still means something to me. It has now become a symbol not of conquest of nature or man's achievement, although I suppose one might see it that way, but something more too complex to explain in a single sentence. It's a symbol of advancement alright. I think about that moon landing and Armstrong's words, we have taken a giant step, even though we sort of retrenched after that. It could also be seen as a failure. We started something we weren't prepared to continue and have allowed earth bound ideologies and problems to distract us. We were short sighted in thinking "we are not going to conquer the moon and build domed cities on mars in the next hundred years, so just forget it." Did we trade in progress for easy comfort? We have been living trading in the future ecologically for some time now. We have an attitude "who cares what they do four generations form now?" So have we traded in the domed city on Mars for the choice of putting off hard solutions so we can have opulence just a bit longer?

That's not all the moon symbolizes for me. If that's all it was then I would only be able to think of the moon as a bench mark of human lethargy. I also think it symbolizes something about my attitude toward belief. The moon doesn't symbolize for me the fading away of old fables, such as the hoax about seeing a civilization there through telescope, or romantic drivel, or mystery, ti symbolizes the way in which our faith in God can become aware of science and still not be threatened because our theological understanding can mature. This is one one of the major things atheists can't understand. That's becuase they insist on thinking about faith as some willful act of stupidity. They think it's an agreement with yourself to be stupid. Faith is not belief in things for no reason, it's placing confidence in a hypothesis for a reason. Just as the moon is not only a symbol of unknown mysteries but also a goal to aspire to and a bench mark of our understanding and a symbol of our will to knowledge.

Faith is not beliving things without proof

Originally Posted by aussiedave

Faith is a belief and does not require any intellectual basis. An "intellectual belief" is still a belief.
Neither have any facts to substantiate them.

One finds atheists saying things like this all the time. Atheists tend to define faith as "belief of soemthing without any evidence or a valid reason." for support they sometimes turn to Webster's on-line Dicitonary

Definition of FAITH

1

a : allegiance to duty or a person : loyalty b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions

2

a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust

3

: something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs faith>

Of course it usually doesn't dawn on them that this is three different definitions and not a collective one. The third one can't be taken as indicative of all religious faith. There's another reason not to let them use Wesbter's, not at all. That's because it's only indicative of popular use and not theological teaching. Because they don't use a technological dictionary atheists make a straw man argument. They are not dealing with the way the teaching authority of Christian theology uses the term "faith." They are only reflecting the general conception, or misconception of faith, apart from Christian teaching. The whole idea of their argument is that Christian teaching accepts faith as belief with no evidence, when in reality there is no such dictum in any Christian teaching.

The theological authoritative dictionary for Christian Theology is called Westminster's Dictionary of Christian Theology (ed Alan Richardson and John Bowden SCM pres ltd 1983) (on Amazon). That is to the theology what the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary is to the English language. It's what Black's Law Dictionary is to the Lawyer. Really all Chrsitians should own a copy. There are two volumes one is about theologians the other about doctrines. I will concern myself today only with the latter.

The Westminster dictionary of Christian Theology has a long article on faith starting on page 207. Believers often use the term faith as a short hand term for those living according to apostolic teaching (207). The Dictionary points out that the only actual Biblical definition of faith is found in Hebrews 11.1 (evidence of things not seen) and that it "does not encapsulate all that the Bible says on the subject."(ibid). Westminster translates Hebrews 11.1 as "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." This changes certain nuances but reinforces other. I have always liked to point that that faith is a kind of evidence in its own right. That's becuase something has to prompt faith. It's insane to assert that faith is ever held for no reaosn at all. Of cousre the atheist wants to assert that the reason is stupid but that's his burden of proof. What is the stimulus that prompts the response of faith?

Westminster's Dictionary understands faith in many contexts and constructs a complex picture of the term.Faith "...is an obedient confident trust in the reality love of God known through his acts, and awaiting their future consummation." (ibid). The dictionary brings out a variety of nuances from scripture. In OT faith is comparatively rare. When it is used it indicates faithfulness or loyalty rather than passive reliance. Yet dependence upon God and not human powers is important for Issiah (7:9, 30:15). Faith is concieved as Obedient action. (Dud 6:1) Faith as trust is also echoed in the psalms. In the NT belief and trust in Jesus' salvation is referred to as faith.(Mark 2:5, 5:34). Unbelief is hardness of heart, so the opposite of faith, unbelief, involves a refusal of the heart. Again making faith more a matter of some deep relationship than just a passive acceptance of an affirmation. (Mark 6:1).

There's no particular reason to understand this notion of faithfulness as bestowed for no reason. There is no statement about "faithfulness with no proof for no reason." Indeed the whole concept of faith in being about a condition of the heart is removed a step from this idea of accepting an intellectual proposition for no reason. In the Johonine epistles we see doctrinally oriented faith in a credal formula. In that community faith took on doctrinal proportions. Christ came in the flesh, Jesus is he son of God, (20:31, 1 J. 5:1). There is no indication that this is a matter of belief for no reason. NO reason is given but it's obvious the reason is bound up with the faith of the community as a community. One sees the community itself as the witness. The community as a whole testifies "we saw this, we heard this."

In Pauline Theology faith is utter reliance upon God's grace. The person of faith is the one who knows that grace cannot be obtained by works, that justification is only through union with Christ and reliance upon God's grace rather than works or by the law. Faith is not merely assent to an intellectual proposition but a relationship of trust culminating in the acceptance of God's Grace. Grace through faith means reliance upon God's ability to make us holy, nothing of our own effort.

The article points out several tensions that emerge from the centrality of faith to Christian doctrine. This is the kind of subtle theological idea that makes theology interesting and maddening to atheist who can't think subtly. Tension is mistaken for contradiction by skeptics but it's not contradiction. It's a good thing in theology to have tension. As one of my professors at Perkins (school of ethology SMU) put it "if you have no tension on your kite string your kite is not in the air."

One such tension is between weather faith is the response of trust in God or the acceptance of doctrinal propositions.The issues clearly transcend the notion of faith as rule keeping or merely an acceptance of intellectual propositions.

The article winds up with a discussion of Kierkegaard's notion of the leap of faith. This mind tend to make one think that faith means the irrational acceptance of of a proposition with no evidence.SK says faith is irrational and that it's achieved by an irrational leap. Yet one must note that the leap itself is an epistemological ploy, it's an attempt to get over the final chasm which can't be bridged by evidence or logic. The road up to the final gap can be paved with argument and reason. One can make a find philosophical diving board to prepare for the leap. The point at which one makes the leap can be narrowed. The leap is always there. Even in the world view there are epistemic blind alleys from which there are no returns. So in the final analysis there is no basis to the atheist straw man definition of faith as "believing things without evidence."