What is the leap of faith?

Question

I have heard his phrase all my life. Where does it originate?

What exactly are you leaping over? Could you take the leap of faith and then later as you mature in your faith come to a realization that you didn't have to make such a big leap?

Can you explain the concept "leap of faith"? I think it sounds nice, and is probably necesarry for a lot of people to really start to come to understanding of WHO God is and really WHO they were created to be.

However, I think sometimes this proverbial leap is used as a scape goat to dealing with real issues. What do you think?

Answer 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_of_faith

A leap of faith, in its most commonly used meaning, is the act of believing in something without, or in spite of, available empirical evidence. It is an act commonly associated with religious belief as many religions consider faith to be an essential element of piety.

The phrase is commonly attributed to Søren Kierkegaard; however, he himself never used the term, as he referred to a leap as a leap to faith. A leap of faith involves circularity insofar as a leap is made by faith.

Answer 2

A leap of faith is best illustrated in Indiana Jones the Last Crusade when he had to take a step out of pure faith from the lion's head.

We all believe in something whether it is religion or any other subject. In these areas we do not have all the answers. Sometimes we just have to act on what we believe.

I have never seen God, but believe in His existence. In essence I take a leap of faith everyday when I pray. I am believing without seeing.

Answer 3

A leap of faith is a logical act of the will.

You are leaping over your own distrust in the object being considered for the trust.

Take sitting in a chair for instance.
You take a leap of faith each time you sit in the chair.

You trust that it will hold you.
You can look at the chair and know in your mind through scientific analysis and statistics that the chair will hold you, but until you sit in the chair you have not taken the "leap of faith" to trust the chair to hold you.

Answer 4

There are a lot of people that spend a lot of time reading the bible. They think about the claims Jesus made, they read the prophecies in the old testament and then look at the incidents spoken of, and written about, in the new testament that fulfilled those prophecies. They can actually think that there is a good argument to be made for the bible being true. But they will not commit to it for one reason; they do not have any "proof" that they can rely on all this as true.

At one point in time, a person must commit themselves to believing that Jesus is what He claimed to be....or not. Each believer in Christ can tell you that indeed God has given them "proof" enough to believe, but still there is that "leap of faith"...the decision to believe the claims of Jesus Christ. That actually is what God asks of us, to take Him at His word.

"For without faith, it is impossible to please God."

Answer 5

You have to watch Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade for a visual explanantion of a leap of faith.

Answer 6

A leap of faith is simply trusting in God enough to do something that you do not what the outcome will be, but you do it trusting that God will have His hand in it, and HE will work everything out.

Answer 7

Faith means accepting a claim as valid without any evidence to support it. That is the leap. The Roman Catholic Church understands this. Dumb creationists sometimes think they can bolster their beliefs with evidence, and call it "creation science", not realizing that if it involves evidence it is no longer faith.

Answer 8

nicely it doesnt take faith to settle for evolution, because it particularly is actuality. And to the guy who reported that Dawkins reported extraterrestrial beings seeded like on earth: you're a moron. He grew to become into asserting how if panspermia did each and every ensue, it may be from an alien like race, that had ensue by way of evolution, no longer from a god. identity is panspermia, it particularly is using a god to flora as a exchange of extraterrestrial beings

Answer 9

I don't think Christianity is a leap of faith. Christianity is certainly accepted by faith but it is faith based upon reason. Christianity is based upon the bible. The bible claims to be a revelation from God. But how do you know that it is really a revelation from God. There are other Holy books like the Koran and baga-vegida and the Buddhist Holy book. Since all of the Holy books contradict each other abd they all say they are coming from God, the law of non-contradiction says they can't all be true. Logic leaves us only two possibilities:
1)One is true and all the rest are false 2) they're all false(that's got to be considered a logical possibility). That's where reason comes in. You can use reason to determine if one of those holy books has the signature of God. That's why I believe in Christianity. The bible does have the signature of God.
One of those ways is Bible prophecy. The old testament has 333 prophecies about the first coming of Jesus Christ and 456 specific details about his life(all written between 400 and 2000 years before he was born). The 4 gospels in the new testament(Mathew, Mark, Luke & John) tell the story of Jesus. Had those 4 gospel writers chosen to not write their gospels, we could still have re-created the whole life of Christ just from the old testament(all written before he was born). In fact, that is how the christians preached the gospel in the first 20-30 years after the death of Christ. They preached it from the old testament because the new testament had not yet been written. The story of Christ is all there in the Old Testament including some details about His life that are not even mentioned in the New Testament. Man sees history like a person sees the Rose Parade sitting in the stands. The floats that have already gone by him are like the past. The floats in front of him are like the present. The floats still coming are like the future. These prophets in the old testament who wrote about Jesus Christ seemed to be able to see history the way you would see the Rose Parade from a helicopter. They seemed to be able to see the end from the beginning. That tells me that though they were writing these things down the info was not ultimately coming from them but from a higher source because man simply doesn't see history that way. Also, the bible has amazing knowledge about many scientific principals long before these principals were discovered. Seventeen times in the old testament the bible says that God is "stretching the heavens". For thousands of years bible scholar struggled with what that could possibly mean. Then in 1929 Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding. The bible told us that long ago.
No other religion or Holy Book has this kind of knowledge. All this tells me that these prophets in both the old and new testament were not nutcases but true prophets of God. Prophecy does not exhaust the reasons why the bible has the signature of god but what I said will suffice.
Evolution is also a faith, but it's not a faith based upon reason, it's blind faith. In your brain there are 100 billion neurons. Each one of those neurons(remember, there's 100 billion of them) is connected to 1000 other neurons. That comes out to 100 trillion connections in your brain. These connections send electronic signals(and you can measure the electricity) from one place to another. If part of the brain is damaged and you lose some function that is controlled by that part of the brain, the brain can actually re-wire itself and let other neurons in the undamaged part of the brain take over so that you can get back that function. That's only the connections in the brain, not the rest of the body.
Our bodies also have tons of information in the DNA. You have enough information in your DNA to fill encyclopedia sized books stacked from here to the moon and back 500 times. Do you really think that came about by just random chance........kind of like a monkey typing out the works of Shakespear just by randomly plucking away at the keys?

You need to step back and look at the big picture of what is being claimed by evolution, namely, that the unbelieveable complexity of the human brain(not to mention the rest of the body) is nothing more than re-arranged pond scum. It’s pond scum from the original prebiotic soup re-arranged over billions of years into 100 trillion connections in the brain by luck…..just random chance. Evolution says that dumb mud somehow bootstrapped itself into intelligence over billions of years just by random chance luck. Evolution says that man is just a lump of slime that somehow evolved into rationality. No one came to that conclusion by science. That is just blind faith.

Answer 10

a leap of faith is believing in something that is not necessarily true, but something that someone wants to be true.

And to answer the question, "who am I"

I am Julian.