What is faith? According to Paul in Hebrews 11, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. … By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”
That same sense of faith drew Armstrong and others into that universe—or rather, a growing understanding of the unseen, unwritten laws that governed it. They had, and we have, faith that, on some level, the cosmos makes sense. The moon will be in such-and-such a place at a given time. The gravity that binds us to earth can be broken with X amount of power. That if a rocket flies this fast on this trajectory for this amount of days, it’ll get there when we think it will.
That’s kind of amazing when you think about it. At a time in our culture when everything around us seems so chaotic, the universe itself operates by a certain set of principles, and we can rely on those principles. We can stake our very lives on them, just as Armstrong did.
Obviously, faith in science and faith in God are two very, very different things, and I’m sure Armstrong (who died in 2012) would be the first to say so. But they’re not so different as some might believe.
My pastor used to illustrate faith via a chair: Every time we sit in one, it’s an act of faith. We trust that it’ll support our weight. But it’s not an uninformed faith. We look at it to see if it looks sturdy enough to support us. Maybe we wobble it a little, just to make sure. We still ultimately must stick our butts in the seat (or not), but we don’t do it without some evidence.
The same is true with faith in God. Those of us who believe—most of us, anyway—believe for a reason. We see evidence of not just His reality, but His love. We read about it in the Bible and see it at work in our own lives. It might not be evidence that would convince everyone. But it’s enough for believers to trust in Him with their lives.
First Man isn’t a particularly religious movie. But when astronauts break through the earth’s roaring atmosphere into the tranquility of the cosmos beyond, or when Armstrong walks across the gray surface of the moon for the first time, the film conveys their inevitable awe and wonder of the moment—the transcendence of it. Armstrong feels it, we see, even if it’s not pinned to an organized belief structure. Many other astronauts have felt it, too.
“To look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is to me impossible,” John Glenn said in 1998, during a flight on the space shuttle Discovery. And in the movie itself, we see a glimpse of a pamphlet bearing the words, “In the beginning, God …”
Faith is indeed the conviction of things unseen. But when we look, evidence is all around us.
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