Jordan Peterson has an easy way to prove to most everyone they are a person of faith. It is not faith as one normally thinks of it at this time of year -- that the Son of God was born to a virgin Jewish woman in a stable in a not-so-great part of Bethlehem about 2,000 years ago -- but there is a connection. “I presume that you assume that the future is real,” said Prof. Peterson, who teaches psychology at the University of Toronto and has studied the impact of belief on society. “The future is an immaterial entity. It’s composed entirely of possibility. So your belief in it is an axiom of faith.” Across town, Archbishop Thomas Collins, whose responsibility is the region’s 1.7 million Catholics, said he believes in quarks, the little particles that are one of the two most fundamental components of the physical universe. Archbishop Collins has never seen a quark and nor has anyone else. They are, he said, like so many other things we take on faith, beyond our human comprehension. “In this world there’s a lot more than can be caught in the coarse net of secular and rational reasoning,” said Archbishop Collins. “The imperfect instrument of the human reason is profoundly valuable, but it cannot capture everything. And the Virgin Birth is certainly something that doesn’t fit into it. Mysteries and miracles are simply things that boggle the mind. But they are real and they are profound.” Even renowned atheist Sam Harris, the best-selling author of The End of Faith and the follow-up Letter to a Christian Nation, said belief is the “hinge upon which so much of human activity and human nature swings.” “You are to an extraordinary degree guided by, or misguided by, what you believe,” Mr. Harris said. “If you’re a racist, that is a result of what you believe about race. If you’re a jihadist, that is built on what you believe about the Koran and supremacy of Islam. So belief is doing most of the work humans do. And it’s an engine of conflict and reconciliation, so it really matters what people believe.” Of all the beliefs across time, there is none so seemingly extraordinary as belief in the Virgin Birth. Yet for hundreds of millions of people over the past 2,000 years it is the central idea on which everything else stands: God entered into humanity through the womb of the Virgin Mary to create a man who was also God. Without it, Jesus is just a Jewish prophet from Roman-occupied Palestine who had a few nice things to say. Without it, there is no calming of the seas or feeding the 5,000 with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. And there is no resurrection from the dead and there is no Christianity. “This is simply the thing that happened,” said Archbishop Collins. The Catholic writer Romano Guardini called it the point “where the mind has stopped short at some intellectual impasse.” And that point, he wrote, is “this journey of God from the everlasting into the transitory, this stride across the border into history … something no human intellect can altogether grasp.”

So why bother to grasp it if it is beyond human reason? What possible good can it do to believe in this miracle, let alone in any other religious belief? It is a question asked by secular societies that more and more see religion as divisive, superstitious and an elaborate but irrational story for children. To Prof. Peterson, though, belief is not optional. And regardless of the specific belief, he maintains it is as necessary as air and water. At its most basic level, belief acts like a set of headlights to guide us through a foggy universe that “is far more complicated than we are smart.” So belief is eradicable, he said, because there will never be a time when we know everything. “Ignorance is a condition of human existence and belief is a necessary means of coping with ignorance,” he said. “The assumptions we make about the world directly regulate our emotions and they provide hope and inhibit anxiety.” But at a deeper level, belief represents patterns of a deeper reality that go beyond the physical world. They function like mathematical formulas that seem abstract but actually define an underlying physical reality. “Our religious sense is grounded in biology,” said Prof. Peterson. “It’s not a simple cultural overlay. Religious belief and ritual are universal. It’s as specifically human as language. “What’s repeated in profound systems of belief are the patterns of life. That’s why they’re so memorable,” he said. “There is something about them that contains the essence of life. These stories can’t be forgotten. That’s why they last thousands of years.” He points to the story of Christ’s birth as being an archetype of all human longing, Christian or not. “Christ is born at the darkest time of the year. That’s not an accident. There are a lot of extremely complex ideas behind that. So here’s one: the redeeming hero emerges when the need is greatest. The hero is born not only when things are darkest but also when tyranny has reached new heights. There are dozens of examples like that which underlie the way these stories are constructed; they are stunningly profound and people relive them all the time.” Of course, one of those stories that has lasted is the Virgin Birth, an idea that is central to Christianity but is difficult even for some of the professionals. Various surveys taken over the years indicate that about a quarter of Protestant clergy, for example, have doubts about the Virgin Birth. A former Episcopal Bishop of Newark, N.J., John Shelby Spong even went so far as to suggest that Wonder Woman was a better role model than Mary and that the story around Mary was a pure construct of a patriarchal Church that wanted to keep women passive and pure. Nearly a decade ago, Bill Phipps, the former Moderator of the United Church of Canada, said of the Virgin Birth: “Well, I don’t believe it is necessary to believe in the Virgin Birth to be a Christian,” he told a reporter. “Christian faith has to do with trying to follow the will of God, as we see it expressed in Jesus of Nazareth. Now the nature of this birth has nothing to do with that.”