Faith vs. "Blind Faith" #20

A common modern assumption, voiced by critics from Richard Dawkins to casual skeptics, is that religious faith means believing something without evidence, or even in spite of evidence — that faith and reason are fundamentally opposed. This is a real and understandable impression, since the word “faith” is used loosely in everyday speech to mean exactly that. But it does not match how the Bible itself defines or models faith.

The Argument

Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” — not the absence of evidence, but confident trust that goes beyond what is presently visible, built on grounds already given. Peter instructs believers to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15), assuming Christian belief is the kind of thing that has reasons to be articulated, not merely asserted. Isaiah 1:18 has God inviting Israel to “reason together” with him rather than simply demanding assent. Even Jesus’s own handling of Thomas’s doubt is instructive: rather than condemning Thomas for wanting evidence, Jesus provided it — showing him his hands and side (John 20:24-29) — though he adds a blessing on those who believe without that same direct physical verification, since not every generation can have it.

Common Objections

A fair objection is that even on this more careful definition, faith still involves trusting beyond what strict logical proof could establish — no historical argument, including the case for the resurrection, delivers mathematical certainty, so some step of trust remains necessary at the end of any evidential case, religious or otherwise (a point true of trusting a spouse, a scientific theory, or another person’s testimony generally). Christian thinkers generally embrace this rather than deny it: faith, on the classical account, is not belief without evidence but trust that reasonably goes beyond the available evidence, in the same way one trusts a friend’s character beyond what could be strictly proven in a courtroom — a “faith seeking understanding,” in Anselm’s phrase, rather than a substitute for it.