Faith: A Guide for the Perplexed
by Richard Whiting

© 2026 Richard Whiting. All rights reserved. May be reproduced in whole, with attribution. See the full notice at the end of this article.

I. A Word Worth Defending

Few words are more often misdescribed than the word faith. To its critics it has come to mean believing things without evidence — or, worse, believing them all the harder because there is no evidence. Faith, one popular writer declares, is “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.” Put that way, faith is plainly a foolish thing, and no one should want it.¹

But there is a problem: no serious Christian thinker has ever defined faith that way. That definition is not a description of anyone's actual faith; it is a cartoon drawn up to be knocked down — and it is always easier to defeat a position no one holds than to engage the one people really hold. What follows sets the cartoon aside and tries to say plainly what faith actually is, and in particular what the Catholic Church means by it.

II. You Cannot Prove Everything — and No One Does

Begin here, because everything rests on it. Behind the demand “Why should I believe anything I can't prove?” lies a misunderstanding of what proof is. A proof reasons from things you already accept to something that must follow. So every proof needs a starting point — premises it does not itself prove. Demand a proof for those, and you need premises for that proof, and for those, with no end in sight. An endless chain of proofs is impossible.²

This is not a religious trick; it is how thinking works. Even the rules of logic and arithmetic cannot be proved, because you must use them to prove anything at all. That one and one make two, that the world outside my mind is real, that my memory is not a wholesale lie — no one proves these before breakfast, and everyone stakes a life on them. So the honest question is never whether to accept things you cannot prove, but which, and on what grounds. Going beyond proof is not the believer's peculiar vice; it is the ordinary condition of every thinking person.

III. What the Critics Say Faith Is

It helps to lay the caricature out plainly. Faith, the critics say, is belief without evidence; where evidence exists, faith is superfluous; so it is wheeled in only where evidence runs out, which makes it irrational by its very nature. But the whole case rests on a small confusion. The former atheist Alister McGrath put his finger on it: the slogan “fails to make the critical distinction between the ‘total absence of supporting evidence’ and the ‘absence of totally supporting evidence.’” A belief can rest on real evidence that still falls short of proof — and nearly everything we believe is exactly like that.³

IV. What Faith Actually Is: Assent, Trust, Faithfulness

The word carries three strands, and most confusion comes from squashing them into one. First, assent: to believe is, in Augustine's phrase, “to think with assent” — a free judgment that something is true, freely given because the evidence, though real, does not force the hand. Second, trust: Christian faith is not bare belief-that but trust in someone. The New Testament word for faith, the Greek pistis, means exactly this — trust, reliance, the entrusting of oneself — and its verb pisteuo is less “to hold an opinion” than “to entrust oneself.” Faith is like the trust you show when you drop an anchor over the side of a boat, trusting there is something solid below to grip.⁴

Third, faithfulness: the biblical words for faith also mean steady, reliable loyalty — said above all of God, “the faithful God who keeps covenant” (Deut. 7:9). Human faith answers that prior faithfulness: because God has shown himself trustworthy, he can be trusted. Put the three together and faith is a confident trust in what one has good reason to hold true — “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1).

V. Nothing Blind About It: Everyone Already Lives by Faith

The plainest answer to the caricature is the homeliest: everyone already lives by faith. Belief, in the everyday sense, is a readiness to act as though something were so. Have you ever seen someone lower himself onto a chair he did not trust? You believe the friend on the phone who says the house is on fire; you hurry to find the airport gate rather than shrug, “I'm agnostic about where my plane departs.”⁵

Even science runs on trust. It reasons from what it has seen to laws it cannot finish checking — no one has inspected every crow — and rests on a confidence no experiment can establish: that the universe is orderly and our minds can grasp it. And our deepest moral convictions — that cruelty is wrong, that people have dignity — can be proved by neither observation nor logic, yet no sane person calls them blind. To single out religious faith as uniquely irrational, while running one's whole mental and moral life on faith of exactly this kind, is not an argument. It is a double standard.

VI. Faith and Reason: Two Wings

The deepest mistake is to think faith and reason are rivals. “Faith and reason,” wrote Pope John Paul II, “are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” Try to fly on one wing alone and you get nowhere — like a man in a rowboat pulling on a single oar, going in circles and never crossing.⁶

From its earliest centuries Christianity insisted the two belong together. Augustine called the life of faith “faith seeking understanding”; Anselm's motto was “I believe so that I may understand”; Aquinas drew the line still used today — reason reaches some truths on its own (that God exists), while others (the Trinity) lie above reason but never against it. Reason carries a person up to the door; the final step of faith is the free act of a whole person, mind and will together, helped by grace. Christianity never asks anyone to stop thinking. It asks him to think — and then to trust.

VII. The Faith of Unbelief

Here is a point the critics rarely notice: unbelief is itself a kind of faith, and it carries the same burden the believer is asked to carry. To disbelieve is not to have no belief but to be ready to act as though something were false — and, as the philosopher Dallas Willard put it, “not acting is acting.” We assume the doubter owes no account of himself while the believer must justify every step; but if you disbelieve a medicine, a bridge, or a warning, and you are wrong, the cost is just as real.⁷

And here the critic's position turns in a circle. He says he will accept only what reason and evidence establish — but that rule cannot itself be established by reason or evidence; it is an article of faith he has never tested. He trusts that his mind is reliable, that the world is orderly, that his senses tell the truth, that logic holds — none of which he can prove without already using them. Much confident unbelief is, in Willard's blunt phrase, “morally reprehensible faith posing as a scientific worldview” — a faith that never examined its own foundations. This does not prove the unbeliever wrong; it levels the field. Believer and skeptic alike live by trust that runs past proof, and both are answerable to reason for where they place it.

VIII. Faith Is Not Superstition

A common charge says faith is superstition in respectable dress. But superstition is the belief that some object or action not really connected to an outcome can force it anyway — that the right words will make someone love you, that the right dance will bring rain. Its heart is control: perform the rite correctly and you bend events, even heaven, to your will. Christian faith is the opposite: it does not try to control God but to trust him. Scripture itself condemns the attempt to buy or command divine power — Simon the magician, the sons of Sceva (Acts 8 and 19).⁸

There is a sharp irony here that cuts against the skeptic. Consider the demand one often hears: “Let God give me a sign, and then I'll believe.” That sounds hard-headed, but it is superstition wearing a lab coat — for it assumes God is a mechanism we can operate, obliged to perform on cue if we issue the right challenge. It treats the Almighty as something we control, which is the essence of the magical mindset. Superstition tries to control; faith is content to rely. It is the skeptic's sign-on-demand, not the believer's trust, that lands on the wrong side of that line.

IX. Faith Is Not Blind: The Biblical Picture

Nowhere in Scripture is faith held up as belief against the evidence. Look at Christ himself: far from demanding blind acceptance, he kept appealing to evidence — to his works, to eyewitnesses, to what was written (John 10:37–38; 20:24–29). And he reasoned, arguing by analogy, by exposing contradictions, by driving an opponent's premise to an absurd conclusion. When the Sadducees tried to trap him with a riddle meant to make the resurrection look ridiculous, he took a premise they accepted and drew from it the conclusion they did not want. If the Lord himself argued from evidence and reasoned closely, his followers can hardly claim his authority for throwing evidence and reason away.⁹

The most honest line in Scripture on this subject may be the cry of the father whose son Jesus heals: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). There is faith as it really lives in a human heart — not serene certainty, but a real trust that knows its own weakness and asks for help. That Jesus answers him tells us something the cartoon cannot allow: faith and doubt can share a heart, and even a faith mixed with unbelief is enough to bring a person to God.

X. Gift and Response: The Catholic Shape of Faith

Catholic teaching holds that faith is necessary but not sufficient for salvation, where much Protestant thought holds it both necessary and sufficient. This is not a denial that salvation is God's free gift; it is a claim about what living faith is. Faith is first a gift: “What moves us to believe,” the Catechism teaches, is not that revealed truths look obviously true to reason, but the authority of God who reveals them, “who can neither deceive nor be deceived.” Faith is, in Peter Kreeft's image, “more like opening a faucet than passing a test”: open it and grace flows in; keep it shut and it does not — not because God is stingy, but because he respects the freedom he gave us.¹⁰

But faith is also a response, and a living response is never idle — which is why faith without works is dead (James 2:17). Luther himself granted the point Catholics gladly own: “Faith alone saves, but the faith that saves is never alone.” Real faith flowers into love, and love into action — “faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6).

XI. Faith, Hope, and Love: The Living Plant

Faith is never found alone. It stands with hope and love, “and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). An old image catches their relation: the new life of God in the soul is like a plant — faith the root, hidden underground; hope the stem, rising toward the light; love the flower and fruit, the loveliest part of all. It explains why faith is invisible while love can be seen — you know a plant by its fruit — and why faith without works is dead: roots alone are not yet a plant.¹¹

XII. Faith and Its Twin Brother, Doubt

The caricature imagines faith and doubt as enemies; the truth is nearly the reverse. Doubt, handled well, is not faith's destroyer but its companion. A mature faith does not pretend to a certainty it lacks; it holds a healthy tension between what we can know and what may be true but is, for now, beyond us. The closed mind that refuses to inquire is a different thing altogether — and, tellingly, one of its sharpest pictures is a skeptic's: the bishop who, invited to look through Galileo's telescope, refused — “I don't need to look. I already know.” The refusal to look is not the mark of faith; it is the mark of a mind that has stopped inquiring, and it can afflict the unbeliever as easily as the believer.¹²

The true opposite of faith is not doubt but indifference — not caring about the question at all. A person wrestling with doubt is still inside the drama of faith, still facing the One he struggles with. “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” is not the voice of someone outside faith. It is one of faith's truest voices.

XIII. The Man on the Cliff: What Faith Is Not

There is a well-worn story that pictures faith as a blind letting-go. A man falls off a cliff, catches a shrub on the way down, and hangs over the drop. He cries out, “Is anyone up there?” A voice answers: “I am God. Do you trust me? Then let go of the branch.” After a long pause the man calls back, “Is there anyone else up there?” The story is told to show faith as the abandonment of the one solid thing you can feel, on no grounds at all.¹³

But that is precisely what Christian faith is not. Real faith does not ask you to let go of reason, or of every visible support, for no reason. It is not a leap into empty air; it is the reasonable trust of someone who has good grounds to think the voice can be relied on. Faith and reason are the two wings; this cartoon cuts one of them off and calls the crash “faith.” The believer's answer to the voice is not a blind plunge but the considered trust of a whole person — mind included — in a God who has shown himself worthy of it.

XIV. Answering the Objections

“Faith is a crutch for people who can't face reality.” Everyone leans on something in the dark hours — money, status, or confidence in oneself — and all are more fragile than they look. Belief in the self saves no one from death or loss. To call faith a crutch is only to say, “I would rather lean on myself than on God” — a preference, not a proof. The question is not whether you lean, but on what.

“Religious faith is the great source of violence and war.” The record says otherwise. When historians catalogue the wars of recorded history — as Phillips and Axelrod do in their three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars — fewer than 7 percent prove to have been primarily religious; remove the wars fought in the name of Islam and the figure falls to around 3 percent. The bloodiest century in history was dominated not by religion but by militant atheist and neo-pagan regimes. The real culprit is fanaticism, which fastens onto secular creeds as readily as sacred ones.¹⁴

“The Bible praises believing without seeing — ‘blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’” The verse (John 20:29) is spoken to Thomas, who has just been given the evidence — the risen Christ before him. The blessing is on those later disciples who, without seeing the risen Lord in person, will believe on the trustworthy testimony of those who did. That is not credulity; it is the ordinary reliance on reliable witnesses by which we accept nearly everything we know about history.

XV. Putting It All Together

Clear away the cartoon and a steady picture stands out. Faith is not belief against the evidence, nor belief with no evidence at all. It is a free assent of the mind, deepened into trust in a person, and answered in a faithful life — resting on grounds that are real though not compelling, and helped at last by grace. It is not superstition, because it seeks not to control God but to rely on him; not blind, because it rests on evidence and testimony; not a uniquely religious foolishness, because everyone lives by warranted beliefs that run past proof. In its Catholic shape it is a gift before it is an achievement, and a living response before it is a settled possession — the root from which hope rises and love flowers. Judged for what it truly is, faith turns out to be not the surrender of reason its detractors need it to be, but one of the most ordinary and most human things in the world: the reasonable trust of a creature in a Creator who has shown himself worthy of it.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

— Hebrews 11:1

Copyright and Distribution

© 2026 Richard Whiting. All rights reserved.

This essay may be reproduced and distributed freely, in printed or electronic form, provided that it is reproduced in whole and without alteration, and that the author's name is retained. Excerpts may be quoted in reviews, scholarly works, or other writings consistent with fair use, with attribution. For any other use, including translation, adaptation, or partial republication beyond fair use, please contact the author.

Endnotes

1. Richard Dawkins's much-quoted definition of faith as “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence,” discussed and criticized in Alister McGrath, “There is nothing blind about faith” (2011). ↩
2. On the impossibility of an infinite regress of proofs and the necessity of “properly basic” premises, see Roy Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press); and David H. Taylor, “The Definition of Faith,” on empiricism itself being held without empirical proof. ↩
3. Alister McGrath's central distinction between “the total absence of supporting evidence” and “the absence of totally supporting evidence” — the point on which the New Atheist argument fails. The multiverse example (serious scientists believing what the evidence does not compel) is McGrath's. ↩
4. Augustine, credere est assensione cogitare (“to believe is to think with assent”). On the Greek pistis (“faith, trust, reliance”) and its verb pisteuo (“to entrust oneself”), see F. R. Tennant, The Nature of Belief, and Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), ch. 4. The anchor image is the author's. ↩
5. The chair, telephone, doctor, and airport-gate illustrations are from Dallas Willard, “Irresponsible Disbelief,” showing everyday contexts in which belief is a readiness to act and the cost of not believing is real. Cf. McGrath: “belief is just a normal human way of making sense of a complex world.” ↩
6. Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (1998), opening line. The image of rowing with one oar and going in circles is adapted from a comment by Raymond Hudon in the source material. On Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, see James Swindal, “Faith and Reason,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ↩
7. Dallas Willard, “Irresponsible Disbelief” and “The Faith of Unbelief”: “not acting is acting”; disbelief is a readiness to act that carries its own burden of proof; and much unbelief is “morally reprehensible faith posing as a scientific worldview.” On the impossibility of a neutral, presupposition-free standpoint, see Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality. ↩
8. Definition of superstition from The American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed. On the skeptic's demand for a sign as itself a kind of superstition — assuming God can be controlled or obliged by our requests — see Don Talafous, O.S.B., The Risk in Believing (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1982); the author develops the control/reliance contrast in “Faith versus superstition.” ↩
9. Dallas Willard, “Jesus the Logician,” on Christ's use of analogy, the law of non-contradiction, and reductio ad absurdum (e.g., Matt. 12:25–30; Luke 20:27–40): “Jesus is a thinker … not a dirty word but an essential” one. ↩
10. Catechism of the Catholic Church 156. Peter Kreeft, “What is Faith – Like a Plant,” on faith as “more like opening a faucet than passing a test.” Cf. Carl Olson, “Why Believe? An Apologetic of Faith,” Catholic Answers Magazine. ↩
11. Peter Kreeft, “What is Faith – Like a Plant”: faith the root, hope the stem, love the fruit; cf. 1 Cor. 13:13; Matt. 7:20; James 2:17. Martin Luther, as quoted in the “Faith and Reason” apologetics outline: “Faith alone saves, but the faith that saves is never alone.” ↩
12. Dallas Willard, “The Faith of Unbelief”: “As the bishop said to Galileo, ‘I don't need to look. I already know.’” On doubt as an ally of faith, see “Faith as trusting teachableness”; on indifference as faith's true opposite, F. R. Tennant, The Nature of Belief. ↩
13. The cliff-and-shrub story is a widely circulated parable, often told to caricature faith as a blind letting-go; here it serves as a foil for what Christian faith is not. Cf. Kierkegaard's imagery of faith over the abyss, and the Blondin/wheelbarrow anecdote, which likewise dramatize the difference between notional assent and real trust. ↩
14. Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod, Encyclopedia of Wars, 3 vols. (New York: Facts on File, 2005): of 1,763 wars catalogued, about 123 (roughly 7 percent) are classifiable as primarily religious; removing the wars waged in the name of Islam lowers the figure to a little over 3 percent. Gordon Martel, ed., The Encyclopedia of War, independently arrives at about 6 percent. ↩