What Do We Mean by “Faith”?

Leap of Faith

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen…. By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.”

Hebrews 11:1–3

Few words have been more confidently misdescribed than the word “faith.” In the mouths of its critics it has become a synonym for credulity — believing things without evidence, or believing them 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.” Stated that way, faith is plainly a vice. The trouble is that no serious Christian theologian has ever held such a definition. It is a caricature manufactured for the purpose of ridicule — and it is far easier to defeat a position no one holds than to engage the one people actually hold.

In the Catholic and biblical sense, faith is a reasonable trust: the free assent of the whole person to God who has revealed himself — grounded in reasons, yet reaching beyond what reason alone can prove, into personal trust in a Person. It has three strands the critics tend to collapse into one: assent of the mind to what is understood, trust of the will in the One who is believed, and the faithfulness of a life lived accordingly. The very word the New Testament uses, the Greek pistis, means just this — trust, reliance, the entrusting of oneself. Faith is not a leap in the dark; it is closer to the trust we place in a friend, a spouse, or a surgeon — not without reasons, but beyond what proof alone could establish.

Understood this way, faith is not the enemy of reason but its completion — the second of what John Paul II called the “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” Reason can carry us to the threshold: to the reasonableness of God’s existence and the credibility of his self-revelation. Faith is the free step across it, the entrusting of oneself to the God whom reason has shown to be worthy of trust. The panel that follows sets out the skeptic’s view of faith; the Catholic view then answers it at length, showing why faith, far from being irrational, is one of the most ordinary and reasonable things in the world.

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Atheist/Skeptic View

The skeptic’s case against faith is stated with great confidence. Faith, he says, is belief without evidence — and where good evidence exists, faith is superfluous, since the evidence would compel belief on its own. It is invoked, therefore, only where evidence is absent, which makes it irrational by its very structure. One prominent atheist calls it “the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence,” and even “a form of mental illness.”
Worse, the skeptic continues, faith is unfalsifiable: whatever happens, the believer’s faith survives, which shows it was never answerable to reason at all. It demands that a person let go of reason itself — take the blind leap, and hope. It is a crutch for those who cannot face reality unaided, and — on this telling — the great source of superstition, division, and violence in human history. The doubter, after all, is simply following the evidence; it is the believer who must justify himself. To have faith, in short, is to abandon the very standards of evidence we rightly demand everywhere else in life.

Catholic View

The Christian answer is that the faith being attacked is not the faith anyone actually holds. No serious Christian thinker has ever defined faith as believing without evidence, still less as believing against it. Faith 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. That it runs past proof is not its peculiar vice. It is the ordinary condition of every thinking person, including the skeptic who denies it.

Where the Objection Fails

The case against faith rests on a small confusion, and once it is named the argument does not recover. The former atheist Alister McGrath put his finger on it: the slogan fails to distinguish 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 anyone believes is exactly like that. The critic’s definition quietly assumes that evidence either compels or is absent altogether, with nothing in between. Almost nothing we know is like that.1

You Cannot Prove Everything, and No One Does

Behind the demand “why believe anything you cannot prove?” lies a misunderstanding of proof. A proof reasons from things already accepted to something that follows. So every proof needs a starting point it does not itself prove. Demand a proof for those premises and you need premises for that proof, and so on without end. An endless chain of proofs is impossible.2

This is not a religious trick; it is how thinking works. The rules of logic cannot be proved, because you must use them to prove anything at all. That the world outside my mind is real, that my memory is not a wholesale fabrication — no one proves these before breakfast, and everyone stakes a life on them. The honest question is never whether to accept what cannot be proved, but which, and on what grounds.

What Faith Actually Is

The word carries three strands, and most of the confusion comes from crushing them into one. First assent: to believe is, in Augustine’s phrase, to think with assent — a free judgment that something is true, free precisely because the evidence, though real, does not force the hand. Second trust: the New Testament word, pistis, means reliance, the entrusting of oneself; its verb is less “to hold an opinion” than “to entrust oneself.” Third faithfulness: the same biblical words mean steady loyalty, said above all of God, “the faithful God who keeps covenant” (Deut. 7:9). Human faith answers that prior faithfulness. Put the three together and faith is 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).3

Everyone Already Lives This Way

Belief, in the everyday sense, is a readiness to act as though something were so. Nobody lowers himself onto a chair he does not trust. You believe the friend who telephones to say the house is on fire; you hurry to the departure gate rather than shrug that you are agnostic about where your plane leaves from.4

Science runs on the same fuel. It reasons from what it has seen to laws it cannot finish checking — nobody has inspected every crow — and rests on a confidence no experiment can establish: that the universe is orderly and that our minds can grasp it. Our deepest moral convictions, that cruelty is wrong and that people have dignity, can be established by neither observation nor logic, and 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.

The Faith of Unbelief

The skeptic assumes the doubter owes no account of himself while the believer must justify every step. But to disbelieve is not to have no belief; it is a readiness to act as though something were false, and, as Dallas Willard put it, not acting is acting. Disbelieve a medicine, a bridge, or a warning, and be wrong, and the cost is just as real.5

Here the position turns in a circle. The critic will accept only what reason and evidence establish — but that rule cannot itself be established by reason or evidence. He trusts that his mind is reliable, that the world is orderly, that his senses report truly, that logic holds, none of which he can demonstrate without already using them. This does not make the unbeliever wrong. It levels the field. Believer and skeptic alike live by trust that runs past proof, and both are answerable for where they place it.

Faith Is Not Superstition

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 events, even heaven, bend to your will. Christian faith is the reverse. It does not attempt to control God but to rely on Him, and Scripture itself condemns the attempt to buy or command divine power (Acts 8; 19).6

There is an irony here that cuts the other way. Consider the familiar demand: let God give me a sign, and then I will believe. It sounds hard-headed, but it is superstition in a lab coat, assuming God is a mechanism obliged to perform on cue if the right challenge is issued. Superstition tries to control; faith is content to rely. It is the sign-on-demand, not the believer’s trust, that falls on the wrong side of that line.

Neither Blind nor Unfalsifiable

Nowhere does Scripture hold up faith as belief against evidence. Christ appealed constantly to evidence — to His works, to eyewitnesses, to what was written (John 10:37–38; 20:24–29) — and He reasoned, by analogy, by exposing contradictions, by driving an opponent’s premise to absurdity. If the Lord Himself argued from evidence, His followers can hardly claim His authority for discarding it.7

Nor is the faith unfalsifiable, whatever is said of individual believers. It stakes itself on a historical claim and says so in as many words: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain … we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:14–19). That is a falsification condition, stated by the faith about itself. A creed that names the evidence which would destroy it is not the sort of thing the objection describes.8

Three Remaining Objections

A crutch for those who cannot face reality. Everyone leans on something in the dark hours — money, status, confidence in oneself — and all are more fragile than they look. Belief in oneself saves nobody from death or loss. To call faith a crutch is only to say one would rather lean on oneself than on God. That is a preference, not a proof. The question is not whether you lean, but on what.

The great source of violence and war. The record says otherwise. When Phillips and Axelrod catalogue the wars of recorded history in their three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars, of 1,763 wars fewer than 7 percent prove to have been primarily religious; remove those waged in the name of Islam and the figure falls to a little over 3 percent. The bloodiest century in history was dominated not by religion but by militant atheist regimes. The culprit is fanaticism, which fastens onto secular creeds as readily as sacred ones.9

The Bible praises believing without seeing. The verse (John 20:29) is spoken to Thomas, who has just been given the evidence, the risen Christ standing before him. The blessing falls on later disciples who, not seeing the risen Lord in person, 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 the past.

The Reply in Brief

Nearly every version of the objection turns out to depend on the definition it began with. Grant that faith means believing things without reason, and the case against it is finished before it starts; withdraw that definition, and there is very little left to answer. But no one who actually holds the faith has ever meant that by the word, and a criticism that only defeats a meaning its target rejects has not reached its target.

What is really being asked is a question the critic must answer too: what may a reasonable person believe when the evidence is genuine but falls short of proof? Nobody escapes it. Every serious conviction about the world — including the conviction that there is nothing beyond it — is held on grounds that cannot be closed off, by someone who must decide anyway. The dispute is not whether to live past the evidence. It is what to live past it toward.10

This is the short answer. The full treatment adds the Catholic account of faith as gift before achievement and living response before settled possession, why faith without works is dead, the old image of faith as root with hope the stem and love the flower, doubt as faith’s companion rather than its enemy, the cliff-and-branch parable and what it gets wrong, and full documentation for everything asserted here. It is available as a Word document at the end of this page.

Endnotes
  1. Alister McGrath’s distinction between “the total absence of supporting evidence” and “the absence of totally supporting evidence” is the point on which the New Atheist argument fails; see McGrath, “There is nothing blind about faith” (2011). The definition under attack is Richard Dawkins’s: faith as “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.” ↩
  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. Augustine, credere est assensione cogitare, “to believe is to think with assent.” On the Greek pistis and its verb pisteuo, see F. R. Tennant, The Nature of Belief, and Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), ch. 4. ↩
  4. The chair, telephone, and departure-gate illustrations are from Dallas Willard, The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus (HarperOne, 2015), on irresponsible disbelief — everyday contexts in which belief is a readiness to act and the cost of not believing is real. Compare McGrath: belief is “just a normal human way of making sense of a complex world.” ↩
  5. Willard, The Allure of Gentleness, and “The Faith of Unbelief,” in Renewing the Christian Mind (HarperOne, 2016), ch. 27: “not acting is acting”; disbelief carries its own burden of proof; much confident 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. ↩
  6. Definition of superstition from The American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed. On the demand for a sign as itself a species of superstition — assuming God can be obliged by our requests — see Don Talafous, O.S.B., The Risk in Believing (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1982). ↩
  7. 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). ↩
  8. 1 Corinthians 15:14–19 states the condition under which the Christian claim would be false, and Paul draws the consequence without softening it. Whatever may be true of the psychology of individual believers, a creed that identifies the evidence which would refute it is not unfalsifiable in the sense the objection requires. ↩
  9. 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 those 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. ↩
  10. Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (1998), opening line. On Augustine’s “faith seeking understanding,” Anselm’s “I believe so that I may understand,” and Aquinas on truths above reason but never against it, see James Swindal, “Faith and Reason,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ↩

Summary

The skeptic defines faith as belief without evidence — even against evidence — and so as irrational by its very nature. But no serious Christian thinker has ever held that definition; it is a cartoon built to be knocked down. Set it aside, and faith turns out to be among the most reasonable things a person does: the reasonable trust of a whole person in a God who has shown Himself worthy of it.

The caricature confuses two different things. It runs together “the total absence of supporting evidence” and “the absence of totally supporting evidence” (McGrath). A belief can rest on real evidence that still falls short of proof, and nearly everything anyone believes is exactly like that. The objection assumes evidence either compels or is absent, with nothing between.

You cannot prove everything. Every proof reasons from premises it does not itself prove, and an endless chain of proofs is impossible. So everyone accepts some things without proof — the axioms of logic among them. Going beyond proof is not the believer’s peculiar vice but the ordinary condition of every thinking person.

What faith actually is. Three strands the critics collapse into one: assent of the mind to what it understands; trust in a person — the Greek pistis, the entrusting of oneself; and faithfulness, the answer of a creature to a God who first proved reliable (Deut. 7:9; Heb. 11:1).

Everyone already lives by faith. You sit on untested chairs, believe the friend on the telephone, act on laws science cannot finish checking, and hold moral convictions provable by neither observation nor logic. To single out religious faith as uniquely irrational, while running one’s whole mental and moral life on faith of the same kind, is a double standard.

Unbelief carries the same burden. To disbelieve is not to have no belief but to be ready to act as though something were false, and the cost of being wrong is just as real. The skeptic who accepts only what reason and evidence establish cannot establish that rule by reason or evidence; he trusts his mind, his senses, and logic without proving any of them. That does not make him wrong. It levels the field.

Not superstition. Superstition seeks to control unseen powers; faith seeks only to rely on a God who gives Himself freely. The skeptic’s “give me a sign and I will believe” is the more superstitious posture — it assumes God is a mechanism obliged to perform on demand.

Neither blind nor unfalsifiable. Christ appealed constantly to evidence — His works, eyewitnesses, what was written — and reasoned closely, even by reductio against the Sadducees. And the faith names the fact that would destroy it: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14). A creed that states its own falsification condition is not what the objection describes.

The remaining charges fail on the record. To call faith a crutch is only to say one would rather lean on oneself than on God — a preference, not a proof. And of the 1,763 wars catalogued in the Encyclopedia of Wars, fewer than 7 percent were primarily religious, falling to a little over 3 percent once those waged in the name of Islam are removed; the bloodiest century in history was dominated by militant atheist regimes.

In short: faith and reason are not rivals but, in John Paul II’s image, two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth. Try to fly on one and you only turn in circles. Christianity has never asked anyone to stop thinking. It asks him to think, and then to trust.

The full Catholic exposition is available as a Word document: Download Faith: A Guide for the Perplexed (.docx)