Faith is trust in something or someone not seen, not here, or not yet. Because the object of faith is unseen or has not yet materialized, trust therein requires reasoning. It requires an inference from what is beheld at this very moment to what is not. The inference may be confident or tentative. It may be based on overwhelming evidence or insufficiently justified. Either way, faith is an act of our reason. Granted, faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. It is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith is not some mystical or esoteric basis of belief. It is essential to all belief and action.

Misunderstood Faith

Though it is inescapable and ordinary, faith is often mischaracterized and maligned. Mark Twain’s schoolboy quipped that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. It’s cliché to echo that “faith is blind”. Many take it as a given that faith stands in contrast to evidence, science, and reason. In the wake of 9/11, many blamed the evil attack on faith. Terry Eagleton quotes John Milbank opining: “Where reason has retreated, there, it seems, faith has now rushed in, often with violent consequences.” (“Only Theology saves Metaphysics“) Blurbing Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Harvard luminary Alan Dershowitz wrote “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence. … A must read for all rational people.” For his part, Harris writes: “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Portland State professor Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, called faith a “virus”; a “belief without evidence,” a habit of “pretending to know things you don’t know. (Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.) As for the late Christopher Hitchens, he claims: “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically…” (GISG, p.5) For these critics, faith is juxtaposed as the polar opposite of well-justified belief: faith or science, faith or reason. You can only pick one.

These criticisms indict a straw man, a mistaken understanding of the nature of faith. To dispel such confusion, my claim isn’t merely that faith and reason can be fit together or harmonized. More boldly I claim, faith is reasoning in our ordinary understanding of it. Faith is trust in what we can’t behold based upon what we can see, taste, touch, intuit, and know with confidence. Properly understood, faith is a normal and necessary component of every thought and every breath. In all that we say and do, there are elements of trust in realities that are not present, not seen, or not yet. Whatever ills have been motivated by faith, they are the product of misplaced faith, not of the error of faith in itself.

Everyday Faith

We walk by faith. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, I entrust my muscles, bones, joints, and footing with another step not yet made. As a baby learning to walk, after knee surgery, or on a frozen pond in spring, our steps are more tentative. Most of the time, based on what we know to be true, we have good reason to trust our legs and our footing for that next step.

We talk by faith, trusting in another’s presence of mind and ability to comprehend us. We look for validation of our faith in their nods and responses and base further sentences on their demonstrated understanding. We restate if there’s been an apparent miscommunication based on quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, and “uh-huhs” that we see or hear, though we cannot see others’ thoughts. In a foreign country in a second tongue, we may have less faith in our words, adding gestures, speaking more simply. Lacking faith, we may not talk at all. Nevertheless, we successfully communicate countless times a day, seeing our reasonable faith in speech validated over and over.

We have faith in specialists. We trusted astronomers, who foretold that if I traveled to Madras, Oregon on August 21st, 2017 or Dallas, Texas on April 8, 2024 I would see a total solar eclipse; so too if I’m in the right American city on August 8, 2044. I have faith in cartographers and geographers that the city of Beilefeld is where they say, though I have not yet seen it, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.

We have faith in all kinds of people. We trust other drivers, that they will not swerve across the dividing line; we believe our parents when they retell events we’ve forgotten from childhood; we depend upon our employer, that they will cut the check this month; we entrust our lives to the airline, that they hired a competent pilot and maintained the aircraft. We have less faith in the STUDENT DRIVER, in the negligent parent, in the startup company, in the “puddle jumper” over the Alaskan wilds. These are all reasonable inferences. And they are acts of faith.

We have faith in math. We expect that cutting the two-by-four in half will give me two equal planks for my chicken coop; we count on election judges, that when they tally the same votes, they’ll reach the same total; we put our weight on the approaching bridge, trusting that its engineers did their maths. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.

In all of these, we reasonably trust when the object of our faith is not seen, not here, or not yet. Nietzsche associated faith with lunacy, but if you’ve ever known a paranoiac, you know that their lack of faith, their inability to trust, is fearsome and paralyzing for life. Faith is essential every day to life and thought.

William K. Clifford gets the everyday inescapability of faith right.

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the child’s belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.

William K. Clifford in “The Ethics of Belief” (1877)

Biblical Faith

Biblical faith is like everyday faith. Consider the paradigmatic biblical instances of faith as a test of the definition I’ve offered: trust in something not seen, not here, or not yet. Famously, the author of Hebrews says it this way. “Faith is confidence [trust] in what we hope for [not yet] and assurance about what we do not see [not seen].” (Hebrews 11:1)

The author goes on to give numerous examples.

Noah

Noah, “when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (11:7) It is rare, indeed, for someone to upend their life to prepare for a future threat like Noah. Today, climate scientists also warn of impending environmental calamities. Some few trust these climatologists and forecasters enough to upend their own lives. They reason, based on these experts’ credibility and the evidence offered, that this future state will come to pass. As with Noah, that is faith in a biblical sense. It follows a chain of reasoning into the future.

Abraham

Abraham, based on his interactions with God, trusted God’s promise of a child to come, way past child-bearing age. He considered God to be able and trustworthy (11:8). Sarah, understandably, laughed at the unlikelihood. Similarly, based on its track record and the lack of better options, many infertile couples place their faith in IVF and other medical technologies in hopes of a child. The object of faith in these instances differs: one is unnatural, the other is supernatural. In both cases, the outcome is unrealized. Faith is required. Reasoning is required.

Speaking of Isaac and Jacob, the author observes: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.” (11:13) They lived not only according to what they already had, but by what was yet to come.

Clearly, the author of Hebrews has in mind something like I’ve defined. The patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith acted upon their trust in what is not seen or not yet, based in these cases on past actions and encounters with God.

Things loved are therefore not so appropriate to faith as things hoped for, since hope is always for the absent and unseen.

Aquinas, Summa

Thomas

More famous still is “faithless”, “doubting Thomas”. He had known Jesus, seen miracles, and heard from eyewitnesses who were his own friends that Jesus had risen. He had second hand testimony and evidence from past experience. And yet he could not believe until he beheld Jesus himself. It is easy to sympathize with Thomas. He had seen Jesus crushed. He knew as well as we that the dead do not rise. He had not seen the risen Christ as the other disciples had. Jesus sympathized with Thomas and with those not present who would believe without seeing Jesus manifest: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Here Jesus anticipates his future disciples, acknowledging that they will have to determine whether they believe without seeing for themselves. But even for the disciples who did see the resurrected Christ, faith was in order. Jesus made promises to them that were not yet realized. As they faced hostile crowds and threats to their lives, they had to trust Jesus when he promised: “I will be with you always, till the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) The need for faith is escaped only by seeing what was unseen, or what was hoped for coming to pass.

Paul

As one of the most prolific writers of scripture, the Apostle Paul regularly invokes faith and evidence.

That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.

‭‭2 Timothy‬ ‭1:12‬ ‭NIV‬‬

In each of these biblical accounts, the faithful had a basis for their faith. Noah and Abraham are described as knowing God.

Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.

Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Moun (1960) pp. 129–30.

“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
‭‭2 Corinthians‬ ‭4‬:‭18‬ ‭NIV‬‬
https://bible.com/bible/111/2co.4.18.NIV

Faithlessness

How different is the account of faith in the Bible and in our everyday lives than how it’s misconstrued.

The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.” – Sam Harris

Sam Harris

“Our principles are not a faith,” Hitchens

Faith is widely regarded as in tension or opposition to reason and evidence for at least three reasons.

First, faith does go beyond empirical evidence, and we live in a scientistic, materialistic age when sensible and repeatable evidence is thought to be the only kind. Secondly, faith can be irrational and very often is. When people trust the untrustworthy and justify it by appealing to the virtue of faith instead of to evidence, by guilt by association they discredit faith that is perfectly reasonable. And thirdly, faith is inherently uncertain, unrealized. In matters of consequence, that can be terribly unnerving. We crave certainty, but often it is not in the menu.

Scams, schemes, and misinformation are a scourge on our mediated, online existence. We live in a post-trust moment, when faith in others and in our institutions is abysmal. Misled so often, we demand evidence, see conspiracies everywhere, or content ourselves with only the apparent knowledge of our own lived experience. It’s reasonable to demand evidence. It’s perfectly sensible to want to kick the tires, to try it on, to want to see it for ourselves. We grasp beyond the insubstantiality of the unseen, the past, the future, the abstract is a longstanding complaint. The tribes of Jacob erected a golden calf instead of trusting the unseen God. And for us, if there’s no video, it might as well not have happened. It won’t get airplay.

Empiricism

In the same vein, one extreme form of empiricism, logical positivism, put it quite bluntly: if you can’t point to the thing itself, don’t believe it’s a thing that exists. Another extreme remedy, behaviorism, proposed we only judge people by their behavior, since their thoughts are inaccessible to sight and measurement.

In spite of these excesses, the scientific disciplines

Foolishness

Incompleteness

It should be clear that faith in what is not yet or not seen is very often exceedingly reasonable, indeed

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. ¹When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.

‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭13‬:‭12‬ ‭NET‬‬

It is something of a consensus amongst Vhristian apologists who affirm the importance of reason in arriving at truth that faith is best construed as trust. Less often stated is that it is trust specifically in what is unseen or not yet.

Arthur Brooks offers a common definition of

Empricism

So, faith is at odds with empiricism, but not with evidence or reason.

And, I have faith in Jesus, inferring from multiple lines of evidence that he resurrected from the dead after a miraculous and exemplary life and is someone who can be trusted to do what he said he will do.

For Faith

The believer lives “by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians‬ ‭5:7) And faith is, “trusting what we have reason to believe is true.”¹

Faith is not indubitable. Inferences can be mistaken

Whether it is one or the other will be a function of well justified the inference is. what I know of sturdy chairs and the appearance of this particular chair that, it will hold me in a moment.

Faith, but rather of seeing or possessing.

Believers in the conspiracy ask non-believers three questions: Have you ever been to Bielefeld, do you know anybody from Bielefeld, and do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld? To most people, the answer to these three questions is “no,” supposedly proving the conspiracists’ point. 

Faith, then, can be foolhardy. Put no your faith in princes.

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 (KJV)

We are blessed

The disciple, Thomas, is famous for not believing the testimony of the women who first saw Jesus risen from the dead, nor his fellow disciples. To believe this unexpected miracle, he said he would have to touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. He was, in other words, an empiricist. He would not believe what he could not see or touch with his own senses. Jesus does not begrudge Thomas’ request:

”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe.” Thomas replied to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.“
‭‭John‬ ‭20‬:‭27‬-‭31‬ ‭NET‬‬
https://bible.com/bible/107/jhn.20.27-31.NET

This instructive episode encapsulates what we need to know about faith. Thomas failed to trust the witnesses who announced the resurrection of Jesus, but upon seeing the resurrected Jesus, declares: “my Lord and my God.” Jesus understood his predicament, that trusting in a truth or a person that is not yet seen with one’s own eyes requires more. But significantly, John tells us that Jesus performed this sign and other miracles so that we may believe. That is to say, they are the evidence for faith.
Jesus. Rise up and walk to paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins. “so that you may know”. Sean McDowell’s pattern for OT and New: 1) miracle 2) knowledge 3) belief.

A common strategy for rejecting the notion of faith as irrational is to characterize it as synonymous with trust. But if faith were just trust, why then does faith evaporate when the object of faith comes to pass.

is inferring from the knowledge one already possesses to that which has not been, as of yet, beheld.

Fixes, the thing believed, and fiducia, the attitude towards it. Classic distinction

Five Reasonable Beliefs

Which of these are examples of faith?

“Faith” in Common Parlance

Increasingly since the rise of modernism, faith has been viewed in contrast to reasoning rather than as an instance of it. Many Christmas movies In recent year After all, Boghossian asserts,

“if one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. ‘Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief.”[4]

Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists(Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.

I think Boghossian is half right in two respects. Even a great thinker and believer Arthur Brooks describes faith as “beliefs that you do not know”. This mistake is the result of a faulty notion notion of faith and of knowledge. First that knowledge requires certainty. Neither the traditional definition of justified true belief (JTB) nor the Reformed view that it is a faculty operating correctly in a verisimilitudinous environment regard certainty as a requirement for knowledge.

Now, I don’t see much that can be gleaned from the phrase “blind faith”. “Just believe”, or “believe”, . No. Hope is an appropriate disposition. Credulity is not. Hope will lead one to seek true beliefs. Believing whatever is no virtue at all. I don’t have enough faith to, for example, be a Christian, or be an atheist.

Indeed, in his enthusiasm for being a beacon of science and reason, Lawrence Krauss, has at times confusedly denied having beliefs at all. Misunderstanding about these everyday terms abounds.

Pictures of chairs.

Romans 8:24-25

“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭8:24-25‬ ‭NIV‬‬
https://www.bible.com/111/rom.8.24-25.niv

“Faith is Blind.” This is half true.

”that not yet seen”

You cannot have your faith and eat it too

the Ansemian rendering, that it is faith seeking understanding, is a fine one, as long as we understand that faith itsel is also an understanding.

“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
‭‭Romans‬ ‭8:24‬,25 ‭NIV‬‬
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.24.niv

Hope is a corollary to faith and a key to understanding why it is that without hope, one cannot please God. If one does not harbor hopes about tomorrow, about the afterlife, then one is less likely to form beliefs about it. See Unamuno. See Pascal’s Wager. It is Annie’s hope when she’s “stuck in a day that’s gray and lonely” that inspires her rational inference that you ought to “bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”

“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭8:23-24‬ ‭NIV‬‬
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.23-24.niv

The Bible speaks voluminously on faith and belief, but two of the most clarifying verses are:

And.

Do you trust someone when they are out of eyesight.

The term “faith” populates many a cliché. One can “take a leap of faith”, or more modestly, a “step of faith”. Some of the most common but misleading he phraseology around faith include, most infamously, that of “taking a leap of faith”.

This phrase is revealing and misleading at once. Taking a step or leap is a fine way of characterizing an inference. It can be to take the most reasonable next step in a chain of reasoning. But perhaps there are times when the step is more of a leap.

Faith Versus Empiricism

Inference is Inescapable

Fideism

Inference is an act. One of the more colorfully named types in the catalog of logical fallacies is that of the “slothful induction”.

Faithlessness

To be faithless is to be stuck, to insular, to be lonely, without conviction or direction. To be foolish, gullible and unskeptical, is to be prey to a thousand factoids, to every charlatan trying to fleece its mark.,. To be wise, to be intelligent, is to grow skilled in discriminating between facts and factoids.

Trust

The trust angle, such as WLC, who characterizes is as trusting in something based on the evidence.  “Faith is believing that God will.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. …. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” ~ Lewis

Evidence

The design we infer in nature is an insight we abstract from our senses, but the inference itself is acquired by our reason. We infer design in nature by abstraction, not immediately by sense image. We see biological structures that have purpose and specified complexity, and using our capacity for abstract thought we reason that such structures imply a designer.

Michael Egnor at Evolution News (September 30, 2019).

Notes

1 JP Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith, (), p. 18.

Faith is trust in something or someone not seen, not here, or not yet. Because the object of faith is unseen or has not yet materialized, trust therein requires reasoning. It requires an inference from what is beheld at this very moment to what is not. The inference may be confident or tentative. It may be based on overwhelming evidence or insufficiently justified. Either way, faith is an act of our reason. Granted, faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. It is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith is not some mystical or esoteric basis of belief. It is essential to all belief and action.

Misunderstood Faith

Though it is inescapable and ordinary, faith is often mischaracterized and maligned. Mark Twain’s schoolboy quipped that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. It’s cliché to echo that “faith is blind”. Many take it as a given that faith stands in contrast to evidence, science, and reason. In the wake of 9/11, many blamed the evil attack on faith. Terry Eagleton quotes John Milbank opining: “Where reason has retreated, there, it seems, faith has now rushed in, often with violent consequences.” (“Only Theology saves Metaphysics“) Blurbing Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Harvard luminary Alan Dershowitz wrote “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence. … A must read for all rational people.” For his part, Harris writes: “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Portland State professor Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, called faith a “virus”; a “belief without evidence,” a habit of “pretending to know things you don’t know. (Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.) As for the late Christopher Hitchens, he claims: “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically…” (GISG, p.5) For these critics, faith is juxtaposed as the polar opposite of well-justified belief: faith or science, faith or reason. You can only pick one.

These criticisms indict a straw man, a mistaken understanding of the nature of faith. To dispel such confusion, my claim isn’t merely that faith and reason can be fit together or harmonized. More boldly I claim, faith is reasoning in our ordinary understanding of it. Faith is trust in what we can’t behold based upon what we can see, taste, touch, intuit, and know with confidence. Properly understood, faith is a normal and necessary component of every thought and every breath. In all that we say and do, there are elements of trust in realities that are not present, not seen, or not yet. Whatever ills have been motivated by faith, they are the product of misplaced faith, not of the error of faith in itself.

Everyday Faith

We walk by faith. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, I entrust my muscles, bones, joints, and footing with another step not yet made. As a baby learning to walk, after knee surgery, or on a frozen pond in spring, our steps are more tentative. Most of the time, based on what we know to be true, we have good reason to trust our legs and our footing for that next step.

We talk by faith, trusting in another’s presence of mind and ability to comprehend us. We look for validation of our faith in their nods and responses and base further sentences on their demonstrated understanding. We restate if there’s been an apparent miscommunication based on quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, and “uh-huhs” that we see or hear, though we cannot see others’ thoughts. In a foreign country in a second tongue, we may have less faith in our words, adding gestures, speaking more simply. Lacking faith, we may not talk at all. Nevertheless, we successfully communicate countless times a day, seeing our reasonable faith in speech validated over and over.

We have faith in specialists. We trusted astronomers, who foretold that if I traveled to Madras, Oregon on August 21st, 2017 or Dallas, Texas on April 8, 2024 I would see a total solar eclipse; so too if I’m in the right American city on August 8, 2044. I have faith in cartographers and geographers that the city of Beilefeld is where they say, though I have not yet seen it, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.

We have faith in all kinds of people. We trust other drivers, that they will not swerve across the dividing line; we believe our parents when they retell events we’ve forgotten from childhood; we depend upon our employer, that they will cut the check this month; we entrust our lives to the airline, that they hired a competent pilot and maintained the aircraft. We have less faith in the STUDENT DRIVER, in the negligent parent, in the startup company, in the “puddle jumper” over the Alaskan wilds. These are all reasonable inferences. And they are acts of faith.

We have faith in math. We expect that cutting the two-by-four in half will give me two equal planks for my chicken coop; we count on election judges, that when they tally the same votes, they’ll reach the same total; we put our weight on the approaching bridge, trusting that its engineers did their maths. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.

In all of these, we reasonably trust when the object of our faith is not seen, not here, or not yet. Nietzsche associated faith with lunacy, but if you’ve ever known a paranoiac, you know that their lack of faith, their inability to trust, is fearsome and paralyzing for life. Faith is essential every day to life and thought.

William K. Clifford gets the everyday inescapability of faith right.

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the child’s belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.

William K. Clifford in “The Ethics of Belief” (1877)

Biblical Faith

Biblical faith is like everyday faith. Consider the paradigmatic biblical instances of faith as a test of the definition I’ve offered: trust in something not seen, not here, or not yet. Famously, the author of Hebrews says it this way. “Faith is confidence [trust] in what we hope for [not yet] and assurance about what we do not see [not seen].” (Hebrews 11:1)

The author goes on to give numerous examples.

Noah

Noah, “when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (11:7) It is rare, indeed, for someone to put their life on hold to prepare for a future threat like Noah. Today, climate scientists also warn of impending environmental calamities. Some few trust these climatologists and forecasters enough to upend their lives. They reason, based on these experts’ credibility and the evidence offered, that this future state will come to pass. As with Noah, that is faith in a biblical sense. It follows a chain of reasoning into the future.

Abraham

Abraham, based on his interactions with God, trusted God’s promise of a child to come, way past child-bearing age. He considered God to be able and trustworthy (11:8). Sarah, understandably, laughed at the unlikelihood. Similarly, based on its track record and the lack of better options, many infertile couples place their faith in IVF and other medical technologies in hopes of a child. The object of faith in these instances differs: one is unnatural, the other is supernatural. In both cases, the outcome is unrealized. Faith is required. Reasoning is required.

Speaking of Isaac and Jacob, the author observes: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.” (11:13) They lived not only according to what they already had, but by what was yet to come.

Clearly, the author of Hebrews has in mind something like I’ve defined. The patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith acted upon their trust in what is not seen or not yet, based in these cases on past actions and encounters with God.

Things loved are therefore not so appropriate to faith as things hoped for, since hope is always for the absent and unseen.

Aquinas, Summa

Thomas

More famous still is “faithless”, “doubting Thomas”. He had known Jesus, seen miracles, and heard from eyewitnesses who were his own friends that Jesus had risen. He had second hand testimony and evidence from past experience. And yet he could not believe until he beheld Jesus himself. It is easy to sympathize with Thomas. He had seen Jesus crushed. He knew as well as we that the dead do not rise. He had not seen the risen Christ as the other disciples had. Jesus sympathized with Thomas and with those not present who would believe without seeing Jesus manifest: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Here Jesus anticipates his future disciples, acknowledging that they will have to determine whether they believe without seeing for themselves. But even for the disciples who did see the resurrected Christ, faith was in order. Jesus made promises to them that were not yet realized. As they faced hostile crowds and threats to their lives, they had to trust Jesus when he promised: “I will be with you always, till the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) The need for faith is escaped only by seeing what was unseen, or what was hoped for coming to pass.

Paul

As one of the most prolific writers of scripture, the Apostle Paul regularly invokes faith and evidence.

That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.

‭‭2 Timothy‬ ‭1:12‬ ‭NIV‬‬

In each of these biblical accounts, the faithful had a basis for their faith. Noah and Abraham are described as knowing God.

Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.

Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Moun (1960) pp. 129–30.

“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
‭‭2 Corinthians‬ ‭4‬:‭18‬ ‭NIV‬‬
https://bible.com/bible/111/2co.4.18.NIV

Faithlessness

How different is the account of faith in the Bible and in our everyday lives than how it’s misconstrued.

The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.” – Sam Harris

Sam Harris

“Our principles are not a faith,” Hitchens

Faith is widely regarded as in tension or opposition to reason and evidence for at least three reasons.

First, faith does go beyond empirical evidence, and we live in a scientistic, materialistic age when sensible and repeatable evidence is thought to be the only kind. Secondly, faith can be irrational and very often is. When people trust the untrustworthy and justify it by appealing to the virtue of faith instead of to evidence, by guilt by association they discredit faith that is perfectly reasonable. And thirdly, faith is inherently uncertain, unrealized. In matters of consequence, that can be terribly unnerving. We crave certainty, but often it is not in the menu.

Scams, schemes, and misinformation are a scourge on our mediated, online existence. We live in a post-trust moment, when faith in others and in our institutions is abysmal. Misled so often, we demand evidence, see conspiracies everywhere, or content ourselves with only the apparent knowledge of our own lived experience. It’s reasonable to demand evidence. It’s perfectly sensible to want to kick the tires, to try it on, to want to see it for ourselves. We grasp beyond the insubstantiality of the unseen, the past, the future, the abstract is a longstanding complaint. The tribes of Jacob erected a golden calf instead of trusting the unseen God. And for us, if there’s no video, it might as well not have happened. It won’t get airplay.

Empiricism

In the same vein, one extreme form of empiricism, logical positivism, put it quite bluntly: if you can’t point to the thing itself, don’t believe it’s a thing that exists. Another extreme remedy, behaviorism, proposed we only judge people by their behavior, since their thoughts are inaccessible to sight and measurement.

In spite of these excesses, the scientific disciplines

Foolishness

Incompleteness

It should be clear that faith in what is not yet or not seen is very often exceedingly reasonable, indeed

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. ¹When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.

‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭13‬:‭12‬ ‭NET‬‬

It is something of a consensus amongst Vhristian apologists who affirm the importance of reason in arriving at truth that faith is best construed as trust. Less often stated is that it is trust specifically in what is unseen or not yet.

Arthur Brooks offers a common definition of

Empricism

So, faith is at odds with empiricism, but not with evidence or reason.

And, I have faith in Jesus, inferring from multiple lines of evidence that he resurrected from the dead after a miraculous and exemplary life and is someone who can be trusted to do what he said he will do.

For Faith

The believer lives “by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians‬ ‭5:7) And faith is, “trusting what we have reason to believe is true.”¹

Faith is not indubitable. Inferences can be mistaken

Whether it is one or the other will be a function of well justified the inference is. what I know of sturdy chairs and the appearance of this particular chair that, it will hold me in a moment.

Faith, but rather of seeing or possessing.

Believers in the conspiracy ask non-believers three questions: Have you ever been to Bielefeld, do you know anybody from Bielefeld, and do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld? To most people, the answer to these three questions is “no,” supposedly proving the conspiracists’ point. 

Faith, then, can be foolhardy. Put no your faith in princes.

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 (KJV)

We are blessed

The disciple, Thomas, is famous for not believing the testimony of the women who first saw Jesus risen from the dead, nor his fellow disciples. To believe this unexpected miracle, he said he would have to touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. He was, in other words, an empiricist. He would not believe what he could not see or touch with his own senses. Jesus does not begrudge Thomas’ request:

”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe.” Thomas replied to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.“
‭‭John‬ ‭20‬:‭27‬-‭31‬ ‭NET‬‬
https://bible.com/bible/107/jhn.20.27-31.NET

This instructive episode encapsulates what we need to know about faith. Thomas failed to trust the witnesses who announced the resurrection of Jesus, but upon seeing the resurrected Jesus, declares: “my Lord and my God.” Jesus understood his predicament, that trusting in a truth or a person that is not yet seen with one’s own eyes requires more. But significantly, John tells us that Jesus performed this sign and other miracles so that we may believe. That is to say, they are the evidence for faith.
Jesus. Rise up and walk to paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins. “so that you may know”. Sean McDowell’s pattern for OT and New: 1) miracle 2) knowledge 3) belief.

A common strategy for rejecting the notion of faith as irrational is to characterize it as synonymous with trust. But if faith were just trust, why then does faith evaporate when the object of faith comes to pass.

is inferring from the knowledge one already possesses to that which has not been, as of yet, beheld.

Fixes, the thing believed, and fiducia, the attitude towards it. Classic distinction

Five Reasonable Beliefs

Which of these are examples of faith?

“Faith” in Common Parlance

Increasingly since the rise of modernism, faith has been viewed in contrast to reasoning rather than as an instance of it. Many Christmas movies In recent year After all, Boghossian asserts,

“if one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. ‘Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief.”[4]

Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists(Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.

I think Boghossian is half right in two respects. Even a great thinker and believer Arthur Brooks describes faith as “beliefs that you do not know”. This mistake is the result of a faulty notion notion of faith and of knowledge. First that knowledge requires certainty. Neither the traditional definition of justified true belief (JTB) nor the Reformed view that it is a faculty operating correctly in a verisimilitudinous environment regard certainty as a requirement for knowledge.

Now, I don’t see much that can be gleaned from the phrase “blind faith”. “Just believe”, or “believe”, . No. Hope is an appropriate disposition. Credulity is not. Hope will lead one to seek true beliefs. Believing whatever is no virtue at all. I don’t have enough faith to, for example, be a Christian, or be an atheist.

Indeed, in his enthusiasm for being a beacon of science and reason, Lawrence Krauss, has at times confusedly denied having beliefs at all. Misunderstanding about these everyday terms abounds.

Pictures of chairs.

Romans 8:24-25

“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭8:24-25‬ ‭NIV‬‬
https://www.bible.com/111/rom.8.24-25.niv

“Faith is Blind.” This is half true.

”that not yet seen”

You cannot have your faith and eat it too

the Ansemian rendering, that it is faith seeking understanding, is a fine one, as long as we understand that faith itsel is also an understanding.

“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
‭‭Romans‬ ‭8:24‬,25 ‭NIV‬‬
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.24.niv

Hope is a corollary to faith and a key to understanding why it is that without hope, one cannot please God. If one does not harbor hopes about tomorrow, about the afterlife, then one is less likely to form beliefs about it. See Unamuno. See Pascal’s Wager. It is Annie’s hope when she’s “stuck in a day that’s gray and lonely” that inspires her rational inference that you ought to “bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”

“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭8:23-24‬ ‭NIV‬‬
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.23-24.niv

The Bible speaks voluminously on faith and belief, but two of the most clarifying verses are:

And.

Do you trust someone when they are out of eyesight.

The term “faith” populates many a cliché. One can “take a leap of faith”, or more modestly, a “step of faith”. Some of the most common but misleading he phraseology around faith include, most infamously, that of “taking a leap of faith”.

This phrase is revealing and misleading at once. Taking a step or leap is a fine way of characterizing an inference. It can be to take the most reasonable next step in a chain of reasoning. But perhaps there are times when the step is more of a leap.

Faith Versus Empiricism

Inference is Inescapable

Fideism

Inference is an act. One of the more colorfully named types in the catalog of logical fallacies is that of the “slothful induction”.

Faithlessness

To be faithless is to be stuck, to insular, to be lonely, without conviction or direction. To be foolish, gullible and unskeptical, is to be prey to a thousand factoids, to every charlatan trying to fleece its mark.,. To be wise, to be intelligent, is to grow skilled in discriminating between facts and factoids.

Trust

The trust angle, such as WLC, who characterizes is as trusting in something based on the evidence.  “Faith is believing that God will.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. …. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” ~ Lewis

Evidence

The design we infer in nature is an insight we abstract from our senses, but the inference itself is acquired by our reason. We infer design in nature by abstraction, not immediately by sense image. We see biological structures that have purpose and specified complexity, and using our capacity for abstract thought we reason that such structures imply a designer.

Michael Egnor at Evolution News (September 30, 2019).

Notes

1 JP Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith, (), p. 18.

Faith is trust in something or someone not seen, not here, or not yet. Because the object of faith is unseen or has not yet materialized, trust therein requires reasoning. It requires an inference from what is beheld at this very moment to what is not. The inference may be confident or tentative. It may be based on overwhelming evidence or insufficiently justified. Either way, faith is an act of our reason. Granted, faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. It is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith is not some mystical or esoteric basis of belief. It is essential to all belief and action.

Misunderstood Faith

Though it is inescapable and ordinary, faith is often mischaracterized and maligned. Mark Twain’s schoolboy quipped that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. It’s cliché to echo that “faith is blind”. Many take it as a given that faith stands in contrast to evidence, science, and reason. In the wake of 9/11, many blamed the evil attack on faith. Terry Eagleton quotes John Milbank opining: “Where reason has retreated, there, it seems, faith has now rushed in, often with violent consequences.” (“Only Theology saves Metaphysics“) Blurbing Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Harvard luminary Alan Dershowitz wrote “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence. … A must read for all rational people.” For his part, Harris writes: “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Portland State professor Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, called faith a “virus”; a “belief without evidence,” a habit of “pretending to know things you don’t know. (Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.) As for the late Christopher Hitchens, he claims: “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically…” (GISG, p.5) For these critics, faith is juxtaposed as the polar opposite of well-justified belief: faith or science, faith or reason. You can only pick one.

These criticisms indict a straw man, a mistaken understanding of the nature of faith. To dispel such confusion, my claim isn’t merely that faith and reason can be fit together or harmonized. More boldly I claim, faith is reasoning in our ordinary understanding of it. Faith is trust in what we can’t behold based upon what we can see, taste, touch, intuit, and know with confidence. Properly understood, faith is a normal and necessary component of every thought and every breath. In all that we say and do, there are elements of trust in realities that are not present, not seen, or not yet. Whatever ills have been motivated by faith, they are the product of misplaced faith, not of the error of faith in itself.

Everyday Faith

We walk by faith. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, I entrust my muscles, bones, joints, and footing with another step not yet made. As a baby learning to walk, after knee surgery, or on a frozen pond in spring, our steps are more tentative. Most of the time, based on what we know to be true, we have good reason to trust our legs and our footing for that next step.

We talk by faith, trusting in another’s presence of mind and ability to comprehend us. We look for validation of our faith in their nods and responses and base further sentences on their demonstrated understanding. We restate if there’s been an apparent miscommunication based on quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, and “uh-huhs” that we see or hear, though we cannot see others’ thoughts. In a foreign country in a second tongue, we may have less faith in our words, adding gestures, speaking more simply. Lacking faith, we may not talk at all. Nevertheless, we successfully communicate countless times a day, seeing our reasonable faith in speech validated over and over.

We have faith in specialists. We trusted astronomers, who foretold that if I traveled to Madras, Oregon on August 21st, 2017 or Dallas, Texas on April 8, 2024 I would see a total solar eclipse; so too if I’m in the right American city on August 8, 2044. I have faith in cartographers and geographers that the city of Beilefeld is where they say, though I have not yet seen it, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.

We have faith in all kinds of people. We trust other drivers, that they will not swerve across the dividing line; we believe our parents when they retell events we’ve forgotten from childhood; we depend upon our employer, that they will cut the check this month; we entrust our lives to the airline, that they hired a competent pilot and maintained the aircraft. We have less faith in the STUDENT DRIVER, in the negligent parent, in the startup company, in the “puddle jumper” over the Alaskan wilds. These are all reasonable inferences. And they are acts of faith.

We have faith in math. We expect that cutting the two-by-four in half will give me two equal planks for my chicken coop; we count on election judges, that when they tally the same votes, they’ll reach the same total; we put or weight on the approaching bridge, trusting that its engineers did their maths. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.

In all of these, we reasonably trust when the object of our faith is not seen, not here, or not yet. Nietzsche associated faith with lunacy, but if you’ve ever known a paranoiac, you know that their lack of faith, their inability to trust, is fearsome and paralyzing for life. Faith is essential every day to life and thought.

William K. Clifford gets the everyday inescapability of faith right.

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the child’s belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.

William K. Clifford in “The Ethics of Belief” (1877)

Biblical Faith

Biblical faith is like everyday faith. Consider the paradigmatic biblical instances of faith as a test of the definition I’ve offered: trust in something not seen, not here, or not yet. Famously, the author of Hebrews says it this way. “Faith is confidence [trust] in what we hope for [not yet] and assurance about what we do not see [not seen].” (Hebrews 11:1)

The author goes on to give numerous examples.

Noah

Noah, “when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (11:7) It is rare, indeed, for someone to put their life on hold to prepare for a future threat like Noah. Today, climate scientists also warn of impending environmental calamities. Some few trust these climatologists and forecasters enough to upend their lives. They reason, based on these experts’ credibility and the evidence offered, that this future state will come to pass. As with Noah, that is faith in a biblical sense. It follows a chain of reasoning into the future.

Abraham

Abraham, based on his interactions with God, trusted God’s promise of a child to come, way past child-bearing age. He considered God to be able and trustworthy (11:8). Sarah, understandably, laughed at the unlikelihood. Similarly, based on its track record and the lack of better options, many infertile couples place their faith in IVF and other medical technologies in hopes of a child. The object of faith in these instances differs: one is unnatural, the other is supernatural. In both cases, the outcome is unrealized. Faith is required. Reasoning is required.

Speaking of Isaac and Jacob, the author observes: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.” (11:13) They lived not only according to what they already had, but by what was yet to come.

Clearly, the author of Hebrews has in mind something like I’ve defined. The patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith acted upon their trust in what is not seen or not yet, based in these cases on past actions and encounters with God.

Things loved are therefore not so appropriate to faith as things hoped for, since hope is always for the absent and unseen.

Aquinas, Summa

Thomas

More famous still is “faithless”, “doubting Thomas”. He had known Jesus, seen miracles, and heard from eyewitnesses who were his own friends that Jesus had risen. He had second hand testimony and evidence from past experience. And yet he could not believe until he beheld Jesus himself. It is easy to sympathize with Thomas. He had seen Jesus crushed. He knew as well as we that the dead do not rise. He had not seen the risen Christ as the other disciples had. Jesus sympathized with Thomas and with those not present who would believe without seeing Jesus manifest: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Here Jesus anticipates his future disciples, acknowledging that they will have to determine whether they believe without seeing for themselves. But even for the disciples who did see the resurrected Christ, faith was in order. Jesus made promises to them that were not yet realized. As they faced hostile crowds and threats to their lives, they had to trust Jesus when he promised: “I will be with you always, till the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) The need for faith is escaped only by seeing what was unseen, or what was hoped for coming to pass.

Paul

As one of the most prolific writers of scripture, the Apostle Paul regularly invokes faith and evidence.

That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.

‭‭2 Timothy‬ ‭1:12‬ ‭NIV‬‬

In each of these biblical accounts, the faithful had a basis for their faith. Noah and Abraham are described as knowing God.

Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.

Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Moun (1960) pp. 129–30.

“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
‭‭2 Corinthians‬ ‭4‬:‭18‬ ‭NIV‬‬
https://bible.com/bible/111/2co.4.18.NIV

Faithlessness

How different is the account of faith in the Bible and in our everyday lives than how it’s misconstrued.

The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.” – Sam Harris

Sam Harris

“Our principles are not a faith,” Hitchens

Faith is widely regarded as in tension or opposition to reason and evidence for at least three reasons.

First, faith does go beyond empirical evidence, and we live in a scientistic, materialistic age when sensible and repeatable evidence is thought to be the only kind. Secondly, faith can be irrational and very often is. When people trust the untrustworthy and justify it by appealing to the virtue of faith instead of to evidence, by guilt by association they discredit faith that is perfectly reasonable. And thirdly, faith is inherently uncertain, unrealized. In matters of consequence, that can be terribly unnerving. We crave certainty, but often it is not in the menu.

Scams, schemes, and misinformation are a scourge on our mediated, online existence. We live in a post-trust moment, when faith in others and in our institutions is abysmal. Misled so often, we demand evidence, see conspiracies everywhere, or content ourselves with only the apparent knowledge of our own lived experience. It’s reasonable to demand evidence. It’s perfectly sensible to want to kick the tires, to try it on, to want to see it for ourselves. We grasp beyond the insubstantiality of the unseen, the past, the future, the abstract is a longstanding complaint. The tribes of Jacob erected a golden calf instead of trusting the unseen God. And for us, if there’s no video, it might as well not have happened. It won’t get airplay.

Empiricism

In the same vein, one extreme form of empiricism, logical positivism, put it quite bluntly: if you can’t point to the thing itself, don’t believe it’s a thing that exists. Another extreme remedy, behaviorism, proposed we only judge people by their behavior, since their thoughts are inaccessible to sight and measurement.

In spite of these excesses, the scientific disciplines

Foolishness

Incompleteness

It should be clear that faith in what is not yet or not seen is very often exceedingly reasonable, indeed

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. ¹When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.

‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭13‬:‭12‬ ‭NET‬‬

It is something of a consensus amongst Vhristian apologists who affirm the importance of reason in arriving at truth that faith is best construed as trust. Less often stated is that it is trust specifically in what is unseen or not yet.

Arthur Brooks offers a common definition of

Empricism

So, faith is at odds with empiricism, but not with evidence or reason.

And, I have faith in Jesus, inferring from multiple lines of evidence that he resurrected from the dead after a miraculous and exemplary life and is someone who can be trusted to do what he said he will do.

For Faith

The believer lives “by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians‬ ‭5:7) And faith is, “trusting what we have reason to believe is true.”¹

Faith is not indubitable. Inferences can be mistaken

Whether it is one or the other will be a function of well justified the inference is. what I know of sturdy chairs and the appearance of this particular chair that, it will hold me in a moment.

Faith, but rather of seeing or possessing.

Believers in the conspiracy ask non-believers three questions: Have you ever been to Bielefeld, do you know anybody from Bielefeld, and do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld? To most people, the answer to these three questions is “no,” supposedly proving the conspiracists’ point. 

Faith, then, can be foolhardy. Put no your faith in princes.

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 (KJV)

We are blessed

The disciple, Thomas, is famous for not believing the testimony of the women who first saw Jesus risen from the dead, nor his fellow disciples. To believe this unexpected miracle, he said he would have to touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. He was, in other words, an empiricist. He would not believe what he could not see or touch with his own senses. Jesus does not begrudge Thomas’ request:

”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe.” Thomas replied to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.“
‭‭John‬ ‭20‬:‭27‬-‭31‬ ‭NET‬‬
https://bible.com/bible/107/jhn.20.27-31.NET

This instructive episode encapsulates what we need to know about faith. Thomas failed to trust the witnesses who announced the resurrection of Jesus, but upon seeing the resurrected Jesus, declares: “my Lord and my God.” Jesus understood his predicament, that trusting in a truth or a person that is not yet seen with one’s own eyes requires more. But significantly, John tells us that Jesus performed this sign and other miracles so that we may believe. That is to say, they are the evidence for faith.
Jesus. Rise up and walk to paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins. “so that you may know”. Sean McDowell’s pattern for OT and New: 1) miracle 2) knowledge 3) belief.

A common strategy for rejecting the notion of faith as irrational is to characterize it as synonymous with trust. But if faith were just trust, why then does faith evaporate when the object of faith comes to pass.

is inferring from the knowledge one already possesses to that which has not been, as of yet, beheld.

Fixes, the thing believed, and fiducia, the attitude towards it. Classic distinction

Five Reasonable Beliefs

Which of these are examples of faith?

“Faith” in Common Parlance

Increasingly since the rise of modernism, faith has been viewed in contrast to reasoning rather than as an instance of it. Many Christmas movies In recent year After all, Boghossian asserts,

“if one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. ‘Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief.”[4]

Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists(Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.

I think Boghossian is half right in two respects. Even a great thinker and believer Arthur Brooks describes faith as “beliefs that you do not know”. This mistake is the result of a faulty notion notion of faith and of knowledge. First that knowledge requires certainty. Neither the traditional definition of justified true belief (JTB) nor the Reformed view that it is a faculty operating correctly in a verisimilitudinous environment regard certainty as a requirement for knowledge.

Now, I don’t see much that can be gleaned from the phrase “blind faith”. “Just believe”, or “believe”, . No. Hope is an appropriate disposition. Credulity is not. Hope will lead one to seek true beliefs. Believing whatever is no virtue at all. I don’t have enough faith to, for example, be a Christian, or be an atheist.

Indeed, in his enthusiasm for being a beacon of science and reason, Lawrence Krauss, has at times confusedly denied having beliefs at all. Misunderstanding about these everyday terms abounds.

Pictures of chairs.

Romans 8:24-25

“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭8:24-25‬ ‭NIV‬‬
https://www.bible.com/111/rom.8.24-25.niv

“Faith is Blind.” This is half true.

”that not yet seen”

You cannot have your faith and eat it too

the Ansemian rendering, that it is faith seeking understanding, is a fine one, as long as we understand that faith itsel is also an understanding.

“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
‭‭Romans‬ ‭8:24‬,25 ‭NIV‬‬
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.24.niv

Hope is a corollary to faith and a key to understanding why it is that without hope, one cannot please God. If one does not harbor hopes about tomorrow, about the afterlife, then one is less likely to form beliefs about it. See Unamuno. See Pascal’s Wager. It is Annie’s hope when she’s “stuck in a day that’s gray and lonely” that inspires her rational inference that you ought to “bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”

“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭8:23-24‬ ‭NIV‬‬
http://bible.com/111/rom.8.23-24.niv

The Bible speaks voluminously on faith and belief, but two of the most clarifying verses are:

And.

Do you trust someone when they are out of eyesight.

The term “faith” populates many a cliché. One can “take a leap of faith”, or more modestly, a “step of faith”. Some of the most common but misleading he phraseology around faith include, most infamously, that of “taking a leap of faith”.

This phrase is revealing and misleading at once. Taking a step or leap is a fine way of characterizing an inference. It can be to take the most reasonable next step in a chain of reasoning. But perhaps there are times when the step is more of a leap.

Faith Versus Empiricism

Inference is Inescapable

Fideism

Inference is an act. One of the more colorfully named types in the catalog of logical fallacies is that of the “slothful induction”.

Faithlessness

To be faithless is to be stuck, to insular, to be lonely, without conviction or direction. To be foolish, gullible and unskeptical, is to be prey to a thousand factoids, to every charlatan trying to fleece its mark.,. To be wise, to be intelligent, is to grow skilled in discriminating between facts and factoids.

Trust

The trust angle, such as WLC, who characterizes is as trusting in something based on the evidence.  “Faith is believing that God will.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. …. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” ~ Lewis

Evidence

The design we infer in nature is an insight we abstract from our senses, but the inference itself is acquired by our reason. We infer design in nature by abstraction, not immediately by sense image. We see biological structures that have purpose and specified complexity, and using our capacity for abstract thought we reason that such structures imply a designer.

Michael Egnor at Evolution News (September 30, 2019).

Notes

1 JP Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith, (), p. 18.

Such a statement has three features: (1) The claim establishes some requirement of acceptability for an assertion (such as having to be empirically verifiable). (2) The claim places itself in subjection to the requirement. (3) Then the claim falls short of satisfying the requirement of acceptability that the assertion itself stipulates. In other words, when a statement is included in its own subject matter (i.e., when it refers to itself) but fails to satisfy its own standards of acceptability, it is self-refuting. Self-refuting statements can come in many forms. Take a look at these examples: “All sentences are exactly three words long.” “I cannot utter a word of English” (spoken in English). “I do not exist.” “This sentence is false.” “Truths can only be verified by the five senses or by science.”