What is faith?

     Faith is the reason provided for our god belief. Colloquially, faith has come to mean “hope”, “a sense of wonder”, “a recognition of what’s possible”, or even “allegiance”. Faith has also come to mean “a source of encouragement”. Although these are generally considered positive characteristics, none of these definitions present logical or verifiably consistent routes to the actual Truth of an idea, much less the Truth of a god idea. Faith alone, is the belief in something without evidence. As such, faith is very difficult to distinguish from gullibility. The clearest distinction between the two words (faith and gullibility) is how they sound to an audience. Audiences will generally agree the word “faith” sounds positive, and agree the word “gullibility” sounds very negative. In general, we may also think of the gullible as eventually seeing the error of their ways, “gullibility” seems to have some conclusion associated with it’s meaning. In this way, we can understand faith as romanticized gullibility. The intention of this statement is not to be offensive, although with this topic, being unintentionally offensive is unfortunately inevitable. Each of the vastly different faiths on Earth would find offense in these statements. It is not possible for all of our faiths to be True. Furthermore, the vast majority of us have been asked to defend our faith. This is where the entire field of christian apologetics comes from. Do we have a different definition of faith? The book of Hebrews, chapter 11, is a great place to start. We should all read our faith-based books much more. Coming to an understanding about this issue will help all of us. In a metaphorical sense, faith is the language of the imagination.

     When we confront this conversation, we may want to suggest that faith is actually evidence. Faith is not evidence. Faith is maintaining a belief without scientific evidence, or even in spite of scientific evidence. If the goal is to find Truth, then we do not logically need faith if we have evidence. Faith demands 100% certainty in our beliefs. How strong is our faith in our god?