Is faith a bad word?

It depends on who you're talking to

The Herzstein Foucault pendulum at the Houston Museum of Natural History

Several years ago, I got to meet Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist, John Lennox, when he came to UT-Austin. He was charming and wonderful, and during our conversation he gave some great advice about academic life and apologetics. But he also offered some advice that surprised me: he said I should limit my use of the word “faith” in conjunction with science.

Why? Well, the problem is, while we Christians understand what is meant by the word “faith,” atheists don’t—at least not consciously. The word has been co-opted and corrupted to mean “blind faith,” as in “believing without reason or evidence” or “believing in spite of evidence to the contrary.”

Christians and atheists use the same words, but we’re often speaking different languages. For the atheist, faith is the act of surrendering your intellect. For the Christian, faith is something different. C.S. Lewis probably put it best when he explained that faith is the act of holding onto a belief you once accepted through reason in spite of your transitory emotions.

But atheists don’t seem to want to accept this definition of faith, even when they use it that way. Watch Richard Dawkins contradict himself when he agrees with Lennox that he has faith in his wife and immediately defends it by saying there’s plenty of evidence to back it up.

Here’s another example. There’s a really great scene in Carl Sagan’s novel, Contact, that didn’t make it to the movie. Astrophysicist, Ellie Arroway, is admiring a large Foucault pendulum along with her friend, Palmer Joss. The pendulum is very heavy, and swings back and forth according to the laws of physics. Palmer (who is Christian) asks Ellie (who is not) if she’s willing to test her faith in the laws of physics by placing herself just a little beyond where the pendulum is supposed to swing. The stakes are high: if it doesn’t obey the laws of physics, she’ll have her face smashed in by this thing. Admirably, Ellie goes ahead with the challenge, but admits to Palmer that her faith was shaken as the several-hundred-pound weight was swinging towards her face.

People have done this experiment in real life, and it’s interesting to watch. The physics teacher, who’s done this before, has faith in the outcome. But look at how the next person flinches the first time he tries it. When risking something important, like the intactness of one’s face, faith in even something as rock-solid as the laws of physics can be shaken. But watch what happens the second time he tries it. This is precisely what Lewis meant when he said that faith is holding onto a reasonable belief in spite of emotions.

There is another, slightly different, sense in which Christians use the word faith that doesn’t have anything to do with emotions. It means to accept something as likely to be true in spite of your inability to prove it.

Christian philosophers, William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga, point out ways in which we take things on faith, often without even realizing it. For instance, most of us take it on faith that there is a past. Does that sound ludicrous to you? Well, try proving that the universe didn’t just pop into existence one second ago. Seriously. Can you prove that your memories and everything that’s seemingly in the past aren’t just something you’re hallucinating? You can’t.

Try proving that you aren’t in the Matrix and being manipulated to think you’re experiencing things that aren’t real. You can’t. Yet you very likely go through your daily life trusting—without proof—that reality is as you perceive it and that your memories are real. That’s an entirely reasonable, even necessary, thing to do. But that’s faith.

We all engage in these acts of faith.

The problem is, no matter how well we argue that faith is reasonable, the word carries too much emotional baggage for atheists. That’s why someone like Dawkins can be tricked into saying he has faith in his wife, based on evidence, and still be repulsed by Christian use of the word. No matter how cleverly you explain the meaning of faith, you won’t get very far with non-Christians if you insist on using it in ways that are meaningful only to you.

By all means, correct atheists who accuse you of having faith as though that’s a bad thing. But when trying to convince them that Christian beliefs are reasonable and compatible with modern science, we need to find more persuasive words. Personally, I like the word “trust.” What words do you think would work well? Give me your thoughts in the replies—I’ll open them up to everyone.

This is an edited and updated version of an article I wrote for my old blog.