Is faith belief without evidence, or trust with good reasons?
Richard Dawkins calls faith blind trust that ignores evidence. Many Christian thinkers answer that the Greek word behind it was used for presenting evidence in court, and that ancient Romans understood faith as a relationship of trust, not a set of opinions. The argument is partly about what one word means.
The English word appeared in the mid-thirteenth century, borrowed from Old French forms such as feid and feit and ultimately from Latin fides. Linguists trace that to a Proto-Indo-European root, bheidh, carrying ideas of trust, confidence and persuasion, which also produced the Greek pistis. In everyday use faith still simply means confidence in a person, thing or idea, and Merriam-Webster lists senses ranging from complete trust to firm belief in something unproven.
For the Romans, fides had no special link to gods. It described a two-sided bond, like that of a father over a family or a host over a guest, in which one party entrusts itself to another who could do harm but chooses not to. The scholar Teresa Morgan argues early Christians understood faith in a similar social way, as a trusting relationship that built a community rather than a private mental state.
Christian theology has pulled in several directions. Thomas Aquinas treated faith as an act of intellect agreeing to truth at the will's command, a middle path between leaning too heavily on demonstration and too heavily on opinion. The biblical scholar A. T. Robertson noted that pistis appears over 240 times in the New Testament and comes from a verb Demosthenes used for bringing forward evidence. Apologists such as John Lennox and Alister McGrath insist faith is normally reasoned, while the philosopher Alvin Plantinga emphasises inner persuasion by the Holy Spirit.
Traditions have even tried to measure it. Willingness to face martyrdom served as one gauge, some Calvinists read prosperity as a sign, and Inquisition tribunals examined people's orthodoxy in detail before acquitting or punishing them.
Source: Faith
