HQ

When I was 13 I went to an adventure island off the coast of Scotland. We climbed mountains, fished, and were taught survival techniques. The big challenge of the trip was to be abandoned on a small island for a night with nothing but a pair of billy cans, a lighter, a plastic sheet, and some flares in case of emergency. My friend and I made our bivouac and then went in search of food. Dinner was to be heather tea and limpets. Limpets are large volcano shaped mollusks attached to rocks. To get them off the rock you have to pull them off quick (sometimes by kicking them). If you fail to remove it on the first tug, you'll never get it off. This is because they tighten their grip on the rock with their teeth and those teeth are the  strongest natural material  in the world: Their tiny, millimeter-long teeth are now the record holders for the world's strongest natural material, according to  findings  published in the Journal of the Royal Society  Interface ...

I was at mile twenty and pretty sure there was no way I could finish. Mile twenty has a name for marathoners: “the wall.” It’s when you think you can go no further. I was there. I was spent, all out of juice, dead in the water. It is commonly said that faith is at mile twenty; it's dead on arrival, a dying trade, a disappearing, unnecessary artifact from a bygone era. The culture is like the voice in the runner’s head: it’s time to quit! Atheists think faith has had its day. Sam Harris says that our faith is "the permission that religious people give one another to believe things strongly when reasons fail" In a recent book called, Faith verses Fact , Jerry Coyne says, “Faith may be a gift in religion, but in science it’s poison, for faith is no way to find truth.” The story of faith is the ultimate underdog story: the team that everybody expects to lose is the team who wins it all But you have to get through the wall.  Jesus' friend, Peter, knows abou...

What is faith? It seems to be a simple concept, one simply believes in something. However, a Biblical definition is rich and multifaceted. Clifford McManis offers a survey of some of the ideas involved in a definition of faith:

Just how do faith and academic studies relate? More particularly, how should students relate their beliefs to their studies? Before we examine the relationship between faith and study we should figure out what we mean by faith and study. Faith, simply put, is as a set of beliefs. A Christian believes, for example, that Jesus Christ is God. She does this not because she can see God in Christ through her eyes or logically deduce that the man Jesus is necessarily God, but by  believing  Christ's and the apostles claims. She might also say that God, the Holy Spirit affirms the truth of scripture to her. Faith, then, in basic terms, is a set of basic commitments, assumptions that have come to be believed in some manner that relies on God's revealing of them and the Christian's trust in God. Let us also say that this kind of faith is Biblical faith in that this kind of faith believes the content of scripture to be the revealed words of God ...

American a-theist in residence, Sam Harris, says that faith is "the permission that religious people give one another to believe things strongly when reasons fail" (listen to the speech here ). Harris seems to think that faith is something one does after all else falls short, a final leap in the dark, a punt. It is as if we can only get so far on our own steam and have to guess at the rest. And, having made the leap, we keep each other bolstered by excusing ourselves from rationality. There may be many religious people who think this way, but by no means all. Christians have other, better ways to define faith. I have been thinking about John Calvin's definition lately (it made an appearance in a recent post here ). It is striking how different it is to the definition supplied by Sam Harris: “Now we possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God's benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise ...