Doesn’t the very concept of faith preclude the offering of evidence and argument? Isn’t that the whole point of “becoming like a child”?

For a lot of people, “faith” does mean believing without evidence, and some Christians talk that way — so the objection is aimed at something real. But that definition is modern, and it is not the one the New Testament uses.

1. Pistis means trust, not credulity. The Greek word pistis is the ordinary word for reliance on a person, the way you rely on a doctor or a friend. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” — assurance and conviction, not wishful thinking. The metaphor is leaning your weight on someone, not believing a proposition against the evidence.

2. Trust is normally grounded in evidence. You trust a surgeon because of her training and her record. You trust a friend because of years of proved character. Faith in God is presented in Scripture the same way: a response to what he has shown. John says the signs were written down precisely so that readers might believe on the evidence (John 20:30-31).

3. Jesus argued. On the road to Emmaus he did not ask for blind acceptance; he interpreted “in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Luke opens Acts by saying he presented himself alive “by many proofs” (Acts 1:3). Paul reasoned daily in the marketplace (Acts 17:17). The pattern is argument, invitation, and evidence.

4. “Become like a child” means humility. Matthew 18:3 commends the trust and teachability of a child over against the self-important. A child trusts a good father for excellent reasons — because the father has proved trustworthy. The contrast is with pride, not with thought. Nothing in the saying asks anyone to stop asking questions.

5. The New Testament commands reasoned defense. “Always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15) — the Greek is apologia, a courtroom answer. That command is unintelligible if faith is supposed to exclude reasons. It even specifies the manner: with gentleness and respect.

6. Scripture is suspicious of credulity. “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). Paul commends the Bereans for checking his preaching against the Scriptures (Acts 17:11). A religion that told you to swallow anything would not write that down.

7. The turn: everyone trusts something they cannot prove. Here is the inconsistency. You trust your reasoning faculties, your memory, the testimony of scientists you have never met, and the uniformity of nature — none of which you proved from scratch, and all of which you rely on every hour. Demanding that religion alone produce presuppositionless certainty is a standard no one applies to ordinary knowledge, including the one applying it.

8. The definition is doing the work. “Faith precludes evidence” is a definition that arrived with the Enlightenment, not with the Gospels — the same era that decided religion belonged to private feeling rather than public truth. The biblical writers did not share it. When the objection says faith and argument are incompatible, it is quoting a modern assumption back at a text that predates it.

9. Christians disagree about how much argument is needed. Some emphasize that faith is a gift and that argument can become a substitute for trust; others emphasize the commanded defense. Both are in the tradition, and the disagreement is real. But almost no serious Christian thinker has held that evidence is irrelevant — that position is a fringe, not the mainstream.

Faith in the New Testament is trust that rests on what God has done, not belief in the teeth of the evidence. Reason is not the enemy of that trust; it is one of the means by which trust becomes possible — and the demand for evidence-free certainty is a standard no one actually lives by.

Sources: J.P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind; C.S. Lewis; Gregory Koukl; Richard Swinburne.

Related challenges:
• How can human language be used to correctly characterize an infinite God?
• How can religious claims be meaningful if they are not empirically verifiable?
• How can religious claims be meaningful if they are not empirically falsifiable?