Faith Isn’t Supposed to Be Blind

For most of my life, I thought faith meant believing without evidence.

I didn’t just assume that. I was taught it. Explicitly and implicitly. Faith was framed as a virtue precisely because it went beyond what could be proven. The less you needed reasons, the stronger your faith supposedly was.

And for a long time, I accepted that.

But that version of faith didn’t hold up.

It eventually collapsed under the weight of questions it couldn’t answer. Questions about history. About truth. About why one belief system should be trusted over another. And once that collapse started, it didn’t stop at the edges. It reached all the way to the center.

That experience shaped almost a decade of my life and this podcast.

When Faith Becomes Fragile

What I’ve come to see more clearly now is that the problem wasn’t doubt. The problem was the foundation.

If faith is defined as a blind leap, then it is incredibly fragile in a world full of competing stories. As soon as you encounter other people who believe deeply, sincerely, and emotionally in very different things, the question becomes unavoidable.

Why this? Why Christianity? Why should I trust this story rather than another one?

If the only answer you’ve been given is “because it feels true to me,” then eventually that answer stops working.

That doesn’t mean the person asking the question is rebellious or proud or unspiritual. It means they’re doing what humans naturally do when they care about truth. They’re comparing explanations. They’re weighing claims. They’re asking whether their beliefs actually correspond to reality.

For years, I didn’t have good tools to do that.

A Word I’d Never Really Examined

One of the reasons this conversation mattered so much to me is that it forced me to slow down and examine a word I had used my entire life without really understanding.

Faith.

In English, that word has accumulated a lot of baggage. It often implies believing despite a lack of evidence. Sometimes even believing because evidence is missing.

But that is not how the word was used in the world of the New Testament.

The Greek word translated as “faith” is pistis. And in the first century, it wasn’t a religious word at all. It was an everyday word. A word used by historians, philosophers, and ordinary people to describe trust.

Not blind trust. Earned trust.

The kind of trust you place in a doctor, a guide, a witness, or a source that has proven reliable. Trust grounded in reasons.

That distinction might sound subtle, but it changes everything.

Christianity as a Public Claim

One of the most striking things about the earliest Christian writings is how public they are.

They appeal to eyewitnesses. They reference fulfilled prophecies. They anchor their claims in real places, real people, and real events.

The resurrection of Jesus is not presented as a private spiritual experience. It is presented as something that either happened in history or didn’t. And the writers seem fully aware that if it didn’t happen, the entire movement falls apart.

That is a risky way to build a religion.

But it makes sense if the people involved believed they were reporting something they had actually seen.

This is where so many of us were never really invited to look. We were taught the conclusions, but not the reasons. The practices, but not the evidence. The applications, but not the foundation.

And when that foundation was later challenged, many of us had nothing solid to stand on.

Why Hebrews 11 Isn’t About Blind Faith

Hebrews 11:1 is often quoted as the definitive description of faith. And for years, I heard it used to reinforce the idea that faith is strongest when it’s least tied to evidence.

But when you slow down and examine the language and context, that verse isn’t praising blindness at all. It’s describing trust as something like a title deed. A guarantee. A grounded assurance pointing toward something promised but not yet fully seen.

It’s not saying faith ignores reality. It’s saying faith is oriented toward a future grounded in a trustworthy past.

That kind of faith doesn’t fear investigation. It expects it.

Why This Matters Now

We live in a pluralistic world. A skeptical world. A world where people are constantly exposed to alternative explanations for reality.

In that environment, a faith built only on feelings is almost guaranteed to fracture. Not because feelings are bad, but because they are not unique. Every worldview has them.

What makes Christianity distinct, if it is distinct at all, is not how deeply it is felt, but whether it is true.

That is the question I’m no longer afraid to ask.

Why Faith Lab Exists

This episode is a good example of why Faith Lab exists.

Not to pressure anyone into belief. Not to shame doubt. Not to replace curiosity with certainty.

But to recover a vision of faith that is intellectually honest. A faith that understands itself as trust grounded in reality, not belief floating free from it.

I spent years assuming that asking hard questions would eventually lead me away from Christianity. What surprised me was discovering how much of the evidence I had never really engaged in the first place.

Faith Lab is my attempt to make that material accessible. To slow down. To listen carefully. To test claims rather than dismiss them or accept them too quickly.

If you’re still sorting things out, you’re not behind. If you’re unsure what you believe, you’re not broken. And if you’ve been quietly wondering whether Christianity has more to stand on than you were told, you’re asking the right kind of question.

If it’s true, it should stand up to scrutiny.

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