Faith in Things Unseen

We’ve been discussing faith since August in the context of Jesus’s comments to the Pharisees in the “Woes” that they should pay more attention to the weightier matters of the law—Mercy, justice and faith.

What does your faith require proof of? Maybe a better way of putting it is: How much evidence is required for your faith? Or is faith something that requires no evidence? In Hebrews 11:1, faith is defined as “the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen.” What does that mean? What does it mean to understand, and even to be certain of, evidence in things “not seen”? On the face of it, it seems like an oxymoron.

Is not evidence by definition something that can be seen, something that can be at least experienced by the senses? So the question is, does faith require evidence? Or is faith something that is needed when there is no evidence? For example: Does it take faith to believe that God exists? Or is there so much evidence that God exists that a reasonable individual would not doubt that God exists?

Evidence is something we usually associate with science. Questions are asked, hypotheses are formulated, experiments are designed to answer the question, data are gathered and analyzed, results and conclusions are reached, and the outcome is reported. This, in essence, is what we call the scientific method. It is evidence-based. No conclusion is drawn without data, without evidence. Moreover, the quality of the evidence is judged as well: Are the data blinded? Is the study sample randomized? Are potential biases controlled? Do the data reach statistical significance?

The core of science is to embrace uncertainty and to set up experiments for answers. Answers in science generally generate more questions. Uncertainty is the engine of science. Science welcomes ambiguity, embraces fallibility, and relishes the unknown. The goal of science is still truth, however. And it values curiosity, self doubt, even skepticism. In science, the universe is vast, the questions are infinite, and the realm of study is limitless.

Faith shares the goal of wanting truth. Each man and woman of faith seeks the truth about life, the truth about God, the truth about life after death. For faith, like science, the universe also is vast, the questions are infinite, and the realm of study is limitless. But unlike science, faith does not value uncertainty, belief does not welcome curiosity, self doubt, and skepticism. These are viewed as antithetical to faith, as evidence of spiritual failure, even destructive. If uncertainty is the engine of science, what is the engine of faith? Does faith require an engine? Or is faith its own engine?

You see, we want faith to eliminate doubt, to stifle uncertainty, and to suppress mystery. We want answers. We don’t want more questions. We want truth and we want it without ambiguity. It is remarkable, given the vastness of the universe and the internal and infinite nature of God, to think that any of us would not only demand truth but that we would claim it without reservation. So often, extremism in life or religion is dangerous precisely because of its dogmatic denial of uncertainty.

The moral authority of science is rooted in its acceptance of fallibility, ambiguity and the unknown. The moral authority of faith is precisely the opposite. It traffics in infallibility (a very large branch of the Christian church even has a representative of infallibility), in certainty, and in full knowledge. How would you like a faith system that was rooted in uncertainty founded on ambiguity and surrounded by questions?

Could you rely on a church which proclaimed that it didn’t have all the answers about where we come from, about why we are here, and where we are going? Could you rely on a church that clings tenaciously to uncertainty, to a version of faith which is not secure? It would seem impossible to trust a church that was uncertain about its holy writings, or with an ambiguous view of God.

In things of the Spirit we are highly stressed by what is open-ended. We want closure. We have an insatiable desire and appetite for an end product. So much so that we’d rather be wrong than uncertain. We have no pending file for faith. If we don’t know the answer, we’ll make something up, and religion has been doing that for us since the beginning of time.

What does it mean that faith is evidence of things not seen? What is your faith rooted in? What do you worship? We’ve seen from Hebrews 11 that Abraham’s faith was bolstered in a personal encounter with God. God takes him outside and shows him the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea. We see Noah’s faith bolstered by technology, building an ark never before imagined, let alone built. We see Moses faith bolstered in a secure relationship with his brother Aaron. And Gideon’s faith rests on science and the scientific method.

Even Doubting Thomas has his own faith bolstered by the senses. When he encounters Jesus, and Jesus says to him (John 20:27): “Reach your finger here and see my hands and reach here your hand and put it into my side and do not be unbelieving, but believing.” We see him resorting to the senses to have his faith bolstered.

What is it that we worship? What do we need to bolster our faith? Is it relationships? Technology? Science? Is it our senses? Can your faith be rooted in many different things? Or are these things not necessary for your faith? Does your faith require evidence to still be faith? Is faith dependent upon data, as it was for Gideon, or is faith independent of data? What is evidence not seen, data which is hidden?

From the Middle Ages until about 1900, it is estimated that human knowledge doubled about every 100 years. By the end of World War 2, knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Now, on average, knowledge doubles every 13 months. According to IBM, by 2025 there’ll be 25 billion devices attached to the Internet of Things and knowledge will double every 12 hours. Is faith the same thing yesterday, today and forever? Or is it somehow data driven? Can faith—must faith—be adjusted for the times that we live in? Does faith need to be adjusted to the times? Is it possible to test your faith in some way, to find out if your faith is out of date, full of centuries-old errors, to find out if your faith is relying on unreliable data and then, somehow, shift your faith to a new paradigm or new aspect or new understanding of faith? What mechanisms exist, what tools are available? What forms do we have for growing our faith or changing our faith in any way?

We’re all starting from a different point in our faith journey, depending on where we were born, what country we grew up in, what we were socialized in. We each have different faiths. We each have different holy writings. Does our faith somehow need an overhaul? Last week, it was suggested that looking upon faith as an action word, as a verb, may be misleading us into thinking that faith is something that it’s not, that faith will do something that it won’t do. Can you live with a faith that is provisional, subject to evaluation, something likely to be replaced or even discarded sometime in the future?

We’re told in Hebrews 13:8 that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Is my faith the same way? Can I root my faith in God alone? Or is it likely that we would require some kind of alteration of our faith, and that our faith actually does require something more tangible in order to be solid faith? Science knows that many things which we hold today to be true, won’t be true in the future. They may be inadequate or wrong in explaining the world. Does faith face the same future in this regard as science?

We’re talking today about faith and evidence. We’re talking about faith as something which is organic: Living faith, dynamic faith and not static faith. We’re talking about an infallible, dogmatic, and certain faith compared to humble, searching, and mysterious faith. What are your thoughts about data driven faith? What do you think your faith leads you to worship? Must your faith be proven? Must it be bolstered by something which is tangible? What are your thoughts about faith and evidence today?

Jay: Last week it was noted that Jesus blessed “the poor in spirit.” One of us wondered if “poor in spirit” meant having not very much faith. Human beings always want to quantify things of the spirit because we feel as if we have to achieve some level, whether that is how much to forgive, how much grace we have and how we utilize it, or how much faith we have. We want to quantify either the amount of faith we have—the Biblical mustard seed—or we want to quantify what to do with it.

The problem is that when we do that, we set a bar, a quantity, of faith to be achieved. We are very uncomfortable with different bar levels for different people. We want there to be a set standard, whatever that standard is, so we all know what it is and can do our best to achieve it. When we do that, we’re really limiting what faith can do for individuals at different times. Gideon appears to be somebody with not very much faith: “I need to know,” “Let me test it,” “Show me this / Show me that,” “Do this other thing,” and so on. He has to see it to believe it, yet he’s listed in Hebrews 11 as a person of great faith.

When we say faith is quantified and “This is what you have to do to have faith” I think we’re really straying from what the power of faith is.

Bryan: The world struggles with data driven science and faith as being at opposite ends of a spectrum. And the reason, probably, why scientists struggle with atheism or at least agnosticism is that it’s hard to prove God’s existence. You can’t really prove it. And so faith becomes a conscious decision to believe. I think it’s as simple as that. You either believe or you don’t believe.

For someone who believes, it’s a lot easier to believe in the story of creation by a God than it is human beings evolving over billions of years from sludge. It just makes more sense if you sit down and think about it. You can’t prove it, but you have a choice. You either believe or you don’t believe. Can you prove God was here? Can you prove God exists? Not really. There’s evidence in the Bible that says he was here, evidence in the Bible that says he did things and interacted with people, but again, it comes back to a decision that you have to believe in the Bible in order to believe that God was here, and God is real.

So faith and science, to me are two different things. And that’s what I think causes the problems between science and creationism.

C-J: I think they’re the same thing. I think that science supports the whole idea. People use text and ritual to define a faith based religion and keep it perpetuating. But consider the idea of infailibility. I think that the suicide cell that helps us have hands as we’re being formed in the womb, where this cell dies so that I can have digits. I think part of faith is being fallible; that decisions are made by this “energy”; that there are “cycles”—that in order for something to be born something must die.

We need that organic. The lifespan of even a galaxy is limited and measurable. But really, it doesn’t disappear. It is just transformed, gobbled up; it still has energy, its form has changed. So is that fallible? Because it has changed? I don’t think so. I think all of that supports the idea of something far greater than ourselves. I’m not caught up in the text. I’m not caught up in the design of faith.

To me, faith is evidenced everywhere. It’s just that in our finite, binary mind, we want to put it in pigeonholes. But there are times when I wouldn’t identify my lack of faith. I kind of pause and wonder what am I looking at? Am I fighting God because I’m not all in, or am I saying, “Wait a minute, something is changing and I don’t understand what it is, so I’m going to pause.”

Last night, I watched a program about training for operatives in an elite unit of the Israeli army. They had gathered 14 people together. These were very talented people. They’d all been trained the same way. They understood the mission and they were sent out. Some of it was planned. It was a skit that was planned and some of it went sideways. I watched it unfold but I didn’t really know what I was watching. But in the end, out of these 14 people, 13 were chosen.

The one who was not chosen did something critical to the survival of the team. The others would have died without his input. But he was not chosen to be part of it because he analyzed it. He used an algorithm which locked him into a mathematical equation. He didn’t use his training, he didn’t use his creativity. He wasn’t thinking about the team. It became a plot—”Let me plot this evidence.” And so he was not chosen. I sat there, wondering throughout: “What am I looking at? What’s really happening here?” But it took me till this morning to understand why he wasn’t chosen. He wasn’t intuitive. He wasn’t creative. He didn’t trust the other people for their innate training and talent.

It’s very critical when we look at the universe or at faith that we are only looking at singular elements. But they’re always in play. And that’s what propels us into these highs and lows in that journey. And sometimes we have to be solitary in order for us to get it and go climb the next mountain and descend into another Valley.

I don’t believe in infallibility other than this energy is going out. But how it will perform is always in a state of flux.

Donald: I keep insisting that words matter, and now we’re introducing the word “evidence” to this conversation. Along the way, we’ve used the word “truth.” And “science” certainly connects to that as well. It seems to me that if you have evidence, you don’t need faith. If you have truth, you don’t need faith. So we’re not going to be comfortable with the idea of a religion based on some level of doubt. We are much more comfortable saying our religion is based on truth.

But truth, in either direction, can lead to extremism. And that can be dangerous, because you do need some level of uncertainty. You need something to work off of, and then you respond to it. It’s not fixed. Once it becomes fixed, you’re all in or you’re out. And everybody can measure by the bar. So I guess I’m agreeing with all of you.

I think faith is a very important part of the journey we have with God. When we lock it into: “I know how that works and you need to come to understand it by the way I perceive it” I think that becomes dangerous, and it doesn’t allow for the creativity that God has blessed human beings with.

Jay: I think the word “uncertainty” is critical to the conversation. I agree that when we become certain, there’s no point in faith. Things are what they are. We don’t like that. We don’t like uncertainty especially in our spiritual life, because it seems to have an “in or out” aspect which is very quickly translated into “good or bad,” or even beyond that to “good and evil. Nobody wants to be on the side of evil. So uncertainty is a very scary thing.

But, for me, the power of faith is that it makes uncertainty palatable. If I have faith that God is a God of goodness then I need not fear the unknown because, in the end, a God of goodness and love is in control. The problem is that the evidence for a God of goodness would consist of lives of ease and good times, but we don’t see that in the stories of the Bible. We don’t see people of great faith leading easy, carefree lives. Would we recognize the real evidence if we saw it? Could it be in the Beatitudes? Could it be in the ministry of Christ?

We think we understand, but we don’t. We think we know what it is to worship, but we don’t. We think we know what it is to forgive, to love our neighbor, but we don’t. If we struggle so greatly with knowing those things, I would assume that we would struggle a lot with saying something is evidence that we can utilize to bolster our faith.

Janelin: It’s uncertainty that leads to our dependence on him. If we’re still searching, we just rely on ourselves. But I think uncertainty is a key component that we know where we’re supposed to put our faith.

Donald: A men’s Bible study group has rules. You can’t talk about your denomination’s beliefs or your church’s beliefs. You’re there to study the Bible, not to proselytize. We get together once a week and review an aspect of the Bible. The common element amongst all of us is that we believe. That’s one thing that we talk about, independent of specifics regarding the text.

The challenge, I think, is when you attempt to talk about your church organization, because then you have to pit doctrine against doctrine, and things start to unravel. If only we could be more generous with each other, so that ambiguity and differences could coexist. Do you belong to this organization? I guess that’s the next step, and that divides us.

You drive down a road on Sunday morning and find ten different church organizations each meeting and believing its own “truth”. It’s just way each organization operates within the context of its ideas. And that’s fine—it’s maybe more of a community church orientation. But it’s not a matter of this church trying to become that church, or these people trying to become that proselytizing type of people. But we’re supposed to preach the gospel, not make people believe in a church; we’re supposed to get them to believe in Jesus Christ.

Don: What is “evidence not seen”?

C-J: Energy. To me, it’s conscious energy. I think humans have yet to evolve to trust in what is innate in us—and that’s our telepathic ability to communicate with each other. Like the mother has with her child: “Something’s wrong with my baby,” “I gotta find my baby.” Or two people who are immensely in love with one another and trust each other, saying: “I knew something was wrong.” If we really walked into that, and left all these things that you mentioned, in the beginning, concrete, measurable—it would be an incredible experience for humanity to have, because all that knowledge would be shared instantaneously and we would have pathways.

We’d have to be able to discover a way to filter out the noise, to find what is good, what is evil, all those things; but now, not using a machine but using this innate capacity that we have as spirit beings, as part of this universal energy that we all share. We may call it life, but those atoms and molecules and cells within me communicate with each other: “Dump this hormone! Give out this chemical! Find balance in this heart!” Our bodies do that all the time. But we’re in this microcosm, and if we were to just take off that cloak, and consider that same potential at a much higher level, it just takes my breath away, what that could possibly mean.

Anonymous: To me, evidence of things not seen is a definition of faith. It doesn’t require much thought or anaysis—it’s just a definition. So, faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the evidence or certainty of things not seen. This definition is as simple as it could be. It cannot be any simpler than that. Anything that’s added to it can only complicate it.

To me, things hoped for are made of faith, so faith is evident. It’s not something beside it. It is evidence. Many versions of the Bible interpret it differently. That’s why it’s kind of confusing. I can use ten words for it, Arabic or English. I looked them all up and there’s a lot of variety of words. But to boil this down to a definition is (at least this is how I understand it): It’s the substance. I think this word is the best. It’s the substance, and the substance of things hoped for is faith. This is what things hoped for are made of: They are made a faith.

Who in the world does not have hope for something? We all hope for worldly things or spiritual things. Without hope, there is no faith. Without faith, there is no hope. Now we’re talking spiritually. If we have hope in things not seen, which are spiritual things like life after death, then we have faith. Without this hope, there is no faith. I have to have faith. It’s so hard to put it together. But it’s all needed together. It goes so deep that you cannot even slice it. Hope is faith. Faith is substance, substance is faith, and things hoped for, the assurance of things, or the evidence of things not seen is faith.

If someone asked me, How do you believe? How are you sure that there is life after death? It’s because of faith. I don’t need any evidence. Because of faith, nothing else, nothing less, nothing more. I don’t have evidence, I don’t have to prove it. If I believe there is life after that, then I have faith. And if I have hopes for that, before I even get there, I have faith. Because the things I’m hoping for are made of faith. And only my faith is the evidence. Nothing else.

C-J: So you’re saying it’s a singularity?

Anonymous: I don’t know what you mean by that. But I would say it’s a single thing. Yes.

C-J: A singularity like a coin. It’s the same coin, but one side cannot exist without the other side..

Anonymous: Are you talking about faith and things hoped for? Because of the word “substance.” It’s like saying “These pants are made of wool. There are no woolen pants without wool in them. If you separate the pants from the wool, there are no pants. So since we all have hopes, we all have levels of faith, but we hope in what? That’s the point. Hope in things unseen—not hope in getting a car. I see the car, I can work for the car, I can steal the money to buy the car. But this is not the hope we’re talking about here. Hope in things not seen—like God and Jesus and love and eternal life and salvation. We cannot prove it. Unless we live it and experience it, we cannot identify it, we cannot expect anybody who has no faith, or has faith in worldly things, to understand what we’re talking about.

Reinhard: The signs we are talking about are based on rationality, or common sense. To me, that’s also given by God. To explain the origin of life or the universe, science can only turn to data, it cannot explain in detail what God created in an instant with just a Word. Science cannot explain where we are going, what is the future. Humans only live up to a certain age, science keeps progressing just for our convenience.

On the other hand, the Bible explain a lot of things. It is not a science textbook but it said things such as that the world is round, long before science discovered that fact. Science cannot prove the level of our faith. The mindset we develop from where we were born determines our relationship with God and contributes (or not, depending on our circumstances) to our faith. Add to that our life experiences and we can know that there is God. It’s hard to explain, it’s very intangible.

Science can facilitate ways to prolong life or alleviate pain, but there are things science and common sense cannot explain, especially things we consider as miracles, which show that God really exists. Life itself is a miracle. The bottom line is that no matter what we do in life, in the end we’re going to go through a process from life through death to eternal life with God.

Bryan: If faith is belief in things unseen, then evidence can be a fairly loaded word. Asking for evidence is like putting God on trial to prove his existence. And so asking for evidence, I think, is outside of what faith really encompasses. If you can experience something with the five senses—if you can touch it, taste it, see it—then you don’t need faith. I think that was one of the problems with the Israelites in the desert. They had God’s physical presence every day. What faith did that take?

Faith is belief in things unseen and I think it’s there for a purpose. It takes a lot more effort to believe in things you can’t touch or experience with your five senses than it does to believe in something you can so touch. It’s a given. And so I think we really need to be careful, when you bring “evidence” into it, that we don’t put God on trial.

Jay: The baseline of faith is knowing there is a God, and other things spring from that baseline. If you believe in—let’s say—the spiritual realm, or anything spiritual, that’s just a baseline. There is a God, God exists. You might call it energy or goodness, but the point is you believe it exists and is in control. This takes a lot of faith. If you believe that God is in control of all things, and then step back and look at what’s happening, you face the dilemma that the evidence seems to show that not a whole lot of goodness exists. Instead, our senses perceive a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, a lot of hurt, a lot of sorrow. Why? If God is goodness and is in control, the question is why, and it’s a question that can erode faith and introduce doubt: “Is God in control? Is there a God if there’s all this suffering and pain and sorrow?”

Many verses in the Bible pit doubt against faith. “Have faith! Don’t have doubt!” The baseline of faith to me is there’s a God, God is good, God is great, and God is goodness. The instruction to love the Lord your God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself is built on the belief that goodness exists. Faith becomes powerful and operational when your faith is to the point of accepting God as goodness and as being in control of everything. So even though things don’t look like I think they should look, or I want them to look, God is in control and faith brings peace to that situation.

Don: Doubting Thomas demands evidence. He wants the sensory experience. Gideon demands evidence and then changes his demands. Yet God does not seem particularly upset by this. It’s puzzling. I’m also wondering whether faith is something static or organic in nature. Do I back my faithmobile up to the faith meter every month to determine whether my faith is in good shape? Is the needle in the green or the yellow or the red zone? Is there a method by which I can judge whether my faith needs an overhaul? I’ve been dragging stuff along in my faithmobile since I was 10 years old. Maybe it’s out of date. Maybe it doesn’t work for this time and place. Is there a faith checkup I can or should or must undergo in order to make sure that my faith is up to date and relevant? What are your thoughts about the static nature of faith?

Donald: The idea of having baggage is really important, because your experience changes. And as your experience changes, your needs change, and your thoughts change, and what is in green, what was in yellow, change. What needs to be steady is your batteries need to be charged. You’ve got to be sure that you’re ready to go; that you’re being thoughtful about that process, and not just coasting. But I’m not sure that things don’t change as one matures. Why wouldn’t it? Why would we expect it to be the same now as it was then?

Don: But does it matter? Does God care if my faith is out of date? Does God care if my faith is rundown?

Bryan: To me, the end product of faith should be the relationship with God. So if your faith has remained consistent throughout your lifetime, has it improved? Has it grown the relationship you have with God? If so then it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. That’s the way I would look at it.

Don: The meter’s in green.

Bryan: Right. If you feel closer to God, if your relationship with God is better now than it was 20 years ago, and your faith really hasn’t changed, I don’t think faith evolves necessarily, but your relationship with God definitely does. And I think faith is the foundation that allows that to happen.

Chris: Faith is a noun. It is an actual thing. If it is a timeless truth from God, God does not change. I think faith is what faith is. And whether or not we choose to accept or use that faith eventually is up to us. I don’t see that some get more faith and some get less faith. Faith is there like a tool for us to use. It is the evidence. There is no other evidence required. Faith is the evidence. We do not understand God’s ways, as we’ve been told. So the only way to relate is through these timeless truths that we’ve touched on—one of which is a timeless truth that does not change, which is faith.

Anonymous: I did not see eternal life as real before I lost my daughter. The loss of my daughter brought me to the strong belief that there is eternal life. I think I always hoped it existed but it did not materialize until my hope in eternal life became essential. God says there is eternal life. This is a fact, this is not something changeable, because God says it. Whether I believe it or not, it’s up to me. If I don’t believe it, I’m not gonna get it. If I believe it, I will get it.

The catalyst is hope. If we hope strongly enough to see God as real, to see Christ as the Lord of our salvation, to see the possibility of getting our sins blotted out, if we have hope strong enough to reach those points, then our faith will carry us to believe that God exists, salvation exists, protection by God exists, love of God exists, eternal life exists, miracles exist,… Everything exists because I truly hope for it. Truly, not just words; I yearn for it. I cannot accept that this is just a game or just talk. No. I really want from the depths of my heart. And that’s why faith is so rooted, rooted in something. And that’s the substance.

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