Why faith is the evidence of things untrue.

Anybody who claims faith as a reason or justification for a belief is likely to be wrong. And when someone makes a claim like “I just have faith that [something] is true”, we can be pretty sure that that something is false. That is, the fact that someone is presenting faith as evidence is, itself, evidence that what they’re saying is untrue.

There are two other common ways that the word faith is used. These muddy the waters and often allow the use of faith as a [bad] reason to slip through undetected and go unchallenged. These two common uses are:

1. As a synonym for confidence– “I have faith that my car will start in the morning.” That is, my car has never failed to start in the years I’ve owned it, so I have good reason to think it will start in the morning.
2. As a synonym for religion– the Buddhist Faith, the Jewish Faith, etc.

These two uses are not what we are referring to when we say faith is evidence of things untrue. (As an aside, these two uses give cover to those who use faith as a way to excuse holding beliefs without good reasons and it would be better if we just don’t say faith, unless we mean it in this negative way.)

Notice how faith can be used to justify any belief whatsoever. For example, some religious folks believe in a god based on faith. So let’s suppose a Hindu believes in the god Vishnu because of faith and a Lutheran believes in their god, Yahweh, because of faith. It’s also likely that each one will think the other’s god is not real.

Now we’ll ask our Hindu and Lutheran friends why they believe in their respective god. We’ve already noted that it’s because of faith, so they might say something like ‘I believe in [Vishnu/Yahweh] because I have faith that [Vishnu/Yahweh] exists.’ This is a lot like saying ‘I think it’s true because I think it’s true’, and there’s no chance that one will convince the other with this– which is actually a good thing because they failed to make an argument of any kind.

Next let’s ask our friends an unrelated question such as: ‘Do you think you were adopted by your parents?’ And follow that up with ‘How do you know?’ Regardless of the answer to the first question, they may give some thought to how they know and then go find their birth certificate or recall something their parents said or talk about a genetic test they took or about characteristics they have in common with their parents. But it would never occur to them to say ‘because I have faith.’

There’s no need for faith because now they have reasons and evidence to rely on, and giving reasons and evidence is what we turn to first.

When people have good reasons or evidence, they justify their beliefs with those reasons and evidence and they don’t mention faith.

The flip-side is that when people fall back on faith as a reason or justification, they do it because they don’t have good reasons or evidence. And when there are no good reasons or evidence to believe something is true… it’s probably not true.

There could be good reasons and evidence our take-it-on-faith’er doesn’t know about. But unless we know those reasons, then their claim to knowledge by reason of faith is a red flag – and evidence that their claim is false.

Which is why faith is the evidence of things untrue.