"Nothing ever becomes real," observed the poet John Keats, "till it is experienced."  Keats likely did not mean that nothing is physically real until one experiences it; rather, he meant that in terms of actually coming to know something, one must experience it, experience it directly, to really know it.  For instance, we can know about a distant mountain, say, Mt. Everest, high and lofty in the remote stretches of the Himalayas.  In fact, we can know a great deal about it; Everest has been climbed and studied extensively.  But we cannot really say that we know Everest unless we have hiked to its base and clambered about its slopes, perhaps its summit.  Or we can say that we know about a certain person, that is, we know who that person is and perhaps what that person does, but not know that person on a personal level, who that person is as a person interacting with us.  We must experience that person directly (it of course goes without saying that even if we do this, we still may not know this person, but that is another discussion) to know her as really real.
     So why is this important?  We who are finite walk in a patina of ignorance about what we cannot touch, hear, or see.  We walk in an astounding world, yet a world which we, despite our best scientific efforts, still do not fully understand.  And if we are honest with ourselves, we walk thinking, at least one point, why is all of this here?  Why am I here?  Some of us then point to a god, some of us point to what we might call the fact of human wonder, some of us point to our inability to know anything with absolute certainty.
     Whichever option we choose, however, we are ultimately saying that that which we imagine--or do not imagine--will only be real to us if we allow it to be so. We cannot prove it beyond all doubt.  If we are religious, we will say that we believe it to be real because we believe that it is the speech or communication of God, a physically (in a metaphysical sense) real God.  If we are not religious, we may say that it is simply a fluctuation of a normal human longing for meaning.  It's not physically real.  In both cases, we believe that because we have experienced it, it is real, real, however, depending on our sensibilities, in imagination or reality.
     If nothing is there, however, do we really experience it?  Faith is believing that a felt experience of the beyond is only real because there is in fact a "beyond" that creates it.  Why pretend otherwise?