In a recent op-ed piece, T. M. Luhrmann, a Stanford sociologist whose work I have discussed before, talks about faith.  "Faith," she says, "asks people to consider that the evidence of their senses is wrong.  In various ways, and in varying degrees, faith asks that people believe that their minds are not always private; that persons are not always visible; that unseen presences should alter your emotions and direct your behavior," and so on.  Before readers of faith jump on her for these remarks, consider how she finishes her piece.  "In the fact of your own uncertainty," she observes, "being precise about what you don't believe in can shore up your confidence in what you do."
     What are we to make of this?  I respect Luhrmann and her work greatly, and have learned much from both.  She is on target in noting that degrees of unbelief will highlight degrees of belief:  we may indeed tend to believe according to what we do not.  But not always.  In regard to faith, those of faith believe largely because that in which they believe offers what is for them a better way to think about the world and their lives in it. Ideally, it's not so much what they reject as what they embrace.  In truth, if we trust what we believe based on what we do not, we've spinning our wheels.
     In regard to faith and the evidence of our senses, perhaps Ms. Luhrmann means faith and our preconceptions.  Jesus' resurrection is an affront to most of our ideas about life and death.  Yet if Jesus really rose, and multiple people saw him do so, then what kept people from believing was not the evidence of their senses but the degree of their willingness to accept it.
     As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, no friend of Christianity, observed, it is in the end all about the will.  It is the will that makes us human, it is the will that drives us forward, and it is the will that, despite Nietzsche's protestations to the contrary, is what will ultimately drive us to God.