Is faith believing in something without evidence?  Many, including some in my atheist discussion group, believe that it is.  According to every dictionary definition they can find, one but, significantly, not all definitions of faith is a belief or conviction without any evidence for it.  Fair enough.  What many people overlook,however, is that according to dictionaries that present the full etymology of words, in its most original sense in the English language faith was construed as a sense of trust.  Drawn from the Latin word fide, faith connotes a willingness to trust what one cannot necessarily, at least for the moment, visibly hear, touch, taste, or see.
     So why do people choose to trust in this way?  People choose to trust in this way because they have sufficient reason, based on reasonable research and experience, to do so.  No thoughtful religious person would choose to believe for no reason.  No rational and spiritually inclined person (by the way, despite what one might think, rationality and spiritually are not antithetical) would elect to trust if she could see no credible reason to do so.  People who choose to have faith do so because they have good reason to trust the objective historical evidence for its object.  They believe in God because they see no good reason not to trust the objective historical witness of his activity in the world and the human heart.
     Can we see God?  Can we hear God?  Although some people insist they have, most of us have not.  Yet we have ample and credible historical testimony as well as the present experience of those who believe in him to conclude that he is there and, as the late Francis Schaeffer said, is not silent.
     Faith is exceedingly complex, but it is also exceedingly simple.  To repeat, in its most basic form, faith is trust.  We all trust, all the time.  We all trust the future, that it will happen, and we all trust the past, that it indeed happened.  We trust ourselves, most of the time, and we trust each other, most of the time.  Why?  We have good reason to do so.
     So it is with faith in God and, from a Christian standpoint, Jesus Christ.  We trust them because we have good reason to do so.  Perhaps we cannot see them, perhaps we cannot hear them.  But others have.  History testifies amply to this.  We trust, we believe. We trust and believe because others, people who had far more reason (for they were eyewitnesses of the risen Christ) than we to do so.  And we trust because all things considered--scientific, philosophical, and otherwise--we have no good reason not to.
     But we have to trust.