The other day, I watched a video produced by a prominent atheist blogger named Matt Dillahunty.  He talks about what he considers to be the futility of faith.  Using the famous "faith" passage in Hebrews 11:1, which reads, "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," he proceeds to dismantle the entire edifice of Christian belief.  In the end, he observes that faith is just "pretending you know something when you really don't."  In point of truth, he says, the verse in Hebrews indicates that faith itself is the evidence for itself, a conclusion that, for him, is not a tenable intellectual position.
     He's right:  it's not.  Faith needs more than itself to be credible.  Faith needs reasons, and faith needs evidence to be cogent.  However, when believers raise this issue with Dillahunty, he replies that their evidence is "not good."  By whose standards?  Clearly, his own.  If the evidence for the Christian faith can be tested, that is, if it is falsifiable, why should it not be considered credible?
     Although we cannot readily test an experience, we can certainly test historical event. There is ample archaeological and linguistic evidence that many of the events presented in both testaments of the Bible really did happen, and there is ample historical evidence that the people of whom the Bible talks were born, lived, and died just like you and me. We can test this evidence, not in the court of public opinion, but through dispassionate research and study.
     If Christianity has no historical basis, then, yes, we have no good reason to believe it. If it does, however, we have every good reason to at least test and examine it, even if we later decide we cannot live with it.  We owe it to ourselves to follow the evidence where it leads.  We all possess minds, we all possess reason, and we all possess the capacity for rational thought.  And we ought to employ it.
     Who knows what we will find?!