Many people think that faith is about believing something strongly enough (especially about God) so it will come true. They believe faith is more important than what they place their faith in, but they are mistaken.
The truth is—the object of a person’s faith is much more important than the faith itself.Here is an example. We are going skydiving and I offer you a parachute or a contraption I made in my garage last night. Which one would you pick? I would hope you’d pick the parachute, because there is no evidence that my contraption works. Faith based on evidence is reasonable faith. In this example, the parachute and my contraption are the objects. If faith is more important than the object, you could strap anything on your back and jump out of the plane, but that’s not realistic. For faith to ultimately work, it must be placed in truth. To find which option has the highest probability of being true, we need evidence. If you had picked my contraption, you would be exercising blind faith.
So why would we rely on blind faith to make one of the most important decisions in our lives—God’s existence, identity and our eternity? It only makes sense to check out the facts to see if our belief is supported by evidence. When you consider a detective who solves mysteries for a living, it’s clear that if he never examines the facts, or if he files criminal charges based on feelings or what someone else believes, he would most likely come to faulty conclusions.
To give you a mental picture of what we will be doing, let’s imagine that you wanted to walk across the ice to the other side of a frozen lake. Before you placed your faith in the ice, you would want some evidence that it would support you, because thin ice could lead to death. You might ask questions of the locals and look to see if anyone was out on the ice. You might cut a hole in the ice and check the thickness. But since it’s not possible to be one hundred percent certain the ice will support you all the way across the lake, there would come a point where you would need to exercise faith—making a decision based upon what you did know—if you ever hoped to get to the other side. In our investigation, we will follow the evidence as far as it will take us; faith will be required to make the rest of the journey. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?
The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines faith as “A firm belief in something for which there is no proof” but it does not say “for which there is no evidence.”
Faith is very important and it is required for any decision where we do not have one hundred percent proof; therefore it is essential to Christianity. The Bible states that faith connects us to the salvation God is offering through grace. Therefore, without faith it is impossible to be saved. But the Bible is speaking about faith placed in the truth, which it claims to be. Even the most sincere faith will not make my contraption perform like a parachute or make the ice thicker. It cannot change history (if Jesus did not rise from the dead, even sincere faith will not change that fact) and it definitely will not make a false belief about God true. While I know we could find adults who believe in the Greek gods Zeus and Apollo, if they aren’t real, not even sincere faith will make them true.
Excerpt from Gravity - True For You But Not For Me. Gravity provides some of the actual evidence for Gods existence and identity. It will show you exactly why the Bible and Jesus are the most reasonable belief available based on the facts.
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