Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; Why would one have faith in something for which one has no evidence? That makes no sense. I hope I'll win the the lottery, but I recognize that the odds are astronomically against me (which is why I don't play). Having faith that I'm going to win won't have the slightest impact on whether or not I actually will win.
it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.
How can one be assured about the existence of things for which there is no evidence? That's not rational.
Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen;
Why would one have faith in something for which one has no evidence? That makes no sense. I hope I'll win the the lottery, but I recognize that the odds are astronomically against me (which is why I don't play). Having faith that I'm going to win won't have the slightest impact on whether or not I actually will win.
If we can't see or define something, so we can't prove that it exists, but it has effects and we see the effects, the effects are the evidence for the existence of the "something".
it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.
How can one be assured about the existence of things for which there is no evidence? That's not rational.
The Bible has the Old and New Testaments. Back in the day, people's wills were a Last Will and Testament. The Testament part has been largely forgotten, but that is where they would write their Christian Testimony; this was left to their progeny.
The Bible is testimony, in the same way testimony is offered in civil and criminal trials as evidence. The Bible is the first evidence we have of God.
Most people who deny the existence of God simply brush past the Bible. What if, in a trial, the jury simply threw out all the testimony of the witnesses ?
It's not thrown out, of course, the jury goes through it all, looking for logical reasons to establish whether the witness is being truthful. Do they have a reason to lie ? What do they have to gain or lose ? Does some of their testimony contradict other parts of their testimony ? Is their testimony all too perfect, such as eye witnesses all essentially parroting the same exact words ?
We do not have any video from 2,000 years ago, we don't have receipts and phone bills. The Library at Alexandria was destroyed - but we know of it's existence. The evidence we have is ancient writings. No one with any sense denies the existence of the Library.
Of course another kind of evidence is physical; the world in all it's complexity. The secular educational system and the news and entertainment media industry present what is almost exclusively hypotheses as facts. This very subtle deception has pervaded society to the extent that most people assume that the Bible has been disproved by science, even where no serious scientist claims to have anything other than a hypothesis about the origin of the cosmos and life. As an example, if the following article,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth, is read with an unbiased and critical eye, one can see how subtle switches between speculative and factual permeate the text to the point where an unwitting reader will surmise that the entire document is as certain as death and taxes.
The idea of accepting hypotheses as facts must be abandoned in order to be open to admitting that humans do not know, in truth, much of anything - relative to how much there is to know. The pseudo-science of our culture has us vastly underestimating the set of all knowledge. The size of the set of human knowledge relative to the set of all possible knowledge is utterly infinitesimal. When speaking with "lay people", our learned elites, like doctors and scientists, typically will drill down into more detailed knowledge to the point where science does not have an answer, then very deftly transition to a smooth turn of their discourse which causes the non-technical listener to believe that the scientist stopped at some fundamental for which there is no further detail. Only if the astute listener stops them precisely at that point and presses them for more detail will they then admit that science has reached it's current knowledge limit in terms of further detail on that specific question. Rarely do we hear that "science does not know"; the focus is shifted to the "positive" - science "continues to research and learn more". A good lawyer would then emphasize for the jury - "so you don't know for sure that a horse evolved from a dog, and, let me remind you you're under oath".
Ironically (from our perspective), it's the blind faith in science that people cling to in order to avoid reading the Bible and it's "rules". It's not the existence of God that people are resisting - it's his Law. They would be perfectly happy to believe in a God that let them do as they pleased and required nothing from them. In fact, many professing Christians openly defy the Bible's teachings themselves, thus the concept of the invisible and visible Church.