Faith Is Not a Leap Into the Dark

The most famous objection to belief is aimed at a definition no serious believer has ever held. Here’s the one they actually hold, and why it’s harder to dismiss.

Jun 08, 2026

*THE GOD THEY REJECTED ISN’T REAL* series 24-75

The most famous objection to belief is aimed at a definition no serious believer has ever held. Here’s the one they actually hold, and why it’s harder to dismiss.

Richard Dawkins has a definition of faith he has repeated, in various forms, for decades. Faith, he says, is belief without evidence, and worse, belief that persists in the teeth of evidence. A virus of the mind. The great cop-out, the excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. There is an older, folksier version of the same idea, the line usually credited to Mark Twain: faith is believing what you know ain’t so.

I want to start by doing something you might not expect. I want to agree.

Because if that is what faith is, then every intellectually honest person in the world is right to refuse it, and I will hand them the torch to burn it down. Belief without evidence is not a virtue. Belief against the evidence is not courage, it’s malpractice. If walking into a church means walking out of your own reason, leaving your mind in the coat-check like an umbrella you’ll collect on the way out, then the only self-respecting thing a thinking person can do is stay home. Dawkins is not wrong to despise that thing. I despise it too.

Here is the problem, and it’s a big one, and once you see it you can’t unsee it. The definition he’s attacking is not the one the people he’s attacking actually use. He has built a magnificent siege engine and aimed it at a castle nobody lives in.

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Let me show you the real definition, and I’m going to do it without a single Bible verse first, because I want you to see that you already believe in this kind of faith. You practice it constantly. You practiced it this morning.

Think about how you decide to trust a person.

You have a friend. A real one, the kind you’d call at three in the morning. Now, can you prove, with the certainty of a mathematical proof, that this person will not betray you tomorrow? You cannot. There is no equation. You do not have certainty. What you have is evidence. Years of it. You’ve watched how they treat people when there’s nothing to gain. You’ve seen them keep a promise that cost them something. You’ve noticed that what they say and what they do line up, over and over, across time and pressure. You have the testimony of other people who know them. And on the basis of all that evidence, evidence that falls short of mathematical proof but is overwhelming all the same, you do something. You extend trust. You act on what you partially know, in the direction of what you cannot fully verify.

That act has a name. The name is faith.

It is not the suspension of reason. It is one of the most reasonable things a human being ever does. It is what every one of us does every time we board a plane we did not build, flown by a pilot we did not vet, or let a surgeon we met yesterday put us to sleep and open our chest. We are not being irrational in those moments. We are acting on good evidence that stops short of certainty, because certainty is not on offer for almost anything that matters, and waiting for it would mean never trusting anyone, never marrying, never flying, never being operated on, never living at all.

John Lennox, who is a professor of mathematics at Oxford and has spent decades on exactly this question, compressed the whole thing into one sentence that I have not been able to improve on. Faith, he says, is not a leap into the dark. It is a step into the light, based on evidence.

Sit with the difference between those two pictures, because the whole argument lives in the gap between them. A leap into the dark is what Dawkins is describing, eyes shut, no information, hurling yourself off a ledge and hoping. A step into the light is the opposite motion entirely. The light is already on. You can see, partially, imperfectly, but really, where your foot is going to land. And you step, on the strength of what you can already see, toward what you cannot yet see fully. One is the abandonment of evidence. The other is a response to it.

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Now I’ll bring in the text, because here is where it gets interesting. The skeptic assumes the Bible is on Dawkins’s side, that Scripture is going to define faith as the blindfold. It defines it as almost exactly the reverse.

The closest thing the New Testament has to a formal definition of faith is a single line in the book of Hebrews. The modern translations render it: faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. But the old King James reaches for a word that the modern versions soften, and the old word is the one that matters. It calls faith the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Evidence. The Bible’s own definition of faith uses the word evidence. Faith is not presented as the absence of evidence. It is presented as a kind of evidence in itself, an inner conviction that corresponds to an outer reality that hasn’t come fully into view yet. That is not the blindfold. That is the opposite of the blindfold.

And watch what the writer does next, because it’s the tell. Having defined faith, he doesn’t produce a gallery of people who believed things for no reason. He produces a gallery of people who acted. Abraham, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, the prophets, a long roll call, and every single one of them is praised not for switching off their mind but for doing something, for moving, for acting on the best evidence they had in the direction of a God who had, in their experience, a track record of keeping his word. They are not commended as people who suspended reason. They are commended as people who trusted a reliable party and acted on it before the final results were in. Which is precisely what you did with your three-in-the-morning friend.

So the biblical definition is not “I know nothing and I believe anyway.” It is “I know enough to take the next step, and the One I’m trusting has a record of being trustworthy.” That is a categorically different claim from the one Dawkins demolishes, and the difference is not a technicality. It is the entire ballgame.

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That’s not even the part that got me, though. The part that got me is the answer to the obvious next question, and it’s an answer that quietly dismantles how most people think faith is supposed to work.

If faith is a response to evidence, then where does it come from? How does a person who doesn’t have it get it?

The instinctive answer, the one baked into our whole culture, is that faith is an act of will. You decide to believe. You screw your eyes shut, clench your jaw, and crank up the willpower until belief somehow appears. And if you can’t manage it, you must just not be trying hard enough. That picture is everywhere, and it is responsible for an enormous amount of private misery, people lying awake straining to manufacture a conviction by force and hating themselves when it won’t come.

The Apostle Paul, tracing exactly this question in his letter to the Romans, gives an answer that has nothing to do with willpower. Faith, he writes, comes from hearing, and hearing through the word about Christ. Faith comes through content. Through encounter. Through exposure to the actual claims about the actual person. It does not get generated in a vacuum by sheer force of trying. It gets generated the way trust in your friend got generated, by contact with the evidence, by spending time near the thing itself until you’ve seen enough to take the step.

Do you understand what that does for the person who’s stuck? It means the instruction is not “try harder to believe.” Trying harder to believe is like trying harder to fall asleep, the effort is self-defeating, the strain is the very thing keeping it away. The instruction is completely different, and it’s something a person can actually do. Get near the source. Stop trying to squeeze belief out of your own will and go put yourself in front of the evidence. Read the Gospels, not as a believer and not as a debunker, but as an investigator with one honest question: what is this person actually like, and did this actually happen? The step into the light comes after exposure to the light. You don’t generate the illumination by wanting it. You walk toward where it’s already coming from.

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Here’s the objection, the strongest one, so I’ll hand it to you myself rather than let it ambush you later.

You could say I’ve pulled a quiet switch. That “trusting a friend” and “trusting that a man rose from the dead” are not the same category of act at all, that one is an ordinary inference from ordinary experience and the other is a wild leap dressed up in the borrowed clothes of the ordinary one. The friend is standing in front of you. The resurrection is a two-thousand-year-old claim about a category of event you’ve never witnessed. Calling them both “faith” smuggles the credibility of the small everyday act onto the back of the enormous historical one.

That’s a fair shot, and I’m not going to wave it away, because it’s pointing at something true: the two acts differ in scale, and the bigger the claim, the heavier the evidence it has to carry. So let me not pretend the friendship analogy does all the work. Let me put the actual weight where it belongs. The central claim of this faith is not a feeling or a philosophy. It is a historical assertion, the kind that has the texture of evidence rather than sentiment: that a specific man was executed in public, certified dead by professional executioners, sealed in a tomb, and was seen alive afterward by named witnesses, groups of them, most of whom then accepted torture and death rather than recant a thing they could simply have admitted was a story. That claim is not a leap into the dark for the same reason the friendship isn’t, it rests on testimony and evidence, and it carries its own built-in test. Produce the body and the entire structure collapses in an afternoon. It has been open to that disproof for two thousand years. The body has never been produced. You are not required to find that conclusive today. I am only asking you to notice that it is the kind of claim that could be checked, that has an evidentiary shape, which is exactly what Dawkins says faith never has. The leap-in-the-dark definition cannot survive contact with the thing it claims to describe.

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So here is where this leaves the person who has been standing at the edge, certain that belief would require them to betray their own intelligence.

You have been told that the step is a leap into the dark, and you have, to your great credit, refused to take it, because you are not the kind of person who leaps into the dark, and you should not be. But you were lied to about what the step is. It was never a leap, and it was never into the dark. The room has been filling with light for longer than you’ve admitted. You have more evidence than you’ve been acting on. You have the moral intuition that keeps insisting some things are really wrong, not just unfashionable, which is a strange thing to have if we’re only chemicals. You have the hunger for meaning that the purely material account keeps failing to fill, no matter how many times you’re told it should. You have, probably, the testimony of someone you actually respect whose life visibly changed and who is not a fool. And you likely have more knowledge of the Gospel record itself than you give yourself credit for.

That is not nothing. That is light. Partial, maybe. Imperfect, sure. But enough to see the next step, which is all light ever has to be.

Lewis took the step kicking and struggling, dragged into it against his own mood, the most reluctant convert in England. Lennox took it with the calm of a mathematician who had checked the working. People have taken it from grief and from anger and from exhaustion and from sheer baffled curiosity, from every starting point on the map. None of them leapt into the dark. Every one of them stepped into a room that was already lit, on the strength of what they could already see.

You cannot wait for certainty first. That’s the one thing this won’t give you, and it’s the thing you’ve been holding out for. Certainty does not come before the step. It tends to come through it, the way understanding came to the fishermen who left their boats before they understood, the way it comes in every real relationship, where you trust first and the confirmation arrives later, earned, on the far side of the trust. The disciples did not get a guarantee and then follow. They followed, and the understanding caught up with them on the road.

The light is already on. The door is already open. It is not a leap, and it never was.

It is a step. And it is yours to take.

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