I'm a physicist, and I struggled for years to reconcile faith and reason. I thought faith meant shutting off my critical mind and believing things despite evidence to the contrary. But this definition suggests something different. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. It's not belief despite absence of evidence. It's confidence based on something real even though it's not visible.
We have confidence in atoms we've never seen because we see their effects. We trust the past we never witnessed because we have reliable testimony. Faith in God works similarly—we trust in God's reality and character based on what we do experience, what others reliably testify to, what shows up in the world. It's not irrational. It's confidence based on evidence, just not the kind of direct observation we might prefer.
This reframing let me stop feeling like I had to choose between being intelligent and being faithful. I could be both, approaching faith with the same rigor I brought to science, testing claims against reality, noticing what holds up and what doesn't. My faith has become more robust, more honest, more grounded in reality rather than divorced from it.
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