What is Faith? Is it a Way of Knowing?

There’s no shortage of the religiously faithless who seem eager to tell us what faith is. Many of these characterizations of faith are reminiscent of Mark Twain’s precocious schoolboy who quipped, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” The figurehead of the so-called New Atheist movement, Richard Dawkins, once said, “Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” His colleague Sam Harris puts it this way: “Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.” The most…