I remember well those days when I was first starting to challenge the belief system in which I'd been raised. They were days of internal questioning and a bit of external cockiness, so sure was I that I'd found the truth when so many of my peers were still ignorant.
There was an older man at my church that I liked a lot and I used to visit him and his wife often. We were pretty good friends in those days. I'd play chess with Bill and help Maxine make peanut brittle. Bill was very active in the church, very strong in his beliefs. And when I started questioning my belief, I was also questioning his.
One talk we had on his front porch revolved around the nature of belief. I told him that I just couldn't believe something without evidence. His response was that I needed to believe based on faith. I told him I couldn't. "Sure you can," he said. "You take things on faith all the time. You have faith that the sun will come up tomorrow, don't you?"
I was young and still shaky in my thought processes. I didn't have a response to him then, but I learned. I learned because this same type of "reasoning" keeps cropping up. Many people seem to use the terms "faith" and "trust" interchangeably.
But faith and trust are fundamentally different. Faith is belief in something without any supporting evidence. Trust is belief in something based on evidence or a proven history. I trusted the sun would "come up" the next day because it always had. I trust in my friends because they have proven themselves worthy of that trust. I trust in myself because, so far, I've managed to survive everything I've encountered. I trust in science because of its impressive history of being able to solve so many problems, given enough time. Faith, on the other hand, is something that has no place in my life.
Trust me on that.
