No faith in the existence of faith

If "faith" is defined as "believing something without evidence," then there is no such thing as faith.

Now, when I say "evidence," I don't mean "absolute proof." It's impossible to have absolute proof of anything. Even if you see something with your own eyes, you could just be hallucinating. Even if the answer to a mathematical problem makes perfect sense to you, that might be because of some deformity in your brain. There are plenty of things that can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but there is nothing that can be proven beyond all doubt.

So if someone says that we don't have absolute proof of the theory of evolution, for example... well, that's technically true, but meaningless, since we also don't have absolute proof that there are any planets besides Earth, or that light comes from the sun, or that fairies don't exist.

It's pointless to define evidence as absolute proof. The most that evidence can be is "a piece of information that convinces you that something is likely to be true." And nobody can believe something without any evidence at all. It's just that some people need more evidence than others.

For example, I believe that evolution happened-- because there is a lot of scientific evidence that convinces me that evolution is more likely than the alternative (since the alternative is either "Thousands of scientists are conspiring to fake their results" or "God faked all the fossil evidence just to mess with our minds.")

But some people hold their beliefs based on lines of reasoning like the following:

A) "My parents taught this to me, and I believe my parents are always right about things like this, therefore I will believe it."

Or:

B) "I believe that God is good, and I like X and dislike Y, therefore I believe that God also likes X and dislikes Y, because otherwise God wouldn't be good in my opinion."

Most religious beliefs are held based on these two logical processes. They are not very strong lines of reasoning, but they are also not faith. They are evidence, in the sense of "a piece of information that convinces a person that something is likely to be true." Starting with pieces of information like "My parents believe this" or "God is good and I think that these things are good," people draw a line of logical reasoning and reach a religious belief.

The reason it's impossible to have blind faith is because there are thousands of religions in the world. If people could have faith in a religion without any concrete proof or logical argument in favor of it, then they would believe every religion that exists... and since religions contradict each other, this would necessitate a lot of doublethink.

So it doesn't happen that way. In reality, people believe in their religions either because they've been brought up in those religions, or because the teachings of those religions make sense to them... in other words, arguments A and B as described above.

Which are a form of evidence, as I've shown. So it makes no sense for a proselytizer to tell me that I just need to have faith and believe what he says without evidence of any kind. A dozen other proselytizers for different religions are telling me the same thing-- so if I didn't need any evidence in order to believe something, then how could I choose which one to listen to? Obviously, when multiple people are trying to convince me of different things, I have to choose who to believe based on who has the best evidence. And right now, the theory of evolution has the best evidence for me.