Everyone Has Faith? A Dissection of a Tired Christian Tactic
One of the more persistent tactics among Christian apologists is the attempt to dissolve the boundary between faith and rational belief by asserting that everyone exercises faith. The suggestion is not merely that faith is widespread, but that it is universal—inescapable—and therefore, that faith-based reasoning cannot be criticized without self-refutation. It’s a sleight of hand, a rhetorical maneuver designed to place the skeptic and the believer on the same epistemic footing. But when we dissect this claim with philosophical rigor, linguistic precision, and psychological clarity, it quickly disintegrates into obfuscation.
1. The Collapse of Epistemic Gradation
The first and most glaring flaw in the “everyone has faith” assertion is its tacit commitment to an outdated binary model of belief. Many Christian proponents of this tactic have little to no background in epistemology, especially in the nuanced understandings that emerged from Bayesianism and decision theory. To them, belief is either “on” or “off.” You either believe something or you don’t. But this is a cartoonish picture of belief.
Rational belief is not binary; it is graded. A Bayesian epistemologist, for example, understands belief in terms of credence—a probabilistic degree of belief that maps to the perceived weight of evidence. The more evidence you accumulate, the higher your credence. There’s no room in this model for the leap of faith that typifies fideistic belief. The moment someone invokes the term “faith” in a way that bypasses evidential proportionality, they’ve stepped out of rational territory.
To claim that a scientist who tentatively holds a model of quantum gravity is exercising the same “faith” as someone who believes God spoke to them in a dream is to conflate a high-credence hypothesis with fantasy. It collapses the epistemic gradient into a single undifferentiated blob.
2. Faith as Defined by the New Testament is Epistemically Vacuous
The second flaw is textual and linguistic. Apologists often lean on the idea that words like trust, confidence, and faith are synonyms, and that faith in God is epistemically on par with the “trust” one might have in a friend or an airplane mechanic. But this is linguistic laziness at best, and dishonest equivocation at worst.
The Greek term πίστις (pistis), from which the English word faith is derived in biblical contexts, does not carry with it the requirement of evidence. In fact, its scriptural use often stands in contrast to sight, to proof, and to knowledge (e.g., Hebrews 11:1). It is belief in the absence of—or even in defiance of—evidence. This is starkly different from trust as employed in normal discourse, which is usually provisional, evidence-based, and open to revision. You trust your doctor because they’ve demonstrated competence. You trust your spouse because of years of consistent behavior. That trust is fragile, responsive to evidence, and retractable.
By contrast, faith as praised in the New Testament is proud of its immunity to disconfirmation. This is not merely a semantic difference. It is a categorical epistemic divide. To equate faith with everyday trust is a linguistic Trojan horse—a way to sneak irrational belief into rational territory.
3. The Slippery Slope to Epistemic Nihilism
There is a third, more insidious motive behind this tactic: a deliberate attempt to blur the lines between reason and irrationality so that irrational beliefs can no longer be called out. This is a moral hazard of thought.
When the apologist claims that “everyone has faith,” they are not just making a descriptive claim—they are trying to excuse their own epistemic recklessness by accusing others of the same. This is akin to saying, “Everyone tells lies,” as a way of justifying habitual deception. It is not a defense; it’s an attempt to drag everyone down into the same pit, making the rational indistinguishable from the irrational.
And the strategy is transparent. If your belief in a scientific theory that’s been tested for decades is “faith,” then my belief that a donkey once spoke Hebrew is also “faith,” and we’re now epistemic equals. This is intellectual relativism masquerading as argument. It destroys the very foundation of rational discourse.
4. We Don’t Actually Live That Way
If Christians really believed the claim that all beliefs are acts of faith, their actions would reflect this. But they don’t. They discriminate sharply between types of belief in their daily lives. They trust a doctor over a faith healer, a bridge engineer over a dream interpreter, a GPS over a prophecy. They get on airplanes built through a network of rational inference and testing—not by praying for wings.
In practice, they assign credences—high for beliefs backed by evidence, low for those without. But when it comes to religious belief, the standards shift. Suddenly, any belief, no matter how wild, is framed as “faith” and deemed virtuous. This is a clear case of special pleading—a logical fallacy in which a rule is applied generally but exempted when it’s inconvenient.
No, Christians do not live as if all belief is faith. They live as if some beliefs are more justified than others—until religion enters the conversation.
5. Faith as a Vice, Not a Virtue
Let’s be clear about this: faith, understood as belief not proportioned to evidence, is not a virtue. It is a vice. It incentivizes credulity. It rewards epistemic stubbornness. It promotes confirmation bias and punishes doubt, which is the very engine of rational progress.
Faith doesn’t build bridges. It doesn’t cure diseases. It doesn’t decode genomes. All the great advances in human understanding have come in spite of faith, not because of it. To say that faith is merely “trust” is to neuter the term and make it harmless, even admirable. But biblical faith was never meant to be harmless. It was meant to be defiant, absolute, and unquestioning. It is the antithesis of rational inquiry.
6. The Evolutionary Psychology of Faith Claims
Why, then, is this “everyone has faith” claim so persistent? Because it offers psychological cover. Faith, especially religious faith, provides cognitive closure. It comforts. It assures. And when challenged, its defenders don’t want to admit that their belief rests on epistemic sand. So they recruit others—everyone, in fact—into the same shaky foundation. It is a way to universalize their weakness and pretend it is strength.
This psychological impulse is powerful. But it is not a license to distort the architecture of rationality.
Conclusion: Faith is Not Our Friend
The claim that “everyone has faith” is not merely mistaken—it is dangerous. It erodes epistemic standards. It collapses distinctions that are essential to rational thought. And it excuses irrational belief by pretending we are all equally irrational.
We are not.
There is a difference between a belief formed by Bayesian updating and one formed in defiance of all counter-evidence. To obscure that distinction is to sabotage the very tools we use to understand the world. There is no need for faith when the world offers us a gradient of evidence. Faith is not your friend. It never was. And those who continue to defend it with such clumsy tactics betray not only a lack of philosophical rigor but a deeper fear that rational scrutiny will reveal what they cannot afford to doubt.
Let them doubt. Let us reason.
Free of Faith 
Leave a comment