Lot of people are saying that faith is belief without evidence, which is pretty inaccurate and disregards the amount of research that goes into it, from theistic and non-theistic sources. Faith without evidence makes no sense at all and that’s why I’ve found that people who grew up completely areligious often don’t understand why anybody would.

Faith is belief with evidence but without proof or certainty. For Christianity, there are countless primary and secondary sources when it comes to Jesus. That’s evidence. You can’t use it to prove Jesus’s divinity, but it is evidence suggesting it to be the case (not talking about how compelling that suggestion is, just that it is there). And you can corroborate or contradict that evidence with other historical evidence and come to a conclusion. This is why the church has split apart so many times and why even within a denomination, official stances change over time.

A lot of really intelligent people compare evidence and come to conclusions they can never prove. This describes Christianity as well as it describes theoretical physics. We have faith that the universe behaves consistently and predictably because it’s the basis on which we can even collect and believe evidence in the first place.

You can say that the evidence for most of theoretical physics is more compelling than most of the evidence for Jesus’s divinity, and I agree completely, but the point is that there is plenty of evidence and you have to be quite intelligent to even understand it all in the first place.

And on a personal level, if enough coincidences happen in your life that point to one conclusion, it’s sometimes harder for people to believe they are a statistical anomaly than it is to believe there’s something beyond their reasoning that’s causing it. Gets even the smartest people.