Is Faith Supposed to Be Blind? with Shane Rosenthal

For most of my life, I believed that faith meant believing without evidence.

It was a blind leap. A feeling. Something you just decided to trust because you were supposed to.

That version of Christianity eventually collapsed for me.

I spent years in pastoral ministry, then went through a long season of deconstruction where I seriously questioned whether the Christian story actually happened in history.

What changed everything wasn’t a new emotion or spiritual experience.

It was running into evidence I had never been taught before.

Evidence that the first-century writers of the New Testament weren’t inventing myths but were actually trying to report something massive and world-shattering that they believed they had witnessed.

Recently, I sat down with Shane Rosenthal, host of The Humble Skeptic podcast, for a conversation that gets right to the heart of this.

Shane’s work has had a profound impact on me personally.

When I discovered his show, I found myself nodding along to everything he said—finally, someone was scratching an itch I’d had for years.

And what we uncovered together might just change how you think about what it means to believe.

The Word We’ve Been Getting Wrong

Here’s something that stopped me in my tracks when Shane explained it.

The Greek word for faith in the New Testament is pistis.

This wasn’t some special religious term the biblical writers invented.

It’s the same word Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, and Josephus used.

And it simply means trust.

As Shane pointed out in our conversation, “When you trust somebody—if you trust your babysitter, you trust your doctor, you trust the chair you’re sitting on—there are usually good reasons to do so.”

Nobody hands their money to a financial advisor they just met on the street.

Nobody leaves their kids with a babysitter they know nothing about.

We trust important things to people we have good reasons to trust.

And that’s exactly what pistis means.

Trust based on evidence.

Shane went further: “When Aristotle says you need to proceed on the basis of evidence which gives you trust—that’s what the word pistis is. And so when you start thinking about that, this is the word used in the New Testament everywhere. They’re not saying blind faith. That’s actually what we impose on the Bible based on where we’re at.”

This might seem like a small linguistic point.

But it changes everything.

How Did We Lose This?

If faith was never meant to be blind, how did we end up here?

Shane has spent decades doing man-on-the-street interviews with Christians across denominations.

The responses are consistent and concerning.

When asked “What is faith?” the overwhelming answer involves some version of a leap, a feeling, or an internal conviction.

When asked “Why Christianity and not other religions?” most struggle to articulate anything beyond personal preference.

So what happened?

Shane’s historical analysis is fascinating.

During the early church’s formation, Christians couldn’t proceed with subjective faith because they were constantly moving into pagan neighborhoods, trying to convince their Druid neighbors.

The whole idea that a warm feeling proves something is true simply doesn’t work when you’re trying to persuade people who worship different gods.

Something had to persuade the world that eventually converted the Roman Empire.

“But once it did happen,” Shane explained, “I think the Christian West forgot the roots because we took for granted the reasons—because everybody around us was Christian. In the Middle Ages, Europe became Christian and then we stopped needing arguments for faith.”

Then the Enlightenment came.

People started being critical.

And instead of returning to the evidential foundations of early Christianity, something else happened—a massive subjective turn.

Romanticism swept through art, philosophy, and religion.

By the 1800s, American Christianity had been profoundly shaped by pietistic movements that internalized everything.

Faith became a feeling.

Evidence became unnecessary.

And here we are.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

I’ve been working with people who are deconstructing for about eight years now.

And I keep asking myself the same question: Why weren’t we taught this in church?

We talk about kids going off to college and losing their faith.

We wring our hands about the exodus of young people from Christianity.

But what if the problem is that we gave them a version of faith that was never designed to survive contact with competing worldviews?

Shane put it perfectly: “You’re setting people up for total failure.”

Imagine sending a missionary family to India and putting their kids in a Hindu university without any preparation in Hinduism or any sense of why Christianity might be true in contrast to other explanations of reality.

“It’s not going to be an accident that your kids come home asking tons of questions about Hindu beliefs,” Shane said. “And if you haven’t helped them to see why Christianity is true in opposition to this competing version of reality, man, that can be totally confusing.”

One person Shane interviewed on his show captures this perfectly.

She had the faith-is-a-feeling worldview and used her experiences and emotions as proof that Christianity was true.

But then she got a Hindu roommate who had the same kinds of experiences and feelings about Hinduism.

They just nodded at each other, neither one able to say why their faith was more than personally meaningful.

Shane called it what it is: “That’s just like a shampoo commercial.”

The Passage Everyone Gets Wrong

At some point in any conversation about faith, Hebrews 11:1 comes up.

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

This verse gets quoted constantly to justify blind faith.

But Shane did a deep dive into the Greek, and what he found was stunning.

The word often translated “substance” or “assurance” was commonly used in the ancient world for title deeds.

If you had property somewhere and wanted proof it was yours, you’d go get the title deed.

You could have the title deed without yet possessing the land itself—but that deed gives you assurance that the inheritance is real and coming.

“Faith is the title deed of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen,” Shane explained. “The reason it’s not seen is that it’s not today. It’s relating to our heavenly inheritance that isn’t yet obtained.”

This verse isn’t defining faith as blind belief.

It’s describing what faith connects you to—your future inheritance.

The evidence that grounds that faith is still external.

And if you want to know what faith actually is?

Go back to the first step.

Faith is trust rooted in evidence.

How Jesus Handled Doubt

Here’s where things get really interesting.

If faith is supposed to be blind, you’d expect Jesus to rebuke people who asked for proof.

But that’s not what we find.

Consider John the Baptist—the guy who preached “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

This is a powerful sermon connecting Jesus to the entire sacrificial system, the Passover Lamb, Isaiah 53.

And yet, from prison, John sends his disciples to ask Jesus: “Are you really the one, or should we look for another?”

John is doubting his own sermon.

How does Jesus respond?

He doesn’t say, “Tell John to just believe.”

He doesn’t shame him for his doubt.

Instead, Jesus says: “Go tell John what you’ve seen and heard this day. The blind see, the deaf hear, the dead are raised.”

Shane unpacked this beautifully: “The way he says this—’go tell him what you’ve seen and heard, the blind see, the deaf hear’—he’s actually quoting Old Testament prophecies that have been fulfilled in those disciples’ sight.”

Eyewitness testimony.

Connected to fulfilled prophecy.

That’s how Jesus chose to comfort someone in a moment of doubt.

Not with a call to blind faith, but with evidence.

Deconstruction as Delayed Honesty

Shane said something that me hard: “Deconstruction is delayed honesty rather than rebellion.”

When the only faith you’ve ever been given is faith without reasons—faith as a feeling, faith as a leap—you’re not equipped for what comes next.

You’re not ready for the Hindu roommate.

You’re not ready for the philosophy professor.

You’re not ready for your own honest questions.

And when the foundation finally cracks, it looks like rebellion from the outside.

But often, it’s just someone finally being honest about what they were never given tools to handle.

This doesn’t mean every deconstruction story ends outside Christianity.

For me, it meant rebuilding on a different foundation.

A foundation I wish I’d been given from the beginning.

A faith that expects questions, invites investigation, and actually provides reasons to believe.

An Ancient Faith for Modern Doubters

What Shane is doing with The Humble Skeptic matters because he’s not asking people to check their brains at the door.

He’s doing exactly what the earliest Christians did—pointing to eyewitness testimony, fulfilled prophecy, and public events.

Not private feelings.

Not blind leaps.

As Shane put it: “What I’d least like to do is get people curious so that they begin to study these things on their own, because I think these things are worth looking into. They’re very weighty subjects and fascinating little historical questions that are worth exploring.”

That’s the invitation.

Not certainty handed down from on high.

But curiosity that leads somewhere.

Evidence that holds up under scrutiny.

A faith that can handle your hardest questions.

Because maybe the problem was never you.

Maybe the problem was what you were taught about faith in the first place.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What does the Greek word for faith actually mean?

The Greek word pistis wasn’t a religious term invented by New Testament writers. It’s the ordinary word for trust that ancient philosophers and historians used. When Aristotle talked about proceeding on the basis of evidence that produces trust, he was using this same word. In the New Testament, faith means trust based on good reasons—not believing without evidence.

Doesn’t Hebrews 11:1 teach that faith is believing what you can’t see?

The Greek word often translated “substance” or “assurance” in this verse was commonly used for title deeds in the ancient world. The passage is describing what faith connects you to—your future inheritance—not defining faith as blind belief. The things “not seen” refer to the heavenly inheritance that hasn’t arrived yet, not a lack of evidence.

Did Jesus rebuke people for having doubts?

No. When John the Baptist sent his disciples to ask whether Jesus was really the Messiah, Jesus didn’t shame him. Instead, he pointed to evidence—miracles that fulfilled Old Testament prophecies—and told the disciples to report back what they had seen and heard. Jesus met doubt with eyewitness testimony and fulfilled prophecy, not demands for blind faith.

Why don’t more churches teach about evidence for Christianity?

Once Christianity became the dominant culture in the West, churches stopped needing arguments for faith. Everyone was already Christian. The subjective turn in the 1800s through Romanticism and pietistic movements further internalized faith as feeling rather than reasoned trust. Many churches today simply inherited this approach without questioning it.

Can examining evidence actually help with deconstruction?

Yes. Many people deconstruct because the faith they were given—built on feelings and blind leaps—can’t survive contact with hard questions or competing worldviews. Discovering the evidential foundations of early Christianity has helped many people (including me) rebuild on a more solid foundation rather than walking away entirely.