Daily Inspiration Quote by Dean Inge

Faith, for Dean Inge, isn’t a warm fog you drift into; it’s a decision you make with your eyes open. The line is engineered to rescue belief from the stereotype of irrational surrender. By calling faith “an act of rational choice,” Inge smuggles it into the realm of agency and responsibility: you don’t “have” faith the way you catch a cold, you choose it the way you choose a course of action under uncertainty.

The phrasing “act as if” is doing the heavy lifting. It admits that faith begins without proof, even without full confidence, and yet insists that behavior comes first. That’s pragmatic psychology before it’s a self-help slogan: live a commitment and you create the conditions in which its truth can become legible. Inge ties belief to futurity, to the wager that the world will meet you halfway. “Confident expectation” isn’t blind; it’s cultivated, a discipline of attention that treats certain goods (meaning, moral order, God) as real enough to organize a life around.

The subtext is a defense against modern skepticism and the early 20th-century prestige of scientific verification. Inge, an Anglican thinker shaped by an age of upheaval and disillusionment, reframes faith as a rational response to incomplete information rather than a refusal of evidence. It’s also a quiet rebuke to passive religiosity: if you want faith to “prove” itself, you don’t wait for lightning. You commit, act, and accept that proof may look less like a lab result and more like a life steadily clarified by the choice to trust.