"Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence, would then the faith be dead?"
About this Quote
Simak needles faith where it’s most defensive: not in the comfort of belief, but in belief’s dependence on discomfort. The question is engineered as a trap. If faith is defined as conviction without proof, then proof doesn’t merely support faith - it abolishes the very conditions that make faith legible as faith. That’s a razor-edged bit of speculative thinking, the kind science fiction does best: taking a familiar moral posture and stress-testing it like a hypothesis.
The subtext is a critique of how we often use “faith” as a prestige word for epistemic looseness. Simak isn’t just asking whether faith can survive evidence; he’s asking whether faith has quietly been built to resist evidence. The phrasing “willingness and ability” is telling. Faith isn’t presented as a serene inner glow but as a practiced skill, almost a discipline: you train yourself to keep believing when the world won’t cooperate. That makes it sound less like virtue and more like a cognitive technology - useful, maybe, but designed for ambiguity.
Context matters. Simak wrote in a century where scientific authority expanded dramatically while existential dread expanded right alongside it: world wars, nuclear threat, the Cold War’s fog of uncertainty. In that atmosphere, “evidence” becomes both promise and menace. The quote anticipates contemporary arguments about whether religion is primarily about truth-claims or about meaning, identity, and community. If evidence arrives and faith “dies,” Simak implies, maybe it was never about truth in the first place; it was about choosing a story strong enough to live inside when facts run out.
The subtext is a critique of how we often use “faith” as a prestige word for epistemic looseness. Simak isn’t just asking whether faith can survive evidence; he’s asking whether faith has quietly been built to resist evidence. The phrasing “willingness and ability” is telling. Faith isn’t presented as a serene inner glow but as a practiced skill, almost a discipline: you train yourself to keep believing when the world won’t cooperate. That makes it sound less like virtue and more like a cognitive technology - useful, maybe, but designed for ambiguity.
Context matters. Simak wrote in a century where scientific authority expanded dramatically while existential dread expanded right alongside it: world wars, nuclear threat, the Cold War’s fog of uncertainty. In that atmosphere, “evidence” becomes both promise and menace. The quote anticipates contemporary arguments about whether religion is primarily about truth-claims or about meaning, identity, and community. If evidence arrives and faith “dies,” Simak implies, maybe it was never about truth in the first place; it was about choosing a story strong enough to live inside when facts run out.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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