Faith gets a bad rep these days. Often in cosmopolitan circles, faith is that thing that people believe as opposed to science. It could be fairies or angels, but most often it's associated with religious beliefs. Faith is perceived as sub-par because it seems to be a leap in the dark to reach a number of assertions devoid of academic rigor and empirical proof.

Some of the worst memes out there go something like this: You have faith and I have facts.

In this environment, who would want to be a person of faith?

The concept that I'd like put forward is faith as a way to get knowledge. Starting from Descartes "cogito ergo sum - I think therefore I am" the history of modern epistemology is built on stripping everything down and starting from the basics - from what one can experience.

But there's more to life than science. There are millions of interactions that can be studied but no quantified by science. How much is a person in love? What is

Faith as testimony. Reliable or not, the fact of the matter is that we can get specific actionable information that is not verifiable by science. Was your cousin truthful when she said she was very close to her aunt? Is your friend genuine when they say they are touched by Monet's "Water Lilies"? The best course of action is to look at the trustworthy of the one making the claims. The nature and depth of the relationship is crucial. Having faith in someone is really a statement about their character, about who they are. To trust, to have certainty that what someone say is true, speaks volumes. Is this empirically tested? Eventually some things are. Some things will never be. Yet this assessments vastly impact ones life.

What about history?

History is notorious for not giving us enough clues. We know how to build a bridge and we can work the math out. But what about the first democracy? Was it really the Greek cities? There's not time machine. We have the historical method that analyzes artifacts, literature and other evidence that can put together a story. But a lot of the written histories are words on a paper. Can we trust their veracity? We can use all the skepticism we want, but at the end of the day we can either dismiss all of the evidence or make a calculated decision with some degree of certainty.