Sports Can Shed Light on Faith

Last February, I achieved something that seemed like a pipe dream just a year ago. That achievement was running my first ever marathon fast enough to qualify for the coveted Boston Marathon. When people ask me how I did it, depending on the circumstances, sometimes my short answer is this: I had faith in my ability to do it. 
Now, faith is something many informed, intelligent people disagree about. Take, for example, Mark Twain. He said faith is believing something you know ain’t true. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, however, thought of faith differently. They said faith is a gift. That is, faith is believing in the testimony from a divine authority, which is the result of a process involving God’s gracious assistance to believe it. Others take faith to be a kind of knowledge, a virtue, a feeling of confidence, a venturous activity, or a variant of hope. What’s more, some conceptions of faith can be held by both non-theists and theists alike. (After all, even the adage “Seeing is believing” requires having a kind of faith that perception is reliable because there is no argument that proves that it is without already relying upon key premises involving perception.) The point is that there is no consensus on what faith is.
I’m still growing in my understanding of faith. It has many different facets. One facet of it shines for me as a result of participating in sports—specifically, triathlons and long distance running. I reached a point in my training where I thought there was a strong possibility I could qualify for the Boston Marathon. This hope in qualifying began a journey of faith towards achieving it. I had my doubts, for sure. Indeed, many times I found myself running at a pace during workouts that was so slow, I thought there is no way I can run a full minute and a half faster than this for 26.2 miles. Most of the time, then, I lacked evidence from perception that I can run fast enough for the entire race. The reason why, however, is because I ran with accumulated fatigue going into each workout. Thus, I had to have faith that I could qualify, despite lacking conclusive evidence from experience. This is why faith can function to combat unjustified doubt. Indeed, one conception of faith is having confident trust that something is true despite lacking conclusive evidence for it. (Only radical skeptics require the kind of evidence that elicits certainty which, after all, very few beliefs can satisfy.)  
Here is another reason why someone might believe this conception of faith. Suppose my wife were standing in front of me and I said, “I have faith that Julie exists.” One might respond to me similarly to the way Inigo Montoya responded to Vizzini in the movie “The Princess Bride:” “You have faith that Julie exists—a person you see right in front of your nose? I don’t think the term ‘faith’ means what you think it means!” The upshot is this: we don’t need faith to believe in the truth of something for which we already have conclusive evidence. And in this case, it’s perceptual evidence. 
Faith, then, can be taken as a disposition—accompanied by affective states like trust and confidence—one has towards the truth of something despite lacking conclusive evidence in support of it. I don’t need faith that Julie is not on a tryst when I can see her right in front of me. I do, however, have faith that she is not on a tryst when I lack conclusive (perceptual) evidence for it; but my confidence and trust that Julie is acting faithfully to me when I can’t see her is still a kind of faith supported by evidence. It’s just not perceptual evidence. Rather, it’s all the years of evidence I acquired about her character.
Similarly, I didn’t have conclusive evidence that I would qualify for the Boston Marathon—indeed, the event hadn’t even occurred yet! The confident trust I had—that is, the faith I had—in qualifying was grounded in other kinds of evidence. I had evidence from previous workouts and races that I could do it; I had testimonial evidence from experts I’d trained with who assured me I could do it; and I had evidence that I could trust God with all the things that were outside my control. Thus, my preparations and experience from the race taught me a little bit more about one facet of faith and how it played a significant part-cause for why I achieved this goal.
Hopefully, this helped you better understand a conception of faith that is reasonable and an effective, responsible way to combat unjustified doubt. What’s more, I hope it equips you to combat the kinds of unjustified doubt preventing you from achieving your next goal.  
ED. NOTE: The author is a native of Cape May County where he once worked for Sig’s Dock, a family commercial clamming business that operates out of Ottens’ Harbor in Wildwood. Sig’s Dock was founded by his grandfather, Sigvald Osmundsen in 1965 who first started out scalloping and sword fishing before switching to clamming.