If I had to choose between the two options you present, I’d go for the first. But I can’t help but feel there’s more to faith than that. In my view there are two further dimensions of faith that need to be considered.

1. Faith is the solution to the puzzle of modernism vs. postmodernism.
2. Faith is the relational aspect of the Christian religion, the ‘assent to the Good’.

I shall try and explain what I mean by these as clearly as possible.

1.
a)It seems to me that modernism is about collecting evidence and proof of things and then only believing what you have proof of, or at least evidence beyond reasonable doubt. But in the practical reality of day-to-day life that just doesn’t work. Very often you have to make decisions without enough evidence either way to go beyond reasonable doubt. And yet you must act. Not acting is another kind of faith - it’s having faith that not-acting is the best thing to do in your situation.

b) It seems to me that postmodernism is about dissociating truth from knowledge. There may be truth, but we can never have certainty of it. Nobody has an objective point of view, every proposition or statement is subjective and relative to the proposer’s perspective. But in the practical reality of day-to-day life we have to act as though things were objective.

Let me pose a few hypothetical examples:

I) (against modernism) You are sitting comfortably in your living room. Suddenly someone bursts through the door and shouts “FIRE!!! Get out the house immediately or you’ll be burned alive!”

You have to weigh up the evidence fast, of course. The person could be lying, they could be trying to get you out the house for some reason, e.g. to rob you. They could be mistaken. You will never have enough evidence, while you sit in your armchair, to know for sure. But even getting out of your armchair means acting on what they said, even if you are only doing so to verify what they’ve told you. You have to have enough ‘faith’ in the possibility of the truth of what they’ve said in order to do anything at all. But not getting out of your armchair also requires faith - faith that you will not be burned alive, no matter what evidence there is to the contrary.

II) (against postmodernism) I go to my online banking website and type in my secure details to check my bank balance. This requires having faith in a great many things all at once. How do I know that the number I see on the screen really is the amount of money I have in the account? How can I be sure that the bank won’t arbitrarily change the amount in my account? Is it only “my point of view” that I have that amount of money in the account? What does it really mean to have money in my account? All it means is that the bank has a few 101101011 binary numbers on a hard drive somewhere in a computer. In fact even calling them binary numbers is a matter of interpretation and perspective. I could just call them magnetic charges. No, even that is a perspective-oriented approach: it’s just a certain number of electrons flying round nucleuses of atoms. But you can never determine the exact position of an electron, nor find out very much about it at all. I’ve never seen an electron.

Moreover, assuming that the electrons really are interpreted as money in my account: what is money? It’s just a created reality, human beings agreeing that you can exchange it for goods. If our society collapsed the money would be meaningless and buy me nothing. What gives the money meaning? Just the people who make up society and decide to give it that meaning.

Nonetheless, I have to live my life as though there were objectivity to my bank balance. Trying to live any other way would quickly end me in a lunatic asylum or jail. There is a reality to it which affects me every day, which affects everyone every day. The poor people on the street don’t philosophize about the relativity of money. They’re poor and it’s a reality to them.

I hope it at least vaguely makes sense how faith is the unison, the glue between modernism and postmodernism. It solves the problems left by both, in a very practical way. I choose to believe certain things without much evidence, and base my life on them. There is objective truth, but even though I can never have 100% certainty, I can have faith which enables me to live.

I’ve much, much more to say but this post is too long already. What do you think?

I think you are leaving an important aspect of biblical faith out of your equation. Faith simply means trust, but biblically speaking that faith is directed at God. So, simply put we trust God. But, we don’t trust without evidence. To start with our faith must have some sort of foundation even if its the simple presentation of the gospel which is witnessed by our spirit.

God grows our faith through testing and trial (clearly defined in the book of James). This too is a form of evidence. We are put in a position in which we can trust God and when He comes through our faith is strengthened. Nowhere in scripture are we called upon to have a blind faith.

Further, our faith is bolstered in God when His scripture is evidenced to be true and our understanding of it to be reliable. If we could not trust scripture we would have frail foundation to trust God since most of what we know of God comes from scripture.