"Faith" is used in two contrary senses - one is "a strongly held belief," which is generally strongly held because based on evidence, and the other is "belief held in absence of proof," which is the religious sense.
Here, check out the Catholic Encyclopedia entry. Starts by defining the word as a translation of the Hebrew word for "steadfastness," combining senses of "belief" and "trust."
It's a very long article - here's a bit from about a third of the way down:
An angel understands truths which are beyond man's comprehension; if then a man were called upon to assent to a truth beyond the ken of the human intellect, but within the grasp of the angelic intellect, he would require for the time being something more than his natural light of reason, he would require what we may call "the angelic light". If, now, the same man were called upon to assent to a truth beyond the grasp of both men and angels, he would clearly need a still higher light, and this light we term "the light of faith" -- a light, because it enables him to assent to those supernatural truths, and the light of faith because it does not so illumine those truths as to make them no longer obscure, for faith must ever be "the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not" (Hebrews 11:1).
snip
...[F]aith is essentially an act of assent, and just as assent to a series of deductive or inductive reasonings, or to intuition of first principles, would be impossible without the light of reason, so, too assent to a supernatural truth would be inconceivable without a supernatural strengthening of the natural light. "Quid est enim fides nisi credere quod non vides?" (i.e. what is faith but belief in that which thou seest not?) asks St. Augustine; but he also says: "Faith has its eyes by which it in some sort sees that to be true which it does not yet see- and by which, too, it most surely sees that it does not see what it believes." |
