Recently I met a man at a party and we began talking about religion. I said I was a Christian. He asked me whether I had ever experienced serious doubts, whether my faith had ever been shaken. I tried to explain that it wasn't like that; that faith, in my experience, wasn't normally stable; that doubt and shakiness were sort of internal to it; that it was an endless argument with its opposite. Frankly I didn't much like the assumption behind his question: that my faith was probably something unexamined, vulnerable to a realism that I carefully shunned. Afterwards I realized how I should have replied. I should have asked him: have you ever questioned your assumption that you are a good person? He would probably have replied that he had never claimed to be a particularly good person. Well, I would have replied, I have never claimed that my faith is a stable possession.

My interlocutor had recently read Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion (2006). Perhaps it had confirmed his assumption that religious faith is a flight from realism, from honesty. Of course, this book has a negative view of religious faith, but does it see any virtue in faith in a more general sense?

In what follows, I shall look at recent writings by Dawkins and three other atheists. There is a tendency for them to limit the meaning of “faith” to “religious faith”, and belief's defiance of evidence and reason. There is almost no acknowledgement of the strange, awkward fact that the word has another meaning: trust, optimism, confidence, hope, a belief that the future will be all right, a belief in someone’s ability to fulfil his potential. These atheists might say: that’s another meaning of faith, which should be kept separate from religion. But that won’t do. The two meanings are not completely separate; their overlap should be reflected on.