What role does evidence have in belief?

“Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Mark Twain “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” Richard Dawkins

Is Evidence Irrelevant? John 11:4, 14-15, 41-42 John 10:37-38 John 20:30-31 Luke 1:1-4

Hebrews 1:1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

John 11:45-47 45 Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him, 46 but some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. 47 So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council and said, “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs.

John 11:48-50 48 If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” 49 But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all. 50 Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.”

John 11:51-53 51 He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, 52 and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. 53 So from that day on they made plans to put him to death.

Why differing Responses? It could be a lack of evidence. It could be the lack of will. “Unbelief is not just a lack of faith because of a lack of evidence, unbelief is the presence of something else. There’s a positive power, there’s something within our hearts that resists and fears, or maybe I should say fears and, therefore, hates, the message of Jesus.” -Tim Keller

“I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics…”

“he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in a way they find most advantageous to themselves… For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” Aldous Huxley

John 20:30-31 30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; 31 but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.