EDIT: There are too many places where "I think" should be placed in the following paragraphs, so just insert it wherever I make an assertion. I am exploring these things as well and I don't want to make it seem like I think I have all the answers. As it says, "we know in part, and we prophesy in part." I am a Christian and I'd love to talk about this stuff with you so I hope it reads friendly.

Yes, I meant to confine my usage to biblical usage of the words specifically, and there are a host of assertions made about faith in the Bible that don't apply to everyday usage of the word "faith". For example, according to Romans, biblical faith "comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God", so the faith I'm referring to is belief in the word of God; by this definition, one can't have biblical faith in whatever one pleases. The word is not used in the more general sense of "assumption" in the New Testament (that I know of). (So when you read "Ye of little faith" or whatever, it's specifically talking about people who don't believe the word of God/Jesus, not just people who are not in the habit of making assumptions in general.) And I meant to use the word "believer" to refer to "one who has faith [in the biblical sense mentioned]".

So what I meant to say earlier is that when the Bible says that a believer should have "faith" in something, the believer can be confident that there will either be no visible evidence for that thing, or that there will be evidence to the contrary. Take Peter, for example, whom Jesus bade to come to him out on the water by faith. At that point, Peter was not only ignorant of whether the water would support him, but rather knew for sure that it wouldn't; and he walked anyway. Abraham is another example, to whom God promised that he would have a son after both he and his wife were past childbearing age (not simply when they didn't have a child yet). And again Abraham, when God told him to offer his son as a sacrifice, reasoned that since God said his lineage would be through Isaac, but Isaac hadn't had children yet, God would simply raise him from the dead, which was impossible by normal human means, needless to say.

More importantly, take the idea that believers are not only made righteous, but are made righteous by faith: since it is by faith, one should not be surprised to see evidence contrary to this claim, namely that one still sins. Paul wrote both "we wait for the hope of righteousness through faith" and "For we are saved by hope; but hope that is seen is not hope, for why would a man hope for that which he sees?"

All that is to say that in biblical vernacular, I think that faith differs from an assumption simply in that a believer is not looking for confirmation, and is perhaps even looking for dis-confirmation of the thing which he believes, whereas an assumption is open to revision upon the discovery of proof or disproof. In other words, the goal of a believer is to persist in blind faith until death, but the goal of an assumer is for his/her assumption to be made obsolete by fact as soon as possible.

> There isn't anything particularly mystical about faith conceptually.

Agreed. But in Christian circles, I think it needs to be made clear that the bible makes a lot of assertions about faith that don't apply to the dictionary definition of the word.