For me, the essence of "faith" is choice, and the key quality is "nevertheless." Faith is the very tension between yes and no, between reliance and rejection, and is the occasion for making an utterly personal decision all by yourself, all for yourself.
It works like this:
On the one hand, I really, honestly, do see, hear, and experience everything that atheists adduce as evidence that God is an illusion. What is more, as a former executive in a brain-monitoring company I understand perhaps better than most of them the scientific basis for their argument that there is no "there" there beyond some intracranial synapses creating an illusion some call "God".
On the other hand, I also see, hear, and experience in my everyday life what I just as really, honestly, understand as God.
This brings me to a free choice: I can choose to live my life according to either one depiction or the other: without God or with God. The act of "faith" is choosing one over the other "nevertheless." The nevertheless means I don't deny, dispute, or dishonor the evidence and the argument to the contrary; it simply means that I choose not to adopt it as the definitive guide for my own thinking and feeling and actions during what poet Mary Oliver calls my "one wild and precious life." Perhaps the same process holds true for those atheists who acknowledge that there really are two sides to this issue: they, too, see some evidence on both sides, weigh it, and choose the alternative instead (although I can imagine that calling this decision an act of "faith" might not be very palatable to some).
Eliot Daley, quoted in the Huffington Post.
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