# Faith

Faith as trust, action, and evidence—explore the biblical and Book of Mormon roots of faith and its link to humanity’s divine potential.

Faith is the steadiness of a trust that holds firm under strain and acts upon a promise before its fulfillment can be seen. Scripture gives the word a concrete picture at Rephidim, where Moses’ arms grew heavy as Israel fought Amalek, until Aaron and Hur “stayed up his hands” and “his hands were steady until the going down of the sun” (Exodus 17:12). The Hebrew rendered “steady” is *’emunah*, the noun elsewhere translated “faith,” formed from *’aman*, “to be firm,” which also yields *amen*. The Greek *pistis* likewise joins trust with faithfulness, the reliability that makes a person worth trusting. Critics of religion commonly define faith as belief held without evidence. The scriptural lexicon describes an assurance that labors, endures, and submits itself to whatever follows.

## Substance and Evidence

The Epistle to the Hebrews supplies the classic definition in the vocabulary of property and proof: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). The noun *hypostasis*, rendered “substance,” denotes the underlying reality of a thing and the assurance that rests upon it, and some scholars, drawing on the papyri of Greco-Roman Egypt, have heard in it the sense of a title deed, a document securing property not yet occupied. *Elenchos*, “evidence,” belongs to the courtroom, signifying a proof or the conviction that a proof produces. Read in this light, the verse describes faith as a present claim upon a future good, and the chapter that follows illustrates it with a roll of those who acted upon such claims.

The Book of Mormon situates faith between hope and knowledge. Alma, teaching the outcast poor of the Zoramites, specifies that “faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true” (Alma 32:21). Moroni fixes the order in which faith and evidence arrive: “dispute not because ye see not, for ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith” (Ether 12:6). The two prophets thereby separate two conceptions that ordinary speech conflates. Faith as assent accepts a proposition and closes the inquiry, while faith as trial commits itself to a course of action and awaits the witness that action alone can produce. On the second conception, faith and evidence become successive stages of one process.

## The Principle of Action and Power

The Lectures on Faith, delivered to the School of the Elders in Kirtland in the winter of 1834–35 and printed with the Doctrine and Covenants until 1921, define faith as “the principle of action in all intelligent beings.” They draw the illustration from the field, asking whether anyone would ever have sown without believing that he would reap. Going further, the Lectures declare that faith is “not only the principle of action, but of power also, in all intelligent beings whether in heaven or on earth.” They read the verse declaring that “the worlds were framed by the word of God” (Hebrews 11:3) as an account of how God Himself works, so that the farmer who sows and the Creator who frames worlds stand within one pattern, each acting toward an outcome not yet visible.

Mormon transhumanists place their own labor within the same pattern. The Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation describes discipleship as the resolve “to trust in, change toward, and fully immerse our bodies and minds in the role of Christ,” making trust the first motion of transformation. Lincoln Cannon has defined faith as “trust in hope, expressed in action,” and, invoking the Epistle of James on faith and works, he concludes that “technology is works.” On this reading the physician who seeks to restore sight and the laboratory that labors to slow aging act upon things hoped for exactly as the sower acts upon the harvest. The same reading binds such labor to the sower’s discipline, because only the harvest can disclose whether the trust was well placed.

## An Experiment upon the Word

Alma invites his hearers to “awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words,” and he names the signs by which a planted seed proves itself good: it begins “to swell within your breasts,” to “enlarge my soul,” and to “enlighten my understanding” (Alma 32:27-28). The prophet frames his invitation in strikingly empirical terms, with a hypothesis, a procedure, and observable results, so that faith submits to a trial whose outcome it does not control. Latter-day Saint scientists have often likened Alma’s procedure to the experimental method, and the comparison holds at the decisive point. A seed that fails to swell is judged by its failure, and Alma leaves no shelter for a conviction that refuses every trial.

The same procedure exposes the credulity that frequently passes for faith in technological enterprise. Theranos, the blood-testing company that raised hundreds of millions of dollars for devices that could not perform as claimed, sustained the confidence of its investors by withholding its machines from independent trial, and its founder was convicted of fraud in 2022. A widely circulated manifesto of technological optimism, published in 2023, sets out its program as a creed in a long series of sentences beginning “We believe,” requesting assent before any experiment. Transhumanist hopes for radical life extension and machine intelligence run the same hazard whenever their advocates solicit a trust that no trial has earned. Alma’s discipline would have every such promise planted, watched, and judged by the fruit it yields.

## The Tree Springing Up

Nor does Alma allow the experiment to close once its first result is in. When the seed has sprouted, he concedes, “your knowledge is perfect in that thing, and your faith is dormant,” yet he adds at once, “neither must ye lay aside your faith, for ye have only exercised your faith to plant the seed that ye might try the experiment to know if the seed was good” (Alma 32:34, 36). The sprout must then be nourished with diligence and patience until it becomes a tree springing up unto everlasting life, bearing fruit whiter than any other. The image unmistakably recalls the tree of Lehi’s dream, and Alma thereby sets the humble experiment of the seed within the great vision of his forebears.

The tree of life stands at the end toward which faith labors, and Alma promises its fruit to those who nourish the word through every season. Faith reaches that end by the cycle the seed began, acting upon a promise, submitting it to trial, and acting again on what the trial discloses, so that the steadiness of Moses’ hands at Rephidim becomes the steadiness of an entire life. The Lectures place the far horizon of this cycle in the power by which God framed the worlds. The resurrection and immortality that Mormon transhumanists hope to help bring about lie at the same horizon, and Alma’s method governs the approach, requiring that each therapy, enhancement, and promise of machine intelligence be planted, tried, and nourished by the fruit it bears.

*See also*: [Hope](/topical-guide/hope), [Knowledge](/topical-guide/knowledge), [Power](/topical-guide/power), [Prayer](/topical-guide/prayer), [Revelation](/topical-guide/revelation), [Singularitarian](/topical-guide/singularitarian), [Transhumanism](/topical-guide/transhumanism)