First off, I would never equate "faith" with "belief", nor would most atheists in my experience. As human beings, we have to make decisions. Sometimes we have t

First off, I would never equate "faith" with "belief", nor would most atheists in my experience. As human beings, we have to make decisions. Sometimes we have to make decisions without the time, experience, or resources to make them in an optimal way. So we can make decisions based on what we know about the world, or we can make decisions based on ignorance. Furthermore, we often have to justify our decisions to other people or against our own moral principles. Belief is what your brain does with prior knowledge and experiences that you have, and it is often invoked to justify decisions made with experience. On the other hand, we sometimes have to justify decision that are based in ignorance. We have a really good word for this: hope. Usually you're just getting lucky. Or you say "I did this because I didn't know what else to do, and I didn't know how to find something better." (You can also call hope a sort of emotion, if you're just commenting on other peoples' decisions rather than evaluating your own.) You're hopeful that it will work, even if you don't have any knowledge or experience that it will. Usually, this is not ideal. You'd always rather do the right thing because you know what the right thing is, rather than doing it on accident. There's no way to teach your methods of victory if you only win your battles on accident! Faith is not belief per se, nor is it hope, though it looks a bit like both on the surface. Faith is what happens when you say it is good/important to make decisions based on hope. It is the promotion of ignorance as a virtue, rather than as an unfortunate fact of life which we must work to overcome. Faith is a particular belief that hope is better than knowledge, at least sometimes. If you're having unsatisfying discussions with atheists, it is probably because you're failing to make these distinctions. Most atheists will tell you they believe things. Those beliefs are based in knowledge and experience with the world. They will also tell you they have hope. They will not tell you they have faith, because they don't want to promote ignorance as a virtue.