Nuances on 'Faith' Contradict Ayn Rand's Definition

Rand assumes that the faithful use faith as a means of knowledge. This definition flies in the face of Rand's epistemology, that Reason is the only valid means of knowledge. Eugene Peterson's statement is instructive in the conversation.

The fatal thing is to reduce faith to an explanation. It is not an explanation, it is a passion. To tell the story of Abraham is to enter a narrative that throws self-help, self-certification, self-discipline-- all our paltry self-hyphenation-- into a junkyard of rusted-out definitions.

Here, Peterson doesn't assume that Faith is a means of knowledge, any more than our emotions are the source of objective fact. But Faith is vital. Peterson again:

[Faith] involves considerable risk. The supposed security of objective certainty recoils from such risk. But for those who take it, it also results in inhabiting a vast, previously unperceived, reality. It also involves considerable retraining in virtually everything involved in being a man, a woman. The introduction of the word "faith" into our language produces a radical and total reorientation from a flat-earth existence, plotted along the monotonous lines of a suburban subdivision, to a multidimensional "on earth as it is in heaven," in which God's presence is the dominant and defining reality with whom we have to do.