Reddit mentions of Philosophy and Faith: A Philosophy of Religion Reader

>To me, faith is defined as "the belief in something for which there is no direct evidence."

I think if you really focused deeply on the nature of theism and faith, you'd see that this definition encompasses not just gods but also all of our non-axiomatic philosophies. Take science: it can't even prove itself, so how do we know it's valid as a method of ascertaining reality? Saying, "because it works" shifts the goal posts from veracity to pragmatism -- from truth to what works.

I'm thinking of Tolstoy, who said: "without faith it is impossible to live." He probably didn't mean it in the way I'm meaning it.

I mean that faith, which can be equated with trust (which in turn signifies inclinations of the will, i.e., you can't just "believe" without showing some type of change in your behavior), is needed to move and live for all of our philosophical assumptions which can't (because they're assumptions) be proven. Take the existence of the outer world, other selves, uniformity in nature, induction, etc. All these things are what we would call "common sense," but this doesn't undermine the fact that we can't (and no philosopher so far has) proven these using reason. They're intuitive or instinctual axioms we have about the world, arguably hard wired into us.

What happens if we doubt these? We can't possibly move or live; we're bound in a constant state of skeptical paralysis. Without faith we can't be human. Religious faith is another flavor of a faith that's essentially no different than the daily faith we have in our basic assumptions.

What I'm sensing is you're somewhere between the contemplation and determination/preparation stage of the stages of change, fueled by a conviction that atheism leads to a sort of nihilism whereas you want the security of theism in contributing to something that goes beyond this. So your task is to read. An excellent introduction is JP Moreland's Scaling the Secular City, the best book on apologetics I've read. More broadly, and with less bias because it's an anthology, I always recommend Shatz's Philosophy and Faith, which goes through multiple areas regarding God with contributions from atheists, agnostics, and mostly theists. The great Catholic theologian critical of Catholicism, Hans Kung, has a classic called On Being a Christian that's one of the most intellectual and insightful justifications for Christianity in writing.

There are plenty others. Moreland in particular does an excellent job of unveiling how materialistic explanations are something we tend to accept uncritically, and through criticizing them does a great job of making them appear very problematic.