Faith just means believing something without, or even against, the evidence. Calling that a virtue is intellectually dishonest.

Why people find it persuasive

Popular usage supports this — 'just have faith' is often deployed precisely when evidence runs out, and Hebrews 11:1's 'assurance of things hoped for, conviction of things not seen' sounds like a definition of believing without seeing.

Important distinctions

• • Fideism (believing without or against evidence) vs. classical Christian pistis (trust grounded in prior warrant).
• • Faith as the initial leap vs. faith as ongoing trust built on an evidential foundation, akin to trusting a friend whose character you already know.
• • Popular folk usage of 'faith' vs. the technical usage in scripture and historical theology.
• • Certainty vs. reasonable confidence sufficient to warrant commitment.

Christian response

• • Hebrews 11 itself, read in context, is not commending belief without evidence: its litany of examples (Abraham, Moses, Rahab) grounds faith in God's prior demonstrated track record of promise-keeping — 'faith' there means steadfast trust based on precedent, not credulity absent precedent, analogous to trusting a spouse of thirty years based on accumulated evidence of fidelity.
• • John's Gospel repeatedly presents miracles explicitly as evidence meant to ground belief — 'these are written that you may believe' (John 20:31), and Jesus appeals to his works as warrant: 'even though you do not believe me, believe the works' (John 10:38).
• • 1 Peter 3:15 commands believers to 'always be prepared to give an answer... for the hope that you have' — a call to reasoned defense (apologia), incompatible with a fideist model that treats reasons as unnecessary or hostile to faith.
• • Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:14-17 explicitly stakes Christianity's truth on a historical, checkable event — 'if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile' — grounding belief in a claim meant to be evidentially assessable, not insulated from it; this is the opposite of fideism.
• • The classical theological tradition (Aquinas's distinction between the preambles of faith, established by reason, and the articles of faith, held by grace-assisted trust; Anselm's 'faith seeking understanding') has never treated faith and evidence as opposed, even though it also holds that faith involves trust that outruns strict demonstrative proof, as trust in any person, not merely a formula, generally does.
• • That popular rhetoric sometimes misuses 'faith' as a euphemism for wishful thinking is a fair critique of bad preaching and folk piety, not of the concept as scripture and serious theology define it.

Christian counterresponse

Christian epistemology generally responds that this is true of trust in persons generally — trusting a friend's character involves a step beyond strict logical entailment from observed behavior, yet is not thereby irrational; the claim is that Christian faith is warranted trust of that kind, resting on historical and philosophical grounds (the resurrection, natural theology) sufficient to make the further trust reasonable rather than arbitrary.