A note on faith

When you have no evidence for what you believe, you say you have faith. You proclaim it proudly, hands on hips, eyebrows raised in smug triumph because you feel you have delivered a decisive blow to my argument. But consider this;

I have a deadly disease that the entire medical community agrees there is currently no cure for. My doctor pulls a pill from his pocket that looks curiously like an old gumball with a slight dusting of pocket lint. He tells me it is the answer to my prayers, the cure for my disease. "But doctor, every other doctor I spoken to, as well as every piece of research I have read, tells me that there is no cure". He tells me that he had an inner-revelation that this gumball was transformed into the cure and that I only need to have faith. "But doctor, what about clinical trials, peer reviewed medical journals, the scientific process?" He told me he could offer me no evidence, only his faith. He claimed to have captured an invisible fairy in his sock drawer and it was her fairy dust that transformed the gumball into the cure. Unfortunately, the fairy is invisible, so there is no evidence to be had in the sock drawer. I suggest doing some tests on the gumball, so perhaps it can be replicated and others can be saved. He told me that testing it would be tantamount to questioning his faith and that would render the gumball useless. So, my desperate fear of death gave way to a reluctant faith in the doctor's unverifiable claims, and I swallowed the gumball.
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Is it good to believe something when there is no evidence of its effect, efficacy, or existence? Consider this quote from Martin Luther. "Reason is the Devil's harlot, who can do nought but slander and harm whatever God says and does".