Yes.
That is the definition of faith. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1 Unseen things are the object of faith. We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:18 Believers walk by faith, not by sight. For we walk by faith, not by sight. 2 Corinthians 5:7 And they are saved by an unseen hope. For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 Paul says that we should believe "all things," which would include things that are not seen. Believeth all things. 1 Corinthians 13:7 To believe in God, you must believe that he exists, even though you've never seen him. For he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Hebrews 11:6 Jesus praised people who believe in unseen things, calling them "blessed." Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. John 20:29
Cited passages
Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, proof of things not seen.
while we don’t look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.
for we walk by faith, not by sight.
For we were saved in hope, but hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for that which he sees?
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Usually considered reconciled
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
This pairing largely dissolves under textual criticism, though a real and more interesting tension survives beneath it.
The "yes" side is overwhelming and consistent. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith (*pistis*) as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (*pragmatōn elenchos ou blepomenōn*). 2 Corinthians 4:18 directs attention to "the things which are not seen"; 5:7 declares "we walk by faith, not by sight" (*dia pisteōs gar peripatoumen, ou dia eidous*); Romans 8:24 grounds salvation in an unseen hope; and John 20:29 has the risen Jesus pronounce blessed "they that have not seen, and yet have believed." The whole stream is univocal: the unseen is the proper object of faith.
The sole counterweight is Colossians 2:18, and here the apparent contradiction is a creature of the King James text. The contested clause is *ha heoraken embateuōn* — literally "entering into [the] things which he has seen." A large body of later manuscripts inserts the negative *mē* ("things which he has NOT seen"), and the KJV follows that reading, producing a verse that seems to condemn belief in unseen things. But the shorter reading, without the negative, is earlier and better attested; Metzger's *Textual Commentary* and the apparatus of the critical editions favor it, and the negative is widely judged a secondary scribal expansion. On the critical text, Colossians 2:18 is not condemning faith in the invisible at all. It is criticizing opponents in the Colossian community who boast about visionary experiences they claim to have had — "intruding into the things he has seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind." Fred Francis's classic study reconstructs these opponents against a background of ascetic-visionary mysticism and angelic worship; Dunn's NIGTC commentary works through the same textual and exegetical terrain. So the contradiction the SAB detects is, in one direction, a KJV artifact: correct the text and the verse no longer addresses the same subject as Hebrews 11.
That said, a deeper seam remains, and it is worth naming rather than papering over. The New Testament simultaneously elevates faith without sight as the higher virtue (John 20:29; Hebrews 11:1, 11:6) and grounds apostolic authority precisely in eyewitness sight: 1 John 1:1 ("that which we have seen with our eyes... have handled"), Luke 1:2 ("eyewitnesses... of the word"), 1 Corinthians 15:5-8 (the catalogue of those to whom the risen Christ appeared, ending with Paul himself), and 2 Peter 1:16 ("we were eyewitnesses of his majesty"). Ehrman has highlighted this as a structural irony of early Christianity: sight is normative and authority-conferring for the first generation, while faith without sight becomes normative for everyone afterward. The Thomas pericope in John 20 is in fact the literary hinge that manages the transition — Thomas sees and believes, and the narrator pivots to bless those who will believe without seeing, a verse Brown reads as addressed directly to John's later audience.
This residual tension is not the contradiction the SAB pairing actually catches, and it is only a contradiction at all if one reads the eyewitness texts and the faith-without-sight texts as competing universal epistemological claims. They are better read as marking two stages: the foundational generation that saw, and the believing generations that did not. The texts distribute the two epistemologies across time rather than asserting both of the same people at once.
Where the critical reading lands: the surface contradiction is overstated and rests on a rejected textual reading; a genuine but milder developmental tension lies underneath, which the narrow SAB pairing does not quite capture.
Sources for this reading