For the atheists of Chapter 1, faith is the supreme tool by which religion fixes itself in human minds: although there is no evidence for the truth of this or that holy teaching, one is told to believe it by faith, which means taking it on trust from the authority that teaches it, and willing oneself to assent. Our account of biblical faith gives a rather different picture: faith is an attitude of radical trust in God, which entails quasi-utopian hope. But to trust that God has a good plan for humanity, one has to believe in God in the first place, the atheist will reply. Surely one has been told of his existence by some flawed authority, which discourages awkward questions. It is hard to know how to respond to this, for the Bible seems to have little conception of rational scepticism. God is assumed to be the most real person in the world. As we have seen, one part of the Old Testament broadly resembles philosophical discourse, but still God's reality is assumed, rather than seen as something in need of substantiation. In the New Testament, too, this is the case. Paul is not passionately arguing that God exists, but that the God who is assumed to exist is doing this new thing, in Jesus, and is to be understood in this revolutionary new way, not the old way. Someone who approaches the New Testament saying “but surely the really big question is whether God exists at all” is missing the point.