What is faith? A reasonable person would give a classical answer, such as "a strong belief or confidence in a given statement". But modern atheists have discovered just how effective the fallacy of equivocation is. By defining faith as "belief without evidence", or even "belief in spite of evidence", they can start any Christian off on their back foot.
But this is not where the conversation ought to start. A reasonable conversation ought to start on reasonable ground. When you start with the assumption that your opponent is an idiot with no good reasons for their views, and especially when you can make them look stupid just by bashing them, that's not a reasonable discussion, that's actually dishonest.
In reality, faith has never been about belief without evidence. Every time God sends out a new message, He verifies it with evidence, be it a personal appearance to the initial recipient, miraculous gifts given to His chosen messenger, or in some cases, both. Even in Hebrews 11, where faith is effectively defined as "...the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen", we see following this a list of "faith heroes"; a number of men who put their faith in a God they personally encountered. Noah believed if he built an ark, he would survive the coming flood. He hadn't seen the flood, he hadn't seen an ark, but God personally told him how to build an ark to preserve life. Is that belief without evidence? No, that's belief with incomplete visions of the future. Then Abraham, who also saw God, is listed as an example of faith because he believed, though his 90 year old wife was completely barren, that God was telling the truth when He promised him a son would be born to Sarah. The so-called "Hall of Faith" continues, not describing men who believed without evidence, but who followed the evidence to its logical conclusion.
As Christians, we have ample evidence that God exists, but none of us have ever seen Heaven. We can't prove that anything will happen when we die. Even if God exists, how do we know there aren't other gods? Even if Christ rose from the dead, how do we know He has the power to raise us? Even if everything in the Bible could be proven, right down to finding the very bones of Adam and Eve, God could very easily be deceptive. The reality is, but for absolute omniscience, there is no way to avoid faith. Christians have faith. Atheists have faith. Everyone who has ever lived, up to and including Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking, has been absolutely required to walk by faith. So why the new "belief without evidence" thing? Simple: Atheists have more faith than any Christian ever will.
See, there is no more arrogant a thing to believe you, and those who agree with you, are the only ones on earth who do not require faith. The entire human race, taken individually or as a collective, has yet to fully understand our tiny little corner of reality. Even individual human beings, inevitably, do not know everything that is known by the other. I know things you will never know. You know things I will never know. We even know things that, if we were to sit down in a room together, we would be incapable of teaching each other. So what business do atheists, who are a global minority, have to say that anyone who has faith must necessarily be so gullible as to believe what they believe with no evidence what so ever?
My friends, there are apologists in every religion. Atheists have their apologists, Christians have ours, and I can assure you, no apologist has the job of sitting in front of an audience shouting "I have no evidence, just believe my worthless religion". Rather, an apologist's job is to present arguments and evidence, as well as counter contrary arguments and explain contrary evidence.
If faith was belief without evidence, there would be no apologists, and all religions would have died the first time someone asked "why?" In reality, Christianity wins converts every day based on evidence. Evidence that is worth the mockery we receive from silly little atheist trolls. Evidence that is worth the scorn of arrogant scholars. Evidence that is even worth the persecution, and in some cases loss of life, that comes along with believing the Christian faith. Christians do not win converts like Lee Strobel, or J Warner Wallace, or Sir Lionel Luckhoo, by encouraging gullibility. We win converts because our faith is so well placed, our religion can actually be proven beyond all reasonable doubt. To quote the aforementioned Sir Luckhoo, "I have spent more than 42 years as a defense trial lawyer appearing in many parts of the world and am still in active practice. I have been fortunate to secure a number of successes in jury trials and I say unequivocally the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof which leaves absolutely no room for doubt."
This leaves us with a question: If faith is not "belief without evidence", what is it? Put simply, faith is about our attitude towards God. Truth faith recognises who God is, from His existence to His character to how we ought to respond to Him. It is essential to recognise God's role as our Creator, God's authority over all things, and unfortunately, the fact that we have failed in our responsibilities to do so, and how He must naturally take care of that. But one essential part of God's character is His love. Love that does not want to see us perish as we ought, but rather, be reconciled to Him. Thus, before He even created the world, He put into action a plan of salvation. He sent Jesus to live a perfect, human life, and yet He died a sinner's death on the cross. There, He took the full wrath of God on behalf of the guilty, allowing us all to be saved. Everyone who confesses Jesus as Lord, and believes in their heart God raised Him from the dead, will be saved, being forgiven for their sins and instead being granted eternal life. We have not yet seen this, but everything we have seen gives us more than reasonable grounds to be confident in this promise.