Faith and perfect knowledge are not incompatible, else how would God, whose knowledge is perfect, possess the attribute of faith? (See Hebrews 11:3.) Alma is defining faith from the viewpoint of mortality, not the vantage point of the eternities. In our present world, faith serves as an assurance of the existence of the unseen.
By contrast, in the Lectures on Faith Joseph Smith spoke of faith in its unlimited sense. Faith, he declared, is “the principle by which Jehovah works, and through which he exercises power over all temporal as well as eternal things. Take this principle or attribute-for it is an attribute-from the Deity, and he would cease to exist.” (Lectures on Faith 1:16.)
Among exalted beings, “Faith, then, is the first great governing principle which has power, dominion, and authority over all things; by it they exist, by it they are upheld, by it they are changed, or by it they remain, agreeable to the will of God. Without it there is no power, and without power there could be no creation nor existence!” (Lectures on Faith 1:24; see also 2:2.)
“Faith Is Not to Have a Perfect Knowledge of Things”
On the other hand, to those who already possess enough faith to have come out of the world, to have believed in the Lord Jesus and accepted the words of his anointed servants-to such the process of faith is grander and more expansive. These come to understand the nature and kind of being that God is, and in so doing they come to appreciate that faith is a principle of power which characterizes the work of God.
God has all knowledge. God has all faith. By virtue of his omniscience and his omnipotence he, commands that things come to pass. By virtue of his perfect faith, this virtue and principle of power, he has absolute confidence that his word will be fulfilled and his command realized. “In the eternal sense,”Elder Bruce R. McConkie has written,
“because faith is the power of God himself, it embraces within its fold a knowledge of all things. This measure of faith, the faith by which the worlds are and were created and which sustains and upholds all things, is found only among resurrected persons. It is the faith of saved beings. But mortals are in process, through faith, of gaining eternal salvation. Their faith is based on a knowledge of the truth, within the meaning of Alma’s statement that ’faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things, ’ but that men have faith when they ’hope for things which are not seen, which are true.’ In this sense faith is both preceded and supplanted by knowledge, and when any person gains a perfect knowledge on any given matter, then as pertaining to that thing, he has faith no longer; or, rather, his faith is dormant; it has been supplanted by pure knowledge.” (New Witness, pp. 209-10.)