What faith can you

But the venture of actually entrusting oneself to God seems to begin with the challenge of being able to accept that, indeed, there is such a God.

While some affirm that many people have sufficient evidence to justify this claim, others, as already noted, hold that everyone has to confront the evidential ambiguity of foundational theistic claims. Trusting in God seems to presuppose, in other words, taking it on trust that God exists. But, if so, the question whether, and under what conditions, one may be entitled to such an evidence-transcending venture becomes pressing.

One way to relieve this pressure is to offer a non-realist analysis of theological claims. On such a non-realist account, the model of faith as trust brackets the cognitive component of faith, and risks becoming, in effect, a model of faith as purely a certain kind of affective state. But, in any case, non-realist models will be rejected by those who take faith to have a cognitive component that functions as a grasping—or would-be grasping—of how things really are.

Reflecting on that proposal discloses further points of disanalogy, however. In cases of interpersonal trust a venture is often needed in initially taking the trustee to be trustworthy, but evidence will inevitably later emerge which will either confirm or disconfirm the truth of that claim—and trust may, and rationally should, be withdrawn if the news is bad.

Furthermore, interpersonal trust does not require actually believing that the trustee is worthy of trust, only that one decisively takes this to be true i.

People of theistic faith, however, typically do believe that God exists and may be trusted for salvation, and, if—as we are here assuming—acting on this belief ventures beyond evidential support, then it is a venture that persists and is not confined to initial commitment only.

These reinforcing experiences, which often involve faith renewed in the face of apparent failures of divine love, do not, however, possess the uncontroversial status of evidence that independently and inter-subjectively confirms the initial venture. James observes, however, that many beliefs have causes that do not constitute or imply an evidential grounding of their truth.

In the next section, the possibility is considered that the gift of these motivational resources might not amount to actual belief. The motivational resources for faith-commitment may thus be an essentially social possession. As noted in Section 5, Aquinas holds that the available evidence, though it supports the truth of foundational faith-propositions, does not provide what Aquinas counts as sufficient i.

On some such assumptions, for example those made by Bayesians, the support provided by the evidence Aquinas adduces—or, by a suitable contemporary upgrading of that evidence, such as that provided in the works of Richard Swinburne—may be considered enough to make reasonable a sufficiently high degree of belief or credence in the truth of theistic faith-propositions so that believers need not venture beyond the support of their evidence.

The doxastic venture model may thus be regarded as capturing the spiritual challenge of faith more satisfactorily than do models that understand faith as conforming to evidentialism. This is because, on the doxastic venture model, faith involves a deeper surrender of self-reliant control, not only in trusting God, but in accepting at the level of practical commitment that there is a God—indeed, this God—who is to be trusted.

Doxastic venture in relation to faith-propositions can be justifiable, of course, only if there are legitimate exceptions to the evidentialist requirement to take a proposition to be true just to the extent of its evidential support—and only if the legitimate exceptions include the kind of case involved in religious, theistic, faith-commitment.

A possible view of theistic faith-commitment is that it is wholly independent of the epistemic concern that cares about evidential support. On this view, faith reveals its authenticity most clearly when it takes faith-propositions to be true contrary to the weight of the evidence. Serious philosophical defence of a doxastic venture model of faith thus implies a supra-rational fideism, for which epistemic concern is not overridden and for which, therefore, it is a constraint on faith-commitment that it not accept what is known, or justifiably believed on the evidence, to be false.

Rather, faith commits itself only beyond , and not against, the evidence—and it does so out of epistemic concern to grasp truth on matters of vital existential importance. If such faith is to be justified, its cognitive content will on realist assumptions have to cohere with our best evidence-based theories about the real world.

Faith may extend our scientific grasp of the real, but may not counter it. Whether the desire to grasp more truth about the real than science can supply is a noble aspiration or a dangerous delusion is at the heart of the debate about entitlement to faith on this supra-rational fideist doxastic venture model. Still, it is worth remarking that those who think that faith understood as doxastic venture may be justified face the challenge of providing the tools for weeding out intuitively distorted and unjustifiable forms of faith.

On the other side, those evidentialists who reject doxastic venture as impermissible have to consider whether taking a stance on the nature of reality beyond anything science can even in principle confirm may not, in the end, be unavoidable, and potentially implicated in the commitments required for science itself see Bishop a, Chapters 8 and 9.

Some accounts allow that faith centrally involves practical commitment venturing beyond evidential support, yet do not require or, even, permit that the venturer actually believes the faith-proposition assumed to be true.

Tennant holds a view of this kind: he takes faith to be the adoption of a line of conduct not warranted by present facts, that involves experimenting with the possible or ideal, venturing into the unknown and taking the risk of disappointment and defeat. Andrei Buckareff and J. Schellenberg , propose non-doxastic venture models of propositional faith, with Schellenberg emphasising the positive evaluation that persons of faith make of the truth-claim to which they commit themselves.

Bishop , in response to Buckareff, also agrees that authentic faith need not always be a specifically doxastic venture. Rational assessment of religious faith, Audi thinks, must avoid treating it as implying belief, while recognising that greater confidence attaches to it than to religious hope.

Some philosophers have suggested that the epistemological challenges faced by accounts of faith as involving belief beyond the evidence may be avoided by construing theist commitment as hope. Muyskens contrasts hope with faith understood as belief , arguing that a religion of hope is both epistemically and religiously superior to a religion of faith.

But faith is not generally understood as competing with hope Creel , and some philosophers identify faith with hoping that the claims of faith are true Pojman ; A more adequate model of faith as hope, then, may rather take faith to be acting in, or from, hope. All these three models, then —doxastic venture, sub-doxastic venture and venture in hope— fit the view that faith is consistent with doubt, and, indeed, impossible without doubt of some kind, though they allow that persons of faith may give firm and sustained commitment to the truth of faith-propositions in practice.

To be virtuous, faith must be faith in a worthy object: it is faith in God that is the theological virtue. More generally, faith is virtuous only when it is faith to which one is entitled. An account of the conditions under which faith is permissible is thus the key to an ethics of faith. On models of faith as a special kind of knowledge, or as firmly held belief, it may seem puzzling how faith could be a virtue—unless some implicit practical component emerges when such models are further explicated, or, alternatively, a case may be made for the claim that what is involuntary may nevertheless be praiseworthy, with theistic faith as a case in point Adams Fiducial models of faith seem more attuned to exhibiting faith as a virtue, though a defence of the trustworthiness of the one who is trusted for salvation may be required.

The Jamesian account already mentioned Section 7 aims to meet this need. If faith of the religious kind is to count as virtuous, it seems there must be a suitable degree of persistence and steadfastness in the commitment made.

Persons of religious faith are faithful to the object of their commitment, though the salient kind of faithfulness may be a matter of the continual renewal of faith rather than of maintaining it unchanged. See Audi for a discussion of faith and faithfulness in relation to virtue. Faith is only one of the Christian theological virtues, of course, the others being hope and charity or love, agape : and St Paul famously affirms that the greatest of these is love I Cor.

The question thus arises how these three virtues are related. One suggestion is that faith is taking it to be true that there are grounds for the hope that love is supreme—not simply in the sense that love constitutes the ideal of the supreme good, but in the sense that living in accordance with this ideal constitutes an ultimate salvation, fulfilment or consummation that is, in reality, victorious over all that may undermine it in a word, over evil.

The supremacy of love is linked to the supremacy of the divine itself, since love is the essential nature of the divine.

What is hoped for, and what faith assures us is properly hoped for, is a sharing in the divine itself, loving as God loves see Brian Davies on Aquinas, On this understanding, reducing faith to a kind of hope Section 9 above would eradicate an important relation between the two—namely that people of faith take reality to be such that their hope for salvation, the triumph of the good is well founded, and not merely an attractive fantasy or inspiring ideal.

What is the potential scope of faith? On some models, the kind of faith exemplified by theistic faith is found only there. Both the doxastic and sub-doxastic venture models, however, allow for the possibility that authentic faith may be variously realised, and be directed upon different, and mutually incompatible, intentional objects.

This pluralism is an important feature of accounts of faith in the American pragmatist tradition. Both Dewey and James defend models of faith with a view to advancing the idea that authentic religious faith may be found outside what is generally supposed to be theological orthodoxy. While some of what Dewey and James say about justifiable faith may appear non-realist, in fact they both preserve the idea that religious faith aspires to grasp, beyond the evidence, vital truth about reality.

A general—i. The conditions for permissible faith-venture may exclude faith in God under certain inadequate conceptions of who or what God is. An understanding of what faith is, then, may motivate radical explorations into the concept of God as held in the theistic traditions Bishop ; Johnston ; Bishop and Perszyk Can there be faith without adherence to any theistic tradition? Those who agree with F. Faith in this sense, however, may not seem quite on a par with faith of the religious kind. If faith is understood as commitment beyond independent objective certification to the truth of some overall interpretation of experience and reality, then all who commit themselves with sufficient steadfastness to such a Weltanschauung or worldview will be people of faith.

Faith of this kind may be religious, and it may be religious without being theistic, of course, as in classical Buddhism or Taoism. Providing such a basis may plausibly be thought necessary for faith— the truth to which the venturer commits must be existentially important in this way. Their view is thus that faith is essentially religious, and they accordingly enter into argument as to which religion offers the best solution to the human problem see, for example, Yandell , More broadly, some maintain that a meaningful spirituality is consistent with a non-religious atheist naturalism, and include something akin to faith as essential to spirituality.

The entry proceeds dialectically, with later sections presupposing the earlier discussion. Models of faith and their key components 2. The affective component of faith 3. Faith as knowledge 4. Faith and reason: the epistemology of faith 5. Faith as belief 6. Faith as trust 7. Faith as doxastic venture 8. Faith as sub- or non-doxastic venture 9. Faith and hope Faith as a virtue Models of faith and their key components While philosophical reflection on faith of the kind exemplified in religious faith might ideally hope to yield an agreed definition in terms of sufficient and necessary conditions that articulate the nature of faith, the present discussion proceeds by identifying key components that recur in different accounts of religious faith.

The affective component of faith One component of faith is a certain kind of affective psychological state—namely, a state of feeling confident and trusting. Faith as knowledge What kind of cognitive component belongs to faith, then? The unanswered question of entitlement—again Faith as assent to truths on the basis of an authoritative source of divine revelation is possible, though, only for those who already believe that God exists and is revealed through the relevant sources.

Revelation—and its philosophical critique The justifiability of belief that God exists is a typically focal issue in the Philosophy of Religion. Faith as trust Not all models of faith however, identify it as primarily a matter of knowing or believing a proposition or a set of them. Faith as doxastic venture On a model that takes religious faith to consist fundamentally in an act of trust, the analogy with the venture of interpersonal trust is suggestive.

Theological non-realism One way to relieve this pressure is to offer a non-realist analysis of theological claims. Defending doxastic venture by analogy with interpersonal trust? Doxastic venture models of faith and epistemic concern Doxastic venture in relation to faith-propositions can be justifiable, of course, only if there are legitimate exceptions to the evidentialist requirement to take a proposition to be true just to the extent of its evidential support—and only if the legitimate exceptions include the kind of case involved in religious, theistic, faith-commitment.

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Faith permeates our world, providing a moral and ethical compass for the vast majority of people. Evidence shows that —beyond individual religious practice — faith is increasingly moving into the public sphere and may affect various aspects of economic and social life. More and more often, people of faith are becoming key partners in organizations aimed at tackling a varied set of global challenges — a sign of the important role of faith leaders and communities in bringing about social change.

Moreover, it shows how faith or a belief in a higher power is widespread, whereas this belief is not necessarily paired with a commitment to an organized form of religion. The survey was taken by members of the Network of the Global Agenda Councils over a month period, and concerned their views on the role of faith.

Results of this survey of global leaders and executives highlight areas where faith can make a difference by shaping mindsets, influencing stakeholders and mobilizing communities.

At times both helping and hindering human rights, people of faith have long been active players in this field and have shown how faith can be part of the solution as well as part of the problem. In 19 th -century America, for example, religious leaders were prominent in promoting the rights of black people and women. More recently, a number of leading Muslim intellectuals have asserted that the Islamic tradition supports fundamental human rights.

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