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Belief-in and Belief in God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

John N. Williams
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Extract

Of all the examples of ‘belief-in’, belief in God is both the most mysterious and the most challenging. Indeed whether and how an apologist can make a case for the intellectual respectability of theistic belief, depends upon the nature of this ‘belief-in’. I shall attempt to elucidate this matter by an analysis of the relation of ‘belief-in’ to ‘belief-that’ and by treating belief in God as a special case of ‘belief-in’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , September 1992 , pp. 401 - 405
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 Pace Grant, C. K. ‘Belief In and Belief That’, 12th International Congress 1988, p. 194.Google Scholar

2 E.g. Macintosh, J. J., ‘Belief-In’, Mind, N.S. vol. LXXIX. (1970), 400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Originally Price, H. H., Belief (London, 1969), p. 437Google Scholar. Also Hudson, W. D., A Philosophical Approach to Religion (London, 1974), p. 90Google Scholar, J. J. Macintosh, ibid. p. 400.

4 W. D. Hudson, ibid. p. 90, J. J. MacIntosh, ibid. p. 399.

5 With the exception of its utterance in certain well-known circumstances, e.g. a play. But these are not the circumstances that preclude ‘I believe in…’ from being performative.

6 Pace J. J. MacIntosh, Ibid. p. 399.

7 Epistle of James, Chapter 2, Verse 19.

8 Cf. Augustine, Sermon 144, 2, 2.

9 Malcolm, N. ‘Is it a Religious Belief that “God Exists”?’, in Faith and the Philosophers, ed. Hick, J. (London, 1964), p. 108.Google Scholar

10 Ibid. p. 107.

11 Ibid. p. 107.

12 Braithwaite, R. B., An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief (Cambridge, 1955).Google Scholar