Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T16:27:53.222Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Authentic faith and acknowledged risk: dissolving the problem of faith and reason

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2012

DANIEL J. MCKAUGHAN
DANIEL J. MCKAUGHAN*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Ave., Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

One challenge to the rationality of religious commitment has it that faith is unreasonable because it involves believing on insufficient evidence. However, this challenge and influential attempts to reply depend on assumptions about what it is to have faith that are open to question. I distinguish between three conceptions of faith (faith as belief-plus, trusting acceptance, and hopeful affirmation) each of which can claim some plausible grounding in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Questions about the rationality or justification of religious commitment and the extent of compatibility with doubt look different on accounts of faith in which trust or hope, rather than belief, are the primary basis for the commitments. On such accounts, while the person of faith has a stake in the truth of the content (e.g. that God exists), practical as well as epistemic considerations can legitimately figure in normative appraisals. Trust and hope can be appropriate in situations of recognized risk, need not involve self-deception, and are compatible with the idea that one's purely epistemic opinions should be responsive only to evidence.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 101 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allen, Diogenes (1968) The Reasonableness of Faith (Washington DC: Corpus Books).Google Scholar
Alston, William (1996) ‘Belief, acceptance, and religious faith’, in Jordan, Jeff & Howard-Snyder, Daniel (eds) Faith, Freedom, and Rationality (Lanham: Lowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.), 3–27, 241–244.Google Scholar
Alston, William (2007) ‘Audi on nondoxastic faith’, in Timmons, et al. (2007), 123–141.Google Scholar
Audi, Robert (1991) ‘Faith, belief, and rationality’, Philosophical Perspectives, 5, 213–239.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Audi, Robert (1992) ‘Rationality and religious commitment’, in Hester, Marcus (ed.) Faith, Reason, and Skepticism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 50–97 and 160–166.Google Scholar
Audi, Robert (1993) ‘The dimensions of faith and the demands of reason’, in Stump, Eleonore (ed.) Reasoned Faith (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Audi, Robert (2007) ‘Justifying grounds, justified beliefs, and rational acceptance’, in Timmons, et al. (2007), 222–248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Audi, Robert (2008) ‘Belief, faith, and acceptance’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 63, 87–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Audi, Robert (2011) Rationality and Religious Commitment (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bishop, John (2002) ‘Faith as doxastic venture’, Religious Studies, 38, 471–487.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bishop, John (2007) Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Braithwaite, R. B. (1955) An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Reprinted in Mitchell (1971), 72–91.Google Scholar
Buchak, Lara (2012) ‘Can it be rational to have faith?’, in Chandler, Jake & Harrison, Victoria S. (eds) Probability in the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press), ch. 12.Google Scholar
Bultmann, Rudolf & Weiser, Artur (1961) ‘Faith’, in Bible Key Words from Gerhard Kittel's ‘Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament’ (London: A. & C. Black).Google Scholar
Cohen, L. Jonathan (1989) ‘Belief and acceptance’, Mind, 98, 367–389.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, L. Jonathan (1992) An Essay on Belief and Acceptance (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Dru, Alexander (1938) The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Frankish, Keith (2004) Mind and Supermind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hick, John (1966) Faith and Knowledge, 2nd edn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Jordan, Jeff (2006) Pascal's Wager: Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaplan, Mark (1996) Decision Theory as Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kenny, Anthony (1992) What is Faith? Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Kenny, Anthony (2007) ‘Knowledge, belief, and faith’, Philosophy, 82, 381–397.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kolodiejchuk, Brian (ed.) (2007) Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the ‘Saint of Calcutta’ (New York: Doubleday).Google Scholar
Locke, John (1695) The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures, edited with an introduction and notes by Higgins-Biddle, John C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
McKaughan, Daniel J. (2007) Toward a Richer Vocabulary for Epistemic Attitudes: Mapping the Cognitive Landscape. Ph.D. Dissertation (History and Philosophy of Science Program, University of Notre Dame).Google Scholar
Mitchell, Basil (ed.) (1971) The Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Muyskens, James L. (1979) The Sufficiency of Hope: The Conceptual Foundations of Religion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press).Google Scholar
Penelhum, Terence (1983) God and Skepticism: A Study in Skepticism and Fideism (Dordrecht: Reidel).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plantinga, Alvin (1979) ‘Is belief in God rational?’, in Delaney, Cornelius (ed.) Rationality and Religious Belief (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), 7–27.Google Scholar
Plantinga, Alvin (1981) ‘Is belief in God properly basic?’, Nous, 15, 41–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plantinga, Alvin (1983) ‘Reason and belief in God’, in Plantinga, Alvin & Wolterstorff, Nicholas (eds) Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), 16–93.Google Scholar
Plantinga, Alvin (2000) Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pojman, Louis P. (1986a) ‘Faith without belief’, Faith and Philosophy, 3, 157–176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pojman, Louis P. (1986b) Religious Belief and the Will (New York & London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).Google Scholar
Pojman, Louis P. (1991) ‘Faith, doubt and hope or does faith entail belief?’, in Loades, Ann & Rue, Loyal D. (eds) Contemporary Classics in Philosophy of Religion (La Salle: Open Court), 183–207.Google Scholar
Poston, Ted (2009) ‘Review: Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology of Ethics and Religious Belief, by John Bishop’, Mind, 118, 151–155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Price, Henry H. (1965) ‘Belief “in” and belief “that”’, Religious Studies, 1, 1–27. Reprinted in Mitchell (1971), 142–167.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rupp, E. Gordon & Watson, Philip S. (eds) (1969) Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press).Google Scholar
Schellenberg, J. L. (2005) Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Schellenberg, J. L. (2007) The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Schellenberg, J. L. (2009) The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Sessions, William Lad (1994) The Concept of Faith: A Philosophical Investigation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1998a) Believing: An Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oneworld Publications).Google Scholar
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1998b) Faith and Belief: The Difference between Them (Oxford: Oneworld Publications).Google Scholar
Swinburne, Richard (1969) ‘The Christian wager’, Religious Studies, 4, 217–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swinburne, Richard (2005) Faith and Reason, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Timmons, Mark, Greco, John, & Mele, Alfred R. (eds) (2007) Rationality and the Good: Critical Essays on the Ethics and Epistemology of Robert Audi (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar