## 1. Models of faith and their key components



While philosophical reflection on faith of the kind exemplified in
religious contexts might ideally hope to yield an agreed definition in
terms of necessary and sufficient conditions that articulate the
nature of faith, the present discussion proceeds by identifying key
components that recur in different accounts of religious faith. It
also aims to identify a focal range of issues on which different
stances are taken by different accounts. There is a plurality of
existing philosophical understandings or models of faith of the
religious kind. This discussion therefore aims to set out
dialectically an organisation of this plurality, while also giving
indications of the reasons there may be for preferring particular
models over others. Since 'religion' itself may well be a
'family resemblance' universal, essentialism about faith
of the religious kind might be misplaced. Nevertheless, the concept of
faith as found in the Abrahamic, theist, religious traditions is
widely regarded as unified enough for an inquiry into its nature to
make sense, even if a successful real definition is too much to expect
(this kind of faith might conceivably be a conceptual primitive, for
example).



Note that some philosophers approach the target of religious faith by
first classifying and analysing ordinary language uses of the term
'faith' and locutions in which that term occurs. See, for
recent examples, Audi 2011 (Chapter 3, Section I), who identifies
seven different kinds of faith, and Howard-Snyder (2013b), who
attempts a general analysis of 'propositional'
faith--i.e., faith that p is true, where p is a relevant
proposition. The present discussion, however, deals directly with the
target notion of *the kind of faith exemplified in religious
faith*, assuming the background of a working grasp of the notion
as deployed in religious forms of life, and specifically in those
belonging to the theist traditions. Insights from the analysis of
faith understood more broadly may, nevertheless, be important in
constructing models of faith of the religious kind, as will emerge
below in the discussion of religious faith as a kind of trust (Section
6).



The notion of religious faith as the possession of a whole people is
familiar, and arguably theologically primary in the theist traditions.
Philosophical accounts of theistic faith typically focus, however, on
what it is for an individual person to 'have faith' or be
'a person of faith'. An initial broad distinction is
between thinking of faith just as a person's *state* when
that person 'has faith', and thinking of it as also
involving a person's *act, action* or *activity*.
Faith may be a state one is in, or comes to be in; it may also
essentially involve something one does. An adequate account of faith,
perhaps, needs to encompass both. In the Christian context, faith is
understood both as a gift of God and also as requiring a human
response of assent and trust, so that their faith is something with
respect to which people are both receptive and active.



There is, however, some tension in understanding faith both as a gift
to be received and as essentially involving a venture to be willed and
enacted. A philosophical account of faith may be expected to
illuminate this apparent paradox. One principle for classifying models
of faith is according to the extent to which they recognise an active
component in faith itself, and the way they identify that active
component and its relation to faith's other components. It is
helpful to consider the components of faith (variously recognised and
emphasised in different models of faith) as falling into three broad
categories: the *affective*, the *cognitive* and the
*practical*. There are also *evaluative* components in
faith--these may appear as implicated in the affective and/or the
cognitive components, according to one's preferred meta-theory
of value.


## 2. The affective component of faith



One component of faith is a certain kind of affective psychological
state--namely, having a feeling of assurance or trust. Some
philosophers hold that faith is to be identified simply with such a
state: see, for example, Clegg (1979, 229) who suggests that this may
have been Wittgenstein's understanding. Faith in this
sense--as one's overall 'default' affective
attitude on life--provides a valuable foundation for flourishing:
its loss is recognised as the psychic calamity of 'losing
one's faith'. But if foundational existential assurance is
to feature in a model of faith of the kind exemplified by theists,
more needs to be added about the kind of assurance involved. The
assurance of theistic faith is essentially a kind of confidence: it is
essentially faith *in God.* In general, faith of the kind
exemplified by theistic faith must have some *intentional
object*. It may thus be argued that an adequate model of this kind
of faith cannot reduce to something *purely* affective: some
broadly *cognitive* component is also required. (For an account
that takes faith to be fundamentally affective, while allowing that it
might also involve cognitive aspects, see Kvanvig 2013.)


## 3. Faith as knowledge



What kind of cognitive component belongs to faith, then? One
possibility is that it is a kind of *knowledge*, but there is
then a question about the kind of knowledge that it is: e.g., is it
knowledge 'by acquaintance', or
'propositional' knowledge 'by description', or
both? One type of model of faith as knowledge identifies faith as
propositional knowledge of specific truths, revealed by God. A model
of this type has received prominent recent defence in the work of
Alvin Plantinga, who proposes an account which he regards as following
in the tradition of the reformers, principally John Calvin (see
Plantinga 2000, 168-86). Calvin defines faith thus: 'a
firm and certain knowledge of God's benevolence towards us,
founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both
revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy
Spirit' (John Calvin, *Institutes* III, ii, 7, 551,
quoted by Plantinga (2000, 244)).



*Appeal to a special cognitive faculty*



'Reformed' epistemologists have appealed to an externalist
epistemology in order to maintain that theistic belief may be
justified even though its truth is no more than *basically*
evident to the believer--that is, its truth is not rationally
inferable from other, more basic, beliefs, but is found to be
immediately evident in the believer's experience (see Plantinga
and Wolterstorff 1983, Alston 1991, Plantinga 2000). On
Plantinga's version, (basic) theistic beliefs count as knowledge
because they are produced by the operation of a special cognitive
faculty whose functional design fits it for the purpose of generating
true beliefs about God. Plantinga calls this the *sensus
divinitatis*, using a term of Calvin's. (For discussion of
the extent to which Plantinga's use of this term conforms to
Calvin's own usage see Jeffreys 1997 and Helm 1998.) This
quasi-perceptual faculty meets functional criteria as a mechanism
that, when functioning in the right conditions, confers
'warrant' (where warrant is whatever must be added to true
belief to yield knowledge) and, granted theism's truth, it
probably yields 'basic' knowledge because God designs it
just for that purpose. In defence of specifically Christian belief,
Plantinga argues that the same warrant-conferring status belongs to
the operation of the Holy Spirit in making the great truths of the
Gospel directly known to the believer.



*The welcome certainty of faith*



This appeal to a God-given 'higher' cognitive faculty is
found (in the early 12th Century) in al-Ghazali's
*Deliverance from Error*, where it provides the key to the
'Sufi' resolution of his religious crisis and his
sceptical doubts about the deliverances of sense perception and
unassisted human reason. Faith is thus understood as a kind of basic
knowledge attended by a certainty that excludes doubt. But faith will
not be exclusively cognitive, if, as in Calvin's definition,
faith-knowledge is not only 'revealed to our minds' but
also 'sealed upon our hearts'. For, on this model, faith
will also have an affective/evaluative component that includes a
welcoming of the knowledge received.



*Practical aspects of faith on this model*



This model of faith as a kind of knowledge, certain and welcome,
exhibits faith as essentially something to be received, something
delivered by the proper functioning of a special cognitive faculty.
Nevertheless, the model may admit a practical component, since an
active response is required for reception of the divine gift. Such a
practical component is implied by the real possibility that faith may
be resisted: indeed, Christians may hold that in our sinful state we
will inevitably offer a resistance to faith that may be overcome only
by God's grace. It is, however, a further step for persons of
faith to put their revealed knowledge into practice by trusting their
lives to God and seeking to obey his will. On this 'special
knowledge' model of faith, however, this activity counts as
'acting out' one's faith rather than as a part of
faith itself. Persons of faith thus act 'in',
'through' or 'by' faith: but, on this model,
their faith itself is the welcomed revealed knowledge on which they
act.


## 4. Faith and reason: the epistemology of faith



Models of faith as knowledge may be thought lacking because they admit
no actional component in faith itself. Faith seems essentially to
involve some kind of *active venture* in commitment and trust,
even if talk of a 'leap of faith' may not be wholly apt.
Many have held that faith ventures beyond what is *ordinarily*
known or justifiably held true, in the sense that faith involves
accepting what cannot be established as true through the proper
exercise of our naturally endowed human cognitive faculties. As Kant
famously reports, in the Preface to the Second Edition of his
*Critique of Pure Reason*: 'I have ... found it
necessary to deny *knowledge*, in order to make room for
*faith*' (Kant 1787 [1933, 29]). Theist philosophers do,
however, typically defend the claim that faith is not 'contrary
to reason'. On models of faith that take a cognitive component
as central, and construe faith's object as propositional,
reasonable faith therefore seems subject to a general
*evidentialist* principle--'a wise man ...
proportions his belief to the evidence', as Hume puts it (Hume
1748 [2007], "Of Miracles", 80). And W. K. Clifford
elevates evidentialism to the status of an absolute moral requirement,
affirming that 'it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone
to believe anything upon insufficient evidence' (Clifford 1877
[1999, 77]. Faith's venturesomeness may thus seem in tension
with its reasonableness, and models of faith differ in the way they
negotiate this tension in response to evidentialist challenges.
Another way to classify models of faith, then, is in terms of their
associated epistemology--and, in particular, whether and
according to what norms of 'evidential support', they
accept that faith's cognitive component needs to meet a
requirement to be grounded on available evidence.



The Reformed epistemologist model of faith as 'basic'
knowledge (outlined in Section 3) generates an epistemology under
which, although ordinary cognitive faculties and sources of evidence
do not yield firm and certain inferred knowledge of theistic truths,
there is (if Christian theism is true) a 'higher'
cognitive faculty that neatly makes up the deficit. This model seems
thus to secure the rationality of faith: if faith consists in beliefs
that have the status of knowledge, faith can hardly fail to be
rational. And, once the deliverances of the special cognitive faculty
are included amongst the believer's basic experiential evidence,
an evidential requirement on reasonable belief seems to be met. (Note
that Plantinga originally expressed his defence of 'properly
basic' theistic belief in terms of the rationality of believing
in God 'without any evidence or argument at all'
(Plantinga 1983, 17). He does respect an evidential requirement,
however, holding that it may be fully met through what is basically,
non-inferentially, evident in the believer's experience. Hence
Plantinga's insistence that his Reformed epistemology is not
fideistic (Plantinga 2000, 263).)



*Reflective faith and the question of entitlement*



It is not clear, however, whether Reformed epistemology's model
of faith can achieve all that is needed to show that theist faith is
reasonable. From the perspective of reflective persons of faith (or
would-be faith), the question of *entitlement* arises: are they
rationally, epistemically--even, morally--entitled to adopt
or continue in their faith? This question will be existentially
important, since faith will not be of the kind exemplified by
religious faith unless its commitments make a significant difference
to how one lives one's life. Reflective believers, who are aware
of the many options for faith and the possibility of misguided and
even harmful faith-commitments, will wish to be satisfied that they
are *justified* in their faith. The theist traditions hold a
deep fear of idolatry--of giving one's 'ultimate
concern' (Tillich 1957 [2001]) to an object unworthy of it. The
desire to be assured of entitlement to faith is thus not merely
externally imposed by commitment to philosophical critical values: it
is a demand internal to the integrity of theistic faith itself.
Arguably, believers must even take seriously the possibility that the
God they have been worshipping is not, after all, the true God
(Johnston 2009). But, for this concern to be met, there will need to
be conditions sufficient for justified faith that are
'internalist'--that is, conditions whose obtaining
is, at least indirectly if not directly, accessible to believers
themselves. And, as already noted, those conditions are widely assumed
to include an evidentialist requirement that faith is justified only
if the truth of its cognitive content is adequately supported by the
available evidence.



*The Reformed epistemologist model as leaving the question of
entitlement unanswered*



It may be argued, however, that, if the Reformed
epistemologist's model is correct, those who seek to meet an
evidentialist requirement will be unable to satisfy themselves of
their entitlement to their faith. Theistic truths may be directly
revealed, and experienced as immediately evident, yet, on reflection,
one may doubt whether such experiences are genuinely revelatory since
competing 'naturalist' interpretations of those
experiences seem available. Furthermore, there are rival sources
yielding contrary claims that equally claim to be authentically
revelatory. It may be true, as Plantinga's Reformed epistemology
maintains, that *if* God exists then certain basic theist
beliefs meet externalist criteria for knowledge, even though the truth
of the propositions concerned remains open to reflective
'internalist' doubt. On an externalist account, that is,
one might lack independent evidence sufficient to confirm that one has
knowledge that God exists *while in fact possessing that very
knowledge*. One may thus refute an objector who claims that
without adequate evidence one cannot possess knowledge. But this
consideration is still insufficient to secure entitlement to theistic
faith--if, as may be argued, that entitlement requires that
*one has evidence* adequate to justify commitment to the truth
that God exists. For, one has such evidence *only conditionally on
God's existence*--but it is precisely entitlement to
believe that God exists that is at issue (Kenny 1992, 71; Bishop and
Aijaz 2004). For a wider discussion of the possibility of religious
knowledge that, *inter alia*, endorses the present point, see
Zagzebski 2010.


## 5. Faith as belief



If faith is not 'firm and certain' basic knowledge of
theistic truths, then a model of faith as having a propositional
object may still be retained by identifying faith with *belief*
of relevant content--and the question whether a faith-belief may
have sufficient justification to count (if true) as (non-basic)
knowledge may remain open. To have theist faith might thus be
identified with holding a belief with theological content--that
God exists, is benevolent towards us, has a plan of salvation,
etc.--where this belief is also held with sufficient firmness and
conviction. Richard Swinburne labels this the 'Thomist
view' of faith, and expresses it thus: 'The person of
religious faith is the person who has the theoretical conviction that
there is a God' (Swinburne 2005, 138). (Aquinas's own
understanding of faith is more complex than this formulation suggests,
however, as will be noted shortly.)



The rationality of faith on this model will rest on the rationality of
the firmly held theological beliefs in which it consists. As Swinburne
notes, if such beliefs are founded on evidence that renders their
truth sufficiently more probable than not, then the beliefs concerned
may amount to knowledge on a contemporary 'justified true
belief' fallibilist epistemology, even though they fall short of
knowledge on Aquinas's own criteria, which require that what is
known be 'seen' (i.e., fully and directly comprehended)
(*Summa Theologiae* 2a2ae 1, 4 & 5 (Aquinas 1265-1273
[2006], 27)). In any case, the reasonableness of faith on this model
of faith as (non-basic) theological belief depends on the beliefs
concerned being adequately evidentially justified. The claim that this
condition is satisfied is defended by John Locke in *The
Reasonableness of Christianity* (1695 [1999]), and, in
contemporary philosophy, by Richard Swinburne's Bayesian
approach to the epistemology of Christian belief (see, for example,
Swinburne 2003).



Some argue, however, that the truth of theism is 'evidentially
ambiguous'--that is, that our total available evidence is
equally viably interpreted from both a theist and a naturalist/atheist
perspective (Hick 1966 and 1989; Davis 1978; Penelhum 1995; McKim
2001). This thesis of evidential ambiguity may be supported as the
best explanation of the diversity of belief on religious matters,
and/or of the persistence of the debate about theism, with
philosophers of equal acumen and integrity engaged on either side. Or
the ambiguity may be considered systematic--for example, on the
grounds that both natural theological and natural atheological
arguments fail because they are deeply circular, resting on implicit
assumptions acceptable only to those already thinking within the
relevant perspective. (In relation to Swinburne's Bayesian
natural theology, in particular, this objection surfaces in criticism
of assumptions about how to set the prior probabilities implicated in
calculations of, for example, theism's probability on the
evidence of the 'fine-tuning' of the Universe's
basic physical constants, or of the probability, on all our evidence,
of the truth of the Resurrection.) If the ambiguity thesis is correct,
then--assuming evidentialism--firmly held theistic belief
will fail to be reasonable.



On this model of faith as non-basic belief, all that characterizes
faith apart from its theological content is the firmness or conviction
with which faith-propositions are held true. Firm belief in the truth
of a scientific theoretical proposition, for example, fails to count
as faith *only* through lacking the right kind of content. This
model therefore shares with the Reformed epistemologist model in
taking its theological content as essential to what makes theistic
faith *faith*, and so rejects the suggestion that faith of the
same sort as found in the theist religious traditions might also be
found elsewhere.



Furthermore, in taking faith to consist in non-basic belief that
theological propositions are true, this model invites the assumption
that theological convictions belong in the same category of factual
claims as scientific theoretical hypotheses with which they
accordingly compete. That assumption will lead those who think that
theological claims are *not* reasonably accepted on the
evidence to regard faith as worthless and intellectually
dishonourable--at best, 'a degenerating research
programme' (Lakatos 1970). (On this negative assessment of
faith's evidential support, persons of faith come perilously
close to the schoolboy's definition mentioned by William James:
'Faith is when you believe something that you know ain't
true' (James 1896 [1956, 29]). Or, if persons who have theistic
faith readily abandon theological explanations whenever competing
scientific ones succeed, their God gets reduced to 'the God of
the gaps'.) These misgivings about the model of faith as firmly
held factual theological belief dissolve, of course, if success
attends the project of showing that particular theological claims
count as factual hypotheses well supported by the total available
evidence. Those who doubt that this condition is or can be met may,
however, look towards a model of faith that understands faith's
cognitive content as playing some other role than that of an
explanatory hypothesis of the same kind as a scientific explanatory
hypothesis.



*Aquinas's account of faith*



Though firmly held theological belief is central to it,
Aquinas's understanding of faith is more complicated and nuanced
than the view that faith is 'the theoretical conviction that God
exists'. Aquinas holds that faith is 'midway between
knowledge and opinion' (*Summa Theologiae* 2a2ae 1, 2
(Aquinas [2006], 11)). Faith resembles knowledge, Aquinas thinks, in
so far as faith carries conviction. But that conviction is not well
described as 'theoretical', if that description suggests
that faith has a *solely* propositional object. For Aquinas,
faith denotes the believer's fundamental orientation towards the
divine. So 'from the perspective of the reality believed
in', Aquinas says, 'the object of faith *is something
non-composite*' (hence, definitely not
propositional)--namely God himself. Nevertheless, grasping the
truth of propositions *is* essential to faith, because
'*from the perspective of the one believing* ... the
object of faith is something composite in the form of a
proposition' (*Summa Theologiae*, 2a2ae, 1, 2 (Aquinas
[2006], 11 & 13), our emphases).



A further problem with describing as Thomist a model of faith simply
as firm belief that certain theological propositions are true is that
Aquinas takes as central an *act* of 'inner assent'
(*Summa Theologiae*, 2a2ae, 2, 1 (Aquinas [2006],
59-65)). This is problematic because, (i) in its dominant
contemporary technical usage belief is taken to be a mental
(intentional) *state*--a propositional attitude, namely,
the attitude towards the relevant proposition that it is true; (ii)
belief in this contemporary sense is widely agreed not to be under
volitional control--not directly, anyway; yet (iii) Aquinas holds
that the assent given in faith is under the control of the will.
Aquinas need not, however, be construed as accepting 'believing
at will', since assent may be construed as an act that has to be
elicited yet terminates a process that is subject to the will--a
process of inquiry, deliberation or pondering that involves mental
actions, or, in the case of theist faith, a process of divine grace
that can proceed only if it is not blocked by the will.



Most importantly, however, Aquinas says that assent is given to the
propositional articles of faith *because their truth is revealed by
God*, and on the authority of the putative source of this
revelation. Terence Penelhum puts it like this: 'Thomas tells us
that although what one assents to in faith includes many items not
ostensibly about God himself, one assents to them, in faith, because
they are revealed by God ... It is because they come from him and
because they lead to him that the will disposes the intellect to
accept them' (Penelhum 1989, 122: see *Summa Theologiae*,
2a2ae, 1, 1 & 2 (Aquinas [2006], 5-15)). So, Aquinas's
model of faith is of believing (assenting to) propositional
truth-claims *on the basis of testimony carrying divine
authority*. John Locke follows the same model: 'Faith
... is the assent to any proposition ... upon the credit of
the proposer, as coming from God, in some extraordinary way of
communication' (Locke 1698 [1924, 355]; compare also Alston
1996, 15).



*The unanswered question of entitlement--again*



Theist 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. Might such faith, then, have to rest on a
*prior* faith--faith that God exists and that
*this* is God's messenger or vehicle of communication?
Those foundational claims, it might be maintained, are held true on
the grounds of adequately supporting evidence, such as putatively
provided by arguments of natural theology and the claimed evidence for
miraculous endorsement of a prophet's authority. Theist faith
might then have a purely rational foundation. But this could hardly be
so for *every* person of faith, since not everyone who believes
will have access to the relevant evidence or be able to assess it
properly. Besides, and more importantly, although Aquinas allows that
rational assessment of the available evidence may lead a person to
faith, he does not think that such an assessment could ever elicit
assent itself--only demonstration could achieve that and so high
a level of proof is not here available (see Aquinas [2006], footnote
2b, 58-9). Aquinas's view is thus that *all*
believers stand in need of God's grace: 'the assent of
faith, which is its principal act ... has as its cause God,
moving us inwardly through grace' (*Summa Theologiae*,
2a2ae 6, 1 (Aquinas [2006], 167)). It follows, then, that, on
Aquinas's view, believing that God exists and is revealed in
specific ways is *itself* a matter of faith, and not a purely
rationally evidentially secured prolegomenon to it.



Aquinas's model of faith thus shares with the Reformed
epistemologist model the problem that it leaves unanswered the
reflective believer's concern about entitlement. Attempting to
settle that concern by meeting the evidential requirement leads to
circularity: theological truths are to be accepted on divine
authority, yet the truth that *there is* *such an
authority* (historically mediated as the relevant tradition
maintains) is amongst those very truths that are to be accepted on
divine authority--indeed, it is the crucial one. As Descartes
puts it in the Dedication to his *Meditations*, 'It is of
course quite true that we must believe in the existence of God because
it is a doctrine of Holy Scripture, and conversely, that we must
believe Holy Scripture because it comes from God. ... But this
argument cannot be put to unbelievers because they would judge it to
be circular' (Descartes 1641 [Cottingham et al. 1984, 3]). Thus,
although they differ on the question whether the firm beliefs of faith
count as knowledge, both Aquinas and Calvin understand faith as
essentially involving accepting the truth of propositions as revealed
through willingly receiving God's gracious gift of that very
revelation. The question remains how accepting this gift could be
epistemically rational. The externalist account of how Christian
beliefs may have epistemic worth proposed in Plantinga's model
of faith (named 'the A/C' model because its sources are
supposedly found in Aquinas as well as Calvin) offers some help with
the required explanation, but (as noted in the final paragraph of
Section 4 above) may arguably not by itself be sufficient.



*Revelation--and its philosophical critique*



The reasonableness of belief that God exists is a focal issue in the
Philosophy of Religion. Theist traditions typically, or some would say
essentially, make a foundational claim about an authoritative source,
or sources, of revealed truth. What is salient includes belief or some
related sort of affirmation, not just that God exists but associated
content such as that *this* God exists, the God who is revealed
thus and so (in great historical acts, in prophets, in scriptures, in
wisdom handed down, etc.). The reasonableness of theism is therefore
as much a matter of the reasonableness of an epistemology of
revelation as it is of a metaphysics of perfect being. The question of
how God may be expected to make himself known has gained prominence
through recent discussion of the argument for atheism from
'divine hiddenness' (Schellenberg 1993; Howard-Snyder and
Moser 2002). That argument holds that a loving God would make his
existence clear to the non-resistant--but this claim is open to
question. Perhaps God provides only 'secret' evidence of
his existence, purposely overturning the expectations of our
'cognitive idolatry' in order to transform our egocentric
self-reliance (Moser 2008); besides, there may be significant
constraints logically inherent in the very possibility of unambiguous
divine revelation to finite minds (King 2008).



Similarly, accounts of theistic faith will be open to critique when
they make assumptions about the mechanisms of revelation. In
particular, the model of faith as assent to propositions as revealed
holds that, since God's grace is required for that assent, when
grace is effective the whole 'package deal' of
propositional revealed truth is accepted. This yields the notion of
'*the* Faith', as the body of theological truths to
be accepted by 'the faithful', and it becomes a sign of
resistance to divine grace to 'pick and choose' only some
truths, as *heretics* do (Greek: *hairesis*, choice; see
*Summa Theologiae* 2a2ae 5, 3 (Aquinas [2006], 157-61)).
For heresy to be judged, however, some human authority must assume it
possesses the full doctrinal revelation, with God's grace
operating without resistance in its own case. Whether that assumption
can ever be sufficiently well founded to justify condemning and
purging others is an important question, whose neglect may be
seriously harmful, as we are reminded by the fact that the phrase for
'act of faith' in
Portuguese--*auto-da-fe*--came to mean the
public burning of a heretic.



But the deeper assumption made by this model of faith as non-basic
(justified) belief (as, too, by the model of it as basic knowledge
yielded by the proper functioning of a special cognitive faculty) is
that God's self-revelation is primarily the revelation of the
truth of propositions articulated in human language (compare Swinburne
1992). Alternative understandings of revelation are available,
however. In particular, it may be held that it is primarily *the
divine itself* that is revealed--the reality, not merely a
representation of it. (See Lebens 2023 for discussion of faith as
knowledge by acquaintance with God from a Jewish perspective).
Propositional articulations of what is revealed may still be
essential, but they need to be accepted as at a remove from the object
of revelation itself, and therefore as limited. The development of
propositional articulations expressing the nature and will of the
self-revealing God--the doctrines of 'the
Faith'--will, of course, be understood as a process under
providential grace. It is often assumed that that process can achieve
'closure' in a completed set of infallibly known creedal
propositions. But this assumption about how divine inspiration
operates may be contested, both on the theological grounds that it
reflects the all-too-human desire to gain control over God's
self-revelation (to 'pin God down once and for all'), and
on the wider epistemological grounds that any attempt to grasp
independent reality in human language will be in principle limited and
fallible, subject to revision in the light of future experience.


## 6. Faith as an act of trust



Not all models of faith, however, identify it as primarily a matter of
knowing or believing a proposition or a set of them, even with the
addition of some affective or evaluative component. What is most
central to theistic faith may seem better expressed as believing
*in* God, rather than as believing *that* God exists.
The Christian Nicene creed begins 'Credo *in* unum Deum
...' and it is arguable that in this context 'belief
in' is neither merely an idiomatic variant on, nor reducible to,
'belief that' (Price 1965). It may thus be held that
theists' acceptance of propositional truths as divinely revealed
rests on believing *in* God--and it is this
'believing in', or 'having faith in', which
is, fundamentally, the nature of faith. Noting that, while faith is
held to be a virtue, believing as such is not, Wilfred Cantwell Smith
argues that 'faith is not belief', 'but something of
a quite different order' (Smith 1979, 128), requiring
'assent' 'in the dynamic and personal sense of
rallying to [what one takes to be the truth] with delight and
engagement' (142). Arguably, to put or to maintain faith
*in* God involves a readiness to act, perhaps by relying on God
in relevant ways and/or grounded in a practical commitment. Our
considerations now shift, then, from propositional-attitude-focussed
models of faith to those focussed on action, or what J. L.
Schellenberg calls 'operational' models (2005, 126).



Judeo-Christian scripture envisions humans as actively engaged in a
covenantal relationship with God. Their ongoing participation in, and
commitment to, such a relationship paradigmatically involves both
faith in God and faithfulness to God (McKaughan and Howard-Snyder
2022a and 2023a; Pace and McKaughan 2020). The kind of faith of which
Christian faith is a paradigm case, then, may be understood as
'action-centred commitment' (McKaughan 2016, 78), e.g., to
the Christian 'way'. Arguably, faith understood as a
combination of affective and cognitive elements would miss its
essential active component. We now turn, then, to consider a
*fiducial* model--a model of faith as trust, understood
not simply as an affective state but as an *action*.



On a fiducial model, having faith in God is making a *practical
commitment*--the kind involved in *trusting God*, or,
*trusting in* God. (The root meaning of the Greek
*pistis*, 'faith', is 'trust' (see
Morgan 2015).) On such a model, faith's active, practical
component takes central place, though a cognitive component may be
presupposed by it. Swinburne calls it the 'Lutheran'
model, and defines it thus: 'the person of faith does not merely
believe that there is a God (and believe certain propositions about
him)--he trusts Him and commits himself to Him' (2005,
142). Yet, as noted earlier, Aquinas too takes the ultimate object of
faith to be God, 'the first reality', and, furthermore,
understands 'formed' faith as trusting commitment to God,
motivated by, and directed towards, love of God as one's true
end (see *Summa Theologiae* 2a2ae, 4, 3; Aquinas [2006],
123-7). It is true that Aquinas allows that the devils have
faith in a certain sense, but this 'faith' amounts only to
their belief that what the Church teaches is the truth, arrived at not
by grace but 'forced from them' reluctantly by 'the
acumen of their natural intelligence' (*Summa Theologiae*
2a2ae, 5, 2; Aquinas [2006], 155 & 157). Aquinas's account
of 'saving' faith is thus also a fiducial model.



*The venture of trust*



As noted at the outset, there is a usage of 'faith' for
which 'having/placing faith in' is (near enough)
synonymous with 'trusting' or 'trusting in'.
(For discussion of how faith relates to a range of contemporary
theories of trust, see McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2022b.) If,
moreover, faith of the religious kind is itself a type of trust, then
we may expect our understanding of religious faith to profit from an
analysis of trust in general. It is therefore worth considering what
follows about the nature of faith of the sort exemplified in theistic
faith from holding it to be a kind of active trust.



Conceptually fundamental to trust is the notion of a person (or
persons)--the truster--trusting *in* some agent or
agency--the trustee--*for* some (assumedly)
favourable outcome (though what the trustee is trusted for is often
only implicit in the context). Trust involves a *venture*; so
too--it is widely agreed--does faith. So, if faith is trust,
the venture of faith might be presumed to be the type of venture
implicated in trust. A venture is an action that places the agent and
outcomes of concern to the agent significantly beyond the
agent's own control. Trust implies venture. When we trust we
commit ourselves to another's control, accepting--and, when
necessary, co-operating as 'patient'--with the
decisions of the trustee. Venturing in trust is usually assumed to be
*essentially* risky, making oneself vulnerable to adverse
outcomes or betrayal. Swinburne makes the point this way: 'To
trust someone is to act on the assumption that she will do for you
what she knows that you want or need, when the evidence gives some
reason for supposing that she may not and where there will be bad
consequences if the assumption is false' (2005, 143). Annette
Baier makes no requirement for evidence that the trustee may prove
untrustworthy, but nevertheless takes trust to involve 'accepted
vulnerability to another's *possible but not expected*
ill will (or lack of good will) toward one' (Baier 1986, 235,
our emphasis). Accordingly, it seems sensible to hold that one should
trust only with good reason. But if, as is plausible, good reason to
trust requires sufficient evidence of the trustee's
trustworthiness, reasonable trust appears both to have its
venturesomeness diminished and, at the same time, to become more
difficult to achieve than we normally suppose. For we often lack
adequate--or even, any--evidence of a trustee's
trustworthiness in advance of our venture, yet in many such cases we
suppose that our trust is reasonable (see, for example, Adams 1987).
But, if adequate evidence of trustworthiness is *not* required
for reasonable trust, how is reasonable trust different from
'blind' trust?



The answer seems clear: reasonable trust is *practically
rational* trust. The question of when one may rationally trust
another may thus be resolved by a decision-theoretic calculation,
factoring in the extent to which one's evidence supports the
potential trustee's trustworthiness and the utilities of the
possible outcomes, given one's intended aims. The exercise of
practical reasoning does include mental acts which are epistemically
evaluable, however. When one takes it to be true in practical
reasoning that someone will prove trustworthy, that mental act may be
more or less epistemically rational: it would break the evidentialist
norm to employ in a decision-theoretic calculation a credence that
does not match one's available evidence. In many situations, it
will be practically rational, given one's intentions, to trust
another person only if one believes, or, at least, believes with high
probability, that the person will prove trustworthy. In such
situations it is also often the case, as already noted, that we
don't have adequate evidence in advance that *this*
person will be trustworthy in *this* particular respect. Yet,
affording high credence to a person's trustworthiness may still
be epistemically rational given wider available evidence of, for
example, the person's past friendliness and trustworthiness in
other matters, or, if the person is a stranger, of our shared social
experience that trusting others generally elicits a trustworthy
response. Nevertheless, it can still be
rational--*practically* rational, that is--to trust
another when we *don't* have adequate evidence that they
will prove trustworthy. In a life-threatening situation, for example,
it may be rational to trust unlikely rescuers if they are the only
ones available. Or, when we have wider aims, it may be practically
rational to trust those without a record of trustworthiness, as with
'educative' and 'therapeutic' trust where
people are trusted for the sake of their development or rehabilitation
as trustworthy persons. Being in established relationships of
friendship with others, too, can also require commitment to continue
to trust them even in the face of evidence that, otherwise, would make
it reasonable to believe them unworthy of trust.



On models that take faith of the theist kind to consist fundamentally
in an act of trust, the analogy with interpersonal trust is
suggestive. When one person trusts another there seems typically
(though not uniformly) to be a doxastic aspect (the truster's
belief that the trustee is trustworthy). But what's essential is
the fiducial aspect, which consists in an active commitment or
'entrusting' to the other. Paul Helm proposes that theist
faith similarly has importantly distinct doxastic and fiducial
aspects: in addition to belief about God's existence and
trustworthiness for salvation held with a degree of strength
proportional to the believer's evidence, persons of faith must
also entrust themselves to the one on whom they rely (Helm 2000).
While it is widely agreed that theist faith must have a cognitive
aspect, some philosophers hold that this need not be doxastic (as we
shall see in Section 8).


## 7. Faith as doxastic venture



There are significant differences, however, between the trusting
involved in theistic faith and that involved in interpersonal trust.
For one thing, trusting would seem not to risk any possibility of
disappointment if God really is the trustee. Given the existence of
the God of unchanging love, one trusts in ultimately perfect safety.
But the venture of actually entrusting oneself to God seems to begin
with the challenge of being able to believe or accept that, indeed,
there is such a God. While some affirm that this claim is a matter of
basic knowledge, and some that there is sufficient evidence to justify
it, others, as already noted, hold that everyone has to confront the
evidential ambiguity of foundational theistic claims. For those who
reject the model of theist faith as basic knowledge and also think
that the question of God's existence cannot be settled
intellectually on the basis of the available evidence, the venture
involved in trusting in God (if such there be) may seem to include a
*doxastic* venture: those who trust already venture beyond the
available evidence, *in their very believing* *or
accepting* that God exists and may be relied on for salvation.
Trusting *in* God seems to presuppose, in other words, trusting
*that* God exists. But, if so, the question becomes pressing
whether, and under what conditions, one may be entitled to such an
evidence-transcending venture in practical commitment to a particular
view of ultimate reality and its implications for how we should
live.



*Theological non-realism*



One way to relieve this pressure is to offer a *non-realist*
analysis of theological claims. Trusting God will then not entail any
commitment to *reality's* being a certain way. Rather, on
arguably the most sophisticated kind of non-realist view, theological
beliefs arise because living 'trustingly' comes to be
expressed and reinforced through a culturally constructed fiction
about God and his great saving acts. This existential confidence may
then be described, using the language of the fiction, as
'trusting God' (Cupitt 1980, Geering 1994). 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.



*Defending doxastic venture by analogy with interpersonal
trust?*



Assuming, then, that theist faith does include (under realist
assumptions) a venture in practical commitment to truth-claims about
ultimate reality, the justifiability of such a venture might yet be
thought defensible by analogy with interpersonal situations where
practical commitment seems justifiably to be made beyond one's
evidence to the claim that a person will prove trustworthy in some
relevant respect. 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. But
if--as we are here assuming--one ventures beyond evidential
support in taking it to be true in practical reasoning that God exists
and may be trusted for salvation, this may be a venture that is not
confined to initial commitment but rather persists in needing to be
made. This will be the case on accounts of the evidential ambiguity of
theism that take the ambiguity to hold in principle, ruling out any
possibility of evidential disambiguation. Those accounts may grant, of
course, that continuing to journey in theistic faith may
psychologically reinforce one's commitment, providing subjective
confirmation that the theist view of reality is correct. Yet these
reinforcing experiences, which often involve faith renewed in the face
of apparent *failures* of divine love, do not possess the
uncontroversial status of evidence that independently and
inter-subjectively confirms the initial venture.



*Doxastic venture without doxastic voluntarism*



Many dismiss the idea that one may venture in one's very
believing that God exists as committing a category error: ventures are
voluntary, but propositional belief is not directly under voluntary
control. Trusting God, however, entails *practical commitment to
the truth of theological faith-propositions*, and commitment to
the truth of a proposition in one's practical reasoning
*may* be under direct voluntary control.



It is one thing to be in the mental state of holding that the
proposition that *p* is true; it is another to take it to be
true that *p* in one's practical reasoning (although
these typically go together, since to hold that *p* is true is
*to be disposed* to take it to be true that *p* in
practical reasoning whenever the question whether *p* becomes
salient). Practical commitment to a faith-proposition's truth
therefore *could* be a venture: there is no category error in
allowing this possibility. Doxastic venturing--venturing in
believing--is thus not a matter of willing oneself to believe
without adequate evidential support; rather it is a matter of taking
*an already held* belief to be true in one's practical
reasoning even though (as one may oneself recognise) its truth lacks
such support.



*The psychological possibility of doxastic venture*



Some philosophers have argued, however, that one cannot (in full
reflective awareness, anyway) believe that *p* while accepting
that one has insufficient evidence for *p*'s truth (Adler
2002). The counterclaim that this is possible is defended by William
James, in his controversial 1896 lecture, 'The Will to
Believe' (James 1896 [1956]). James agrees that belief cannot be
directly willed and must be otherwise causally evoked (he later came
to wish that he had used 'The Right to Believe' as his
lecture's title). James observes, however, that many beliefs
have causes that do not constitute or imply an evidential grounding of
their truth. James labels such causes
'passional'--again, a potentially misleading term,
since its intended referents include much more than emotional causes
of belief. In particular, beliefs may be caused by 'the
circumpressure of one's caste or set,' of which
one's inherited religious tradition is a paradigm case (James
1896 [1956, 9]). James is thus able to explain the psychological
possibility of doxastic venture: one already has a
'passionally' caused belief, which one then takes to be
true in practical reasoning despite its lack of adequate evidential
grounding (compare Creel 1994, who similarly describes
'faith' as a 'non-evidential doxastic
passion').



Note that a doxastic venture model of theistic faith reconciles faith
as gift with faith's active components: taking a
faith-proposition to be true in practical reasoning is a basic
(mental) action (which leads on to further actions involved in
trusting God and seeking to do God's will); the gift provides
the motivational resources for this basic action, namely a firm belief
in the truth of the faith-proposition, despite its lack of adequate
evidential support. (In the next section, the possibility is
considered that the gift of these motivational resources might be
effective yet not amount to actual belief.) It is also worth noting
that those who find the focus on the individual something of a
deficiency in analytical accounts of faith (Eklund 2015) may perceive
in James' account some acknowledgment of the social aspect of
faith. Arguably, the standard 'passional' or
'non-evidential' cause of religious belief is cultural
immersion within an historical faith-tradition. The motivational
resources for faith-commitment may thus be an essentially social
possession.



*Examples of doxastic venture models*



On the doxastic venture model, faith involves *full* practical
commitment to a faith-proposition's truth, despite the
recognition that this is not 'objectively' justified on
the evidence. Kierkegaard's definition of faith as 'an
objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of the
most passionate inwardness' in *Concluding Unscientific
Postscript* (Kierkegaard 1846 [1968, 180]) is an example of a
doxastic venture model. So too is Paul Tillich's account of
faith as 'the state of being ultimately concerned', since
the claim of the object of one's ultimate concern to
'promise total fulfilment even if all other claims have to be
subjected to it or rejected in its name' cannot in principle be
established on the basis of the evidence (Tillich 1957 [2001, 1 and
21]).



Aquinas's model of faith, though widely thought of as conforming
to an evidential requirement on belief, may arguably be open to
interpretation as a doxastic venture model. 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.e., demonstrative) support to justify
inner assent (in addition to references to the *Summa
Theologiae* given previously, see 2a2ae. 2, 1 (Aquinas [2006],
63); and compare also Penelhum 1989, 120). Now, whether practical
commitment to the truth of a given faith-proposition does or does not
venture beyond adequate evidential support will be relative to
assumptions about (a) where the level of evidential support required
for 'adequacy' should be set, and (b) just how firm and
decisive propositional faith-commitment needs to be. 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. Interpreting Aquinas's model of
faith as conforming to evidentialism may thus be viable. Nevertheless,
Aquinas's own assumptions on these matters may leave him closer
to Kierkegaard and Tillich than is commonly thought (consider
*Summa Theologiae* 2a2ae 4, 1 and, once again, 2a2ae 6, 1
(Aquinas [2006], 117-9 & 167)).



*The special role of faith-propositions*



Bayesians might argue that there is no occasion for faith as doxastic
venture since, once practical commitment to the truth of propositions
is recognised as a matter of degree, whatever the state of the
available evidence relating to a given proposition, there will always
(given initial credences) be a rational credence properly associated
with that evidence, and hence there are no possible circumstances
where 'the evidence does not decide', so that an
evidentialist requirement can indeed apply universally. Note, however,
Lara Buchak's (2012, 2018) discussion of ways in which Bayesians
might understand faith as going beyond the evidence, and her own
proposal that faith-ventures essentially include an
*additional* practical commitment, which may be rational under
certain conditions, not to inquire further into evidence relevant to
the truth of the propositions concerned for the sole purpose of
deciding what to do. (For critical discussion of this kind of
restriction on inquiry in connection with faith commitments, see
Dormandy 2018 and Howard-Snyder and McKaughan 2022a. Katherine
Dormandy has recently proposed a positive defence of evidentialism in
considering the question of what makes it good to form positive
beliefs about those you have faith in, including God (Dormandy
2022).)



If the domain of faith is, as Stephen Evans puts it, 'the
assumptions, convictions and attitudes which the believer *brings
to* the evidence for and against religious truth' (Evans
1985, 178), and faith's cognitive component offers a
'total interpretation' of the world of our experience
(Hick 1966, 154), then (foundational) faith-propositions function as
'highest-order framing principles' which
*necessarily* cannot have their truth settled by appeal to the
force of a body of independent evidence (Bishop 2007a, 139-44).
Taking such a faith-proposition to be true, then, is not something
that comes in degrees: either one 'buys into' the overall
worldview (foundational) faith-propositions propose, or one does not.
Such a choice is existentially important, and settling it raises
anxiety about exercising a responsibility that cannot--without
'bad faith'--be transferred onto the relatively
impersonal function of one's reason, since a venture beyond any
inter-subjectively rational evidential confirmation is required. The
doxastic venture model may thus be regarded as capturing the spiritual
challenge of faith more satisfactorily than do models that conform 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 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.



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. This view is widely described as
'fideist', but ought more fairly to be called
*arational* fideism, or, where commitment contrary to the
evidence is positively favoured, *irrational* or
*counter-rational* fideism. Despite its popular attribution
both to the church father Tertullian and to 'the father of
existentialism', Kierkegaard, counter-rational fideism does not
seem to have been espoused by any significant theist philosophers
(passages in Tertullian and Kierkegaard that appear to endorse this
position may be interpreted as emphasizing that Christian faith
requires accepting, not logical contradiction, but
'contradiction' of our 'natural' expectations,
wholly overturned in the revelation that the power of divine love is
triumphant in the Crucified One).



Serious philosophical defence of a doxastic venture model of faith
thus implies a moderate version of 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. The thought
that one may be entitled to commit to an existentially momentous
truth-claim in principle undecidable on the evidence when forced to
decide either to do so or not is what motivates William James's
'justification of faith' in 'The Will to
Believe' (James 1896 [1956]). 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 moderate fideist
doxastic venture model.



A discussion of the debate between the moderate, Jamesian, fideist and
the evidentialist is beyond this entry's scope. Still, it is
worth remarking that those who think that faith understood as doxastic
venture may be justified as reasonable face the challenge of providing
the tools for weeding out intuitively unreasonable forms of faith. On
the other side, those evidentialists who reject doxastic venture as
always 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
2007a, Chapters 8 and 9; Bishop 2023). For a useful recent collection
of articles on the wider theme of the relation of religious faith to
intellectual virtue, see Callahan and O'Connor 2014.


## 8. Venturing faith, without belief



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. Such accounts may be described
as proposing a 'non-doxastic' venture model of faith. F.
R. 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. Faith is not
an attempt to will something into existence but rather treating hoped
for and unseen things *as if* they were real and then acting
accordingly (Tennant 1943 [1989, 104]). Swinburne refers to this as
the 'pragmatist' model of faith (Swinburne 2005,
147-8; Swinburne 2001, 211; compare also Golding 1990, 2003 and
McKaughan 2016). The origins of Swinburne's pragmatist model are
to be found in a much earlier paper, Swinburne 1969.



William Alston (1996) suggests that faith may involve an active
'acceptance' rather than purely receptive belief. A
clearly non-doxastic venture model results if acceptance is understood
on Jonathan Cohen's account under which to accept that
*p* is 'to have or adopt a policy of deeming, positing,
or postulating that *p*--i.e. of including that
proposition ... among one's premisses for deciding what to
do or think in a particular context, *whether or not one feels it
to be true that p*' (Cohen 1992, 4, our emphasis). The
firmness of faith-commitment is then just the firmness of one's
'*resolve* to use [faith-claims] as a basis for
one's thought, attitude and behaviour' (Alston 1996, 17):
there is no firm assurance *of their truth*. Decisive
commitment in the absence of such assurance may nevertheless be
possible, motivated (as Swinburne suggested in the first edition of
his *Faith and Reason*) by the evaluative belief that
'unless [faith-propositions are true], that which is most
worthwhile is not to be had' (Swinburne, 1981, 117). A faith
venture that lacks belief in the faith-proposition to which commitment
is made need not, and probably could not, lack cognitive components
altogether, as this suggestion of Swinburne's indicates.



Andrei Buckareff (2005) and J. L. Schellenberg (2005, 138-9)
propose non-doxastic (or, 'sub-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. In response to Daniel Howard-Snyder (2013a)
Schellenberg allows that faith may in some instances involve belief
while still maintaining that 'non-doxastic religious faith
... will turn out to be a particularly important way of having
religious faith as we head into the future' (2013, 262). Bishop
(2005), in response to Buckareff, also agrees that authentic faith
need not always be a specifically doxastic venture. There may, then,
be an emerging consensus amongst proponents of venture models that
faith, at its core, consists in suitably motivated persistent
practical commitment 'beyond the evidence' to the
positively evaluated truth of foundational faith-claims which may, but
need not, actually be believed to be true.



Robert Audi (2011) has also defended a non-doxastic account of faith,
contrasting 'fiducial faith' and 'doxastic
faith', and arguing that authentic religious faith need only
amount to the former. Audi's account is not strictly a
'venture' model, however, since he does not take
commitment beyond the support of adequate evidence to be essential.
Audi's account suggests that religious faith is *sui
generis*, but capable of being understood through its relations
with other psychological states and actions, such as beliefs,
evaluations and practical commitments. 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. For another version of a non-doxastic account of
faith, as a person's 'affective orientation or
stance', see Jonathan Kvanvig (2013, 2018). The question whether
faith entails belief (even if it may not consist purely in beliefs)
remains a lively focus of debate. For defence of the view that faith
entails belief, see Malcolm and Scott 2016 and Mugg 2021; for
criticism see Howard-Snyder 2019.


## 9. Faith and 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. Theist hope seems
not to be mere tenacity ('clinging to one's hopes')
(Taylor 1961), but a more complex attitude. James Muyskens suggests,
for example, that one who hopes 'keep[s] his life open or fluid
with respect to [a faith-proposition] *p*--where (a)
neither *p* nor not-*p* is certain for him, (b) he wants
*p* and (c) he sees *p* as constructively connected with
his own well-being and/or concept of himself as a person' (1979,
35). 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 1993), and some philosophers
*identify* faith with hoping that the claims of faith are true
(Pojman 1986; 2003). Hope as such is an attitude rather than an active
commitment, and, as Audi observes, it contrasts with the attitude of
faith at least in this respect, namely, that surprise makes little
sense as a response to discovering that the object of one's
faith is indeed the case, whereas there need be nothing inappropriate
in surprise at the fulfilment of one's hopes (see Audi 2011,
74).



A more adequate model of faith as hope, then, may rather take faith to
be *acting* in, or from, hope. Such a model then comes close to
a non-doxastic venture model of faith, differing only in so far as
acting from hope that God exists differs from taking this claim to be
true (albeit without belief) in one's practical reasoning, but
this difference may be undetectable at the level of behavioral
outcomes (see McKaughan 2013). A model of faith as acting in hope
shares with the doxastic and non-doxastic venture models in rejecting
the view that faith requires cognitive certainty. But one can act in
hope with firmness and resilience, given a strong affective/evaluative
stance, even if one lacks belief that one's hopes will be
fulfilled. Hoping that *p*, however, does not involve taking a
stand on its being true that *p*, which is widely thought to be
essential to faith.



The 'venture' models of faith (with or without belief) and
the model of faith as a venture in hope all fit the view that faith is
consistent with doubt, and, indeed, impossible without doubt of some
kind, though they allow that persons who have faith may give firm and
sustained commitment to the truth of faith-propositions in practice
(for discussion of different kinds of doubt and their compatibility or
incompatibility with faith and belief see Howard-Snyder 2013b, 359).
The 'certainty' of faith on these models is more a matter
of the certainty that persons of faith find themselves
*conferring* on the foundational claims of their faith, rather
than a matter of discovering in themselves a certain knowledge or
intellectual conviction of the truth of these claims. It is possible,
then, on these accounts of faith, to be a committed person of faith
and also an 'agnostic' in Thomas Huxley's original
sense of someone who does not claim as knowledge the commitments he or
she nevertheless makes as a foundational practical orientation to
reality. (For discussion of the compatibility of Muslim faith and
doubt, see Aijaz 2023.)


## 10. Faith as a virtue



Faith is traditionally regarded as one of the
'theological' virtues. If a virtue is a 'disposition
of character which instantiates or promotes responsiveness to one or
more basic goods', then theistic faith qualifies since it is
'a responsiveness to practical hope and truth', provided
theistic faith-claims are indeed true (Chappell 1996, 27). Faith will
not, however, be a virtue *as such*, if it is accepted that
faith can be misplaced or, even, 'demonic', directed upon
a 'false ultimate' (Tillich 1957 [2001, 21]). 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 theist
faith as a case in point (Adams 1987). (For discussion of how faith
might be voluntary, even if faith entails belief, or indeed is a type
of belief, and belief is not under our direct voluntary control, see
Rettler 2018.) Furthermore, as already suggested (Sections 4 & 5
above), models of faith as knowledge or belief fail to provide
non-circular conditions sufficient for entitlement, unless the truth
of faith-propositions is established by independent argument and
evidence. If faith is understood as, or as essentially including,
beliefs held on insufficient evidence, it is also hard to understand
why Abrahamic religious traditions have valued it so highly, let alone
why God might be thought to make salvation contingent on such belief
(Kvanvig 2018, 106; McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2021).



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. Doxastic and non-doxastic
venture models of faith can vindicate faith as a virtue, provided they
provide robust entitlement conditions, to ensure that not just any
'leap of faith' is permissible. The Jamesian account
already mentioned (Section 7) aims to meet this need. James's
own view of what suffices to justify a faith-venture arguably needs an
ethical supplement: both the non-evidential motivation for the venture
and its content must be morally acceptable (Bishop 2007a,
163-6).



If faith of the religious kind is to count as valuable and/or
virtuous, it seems there must be a suitable degree of resilience in
the commitment made (see Howard-Snyder and McKaughan 2022b for
arguments that faith requires resilience; for discussion of the value
and potential virtuousness or viciousness of resilient faith see
McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2023a; on the rationality of resilient
faith see Buchak 2017, Jackson 2021, and McKaughan 2016). Persons of
religious faith and faithfulness both put their faith in and are
faith*ful* 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 (Pace and McKaughan
2020). (See Audi 2014 for a discussion of faith and faithfulness in
relation to virtue. Audi defends faithfulness as, like courage, an
'adjunctive' virtue, and argues that being 'a person
of faith' counts as a 'virtue of personality'.)



Faith is only one of the Christian theological virtues, of course, the
others being hope and charity (or love, *agape*): St. Paul
famously affirms that the greatest of these is love (I Cor. 13:13).
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, 2002). 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. (See Jeffrey
2017 for discussion of the moral permissibility of faith, particularly
in connection with hope.)


## 11. Faith beyond (orthodox) theism



What is the potential scope of faith? On some models, the kind of
faith exemplified by theistic faith is found only there. On models
which take faith to consist in knowledge or belief, faith is
intrinsically linked to theological content--indeed, in the case
of Christian faith, to *orthodox* Christian theological
content, specifiable as one unified set of doctrines conveyed to
receptive human minds by the operation of divine grace. The 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.
John Dewey strongly rejected the notion of faith as a special kind of
knowledge (Dewey 1934, 20), as did William James, whose
'justification of faith' rests on a
*permissibility* thesis, under which varied and conflicting
faith-commitments may equally have a place in the 'intellectual
republic' (James 1896 [1956, 30]). Charles S. Peirce, another
influential American pragmatist, arguably held a non-doxastic view of
faith (Pope 2018).



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. Furthermore, they
suggest that 'un-orthodox' faith may be *more*
authentic than 'orthodox' faith. 'The faith that is
religious', says Dewey, '[I should describe as] the
unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends,
which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds
as worthy of controlling our desires and choices' (1934, 33).
And James: 'Religion says essentially two things: First, she
says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping
things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to
speak, and say the final word. ... [and] the second affirmation of
religion is that we are better off now if we believe her first
affirmation to be true' (James 1896 [1956, 25-6]). 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. For
example, Dewey holds that religious belief grounds hope because it
takes something to be true about the real world 'which carr[ies]
one through periods of darkness and despair to such an extent that
they lose their usual depressive character' (1934,
14-5).



A general--i.e., non-theologically specific--account of the
religious kind of faith may have potential as a tool for criticising
specific philosophical formulations of the content of religious faith.
The conditions for permissible faith-venture may *exclude*
faith in God under certain inadequate conceptions of who or what God
is. Arguably, the 'personal omniGod' of much contemporary
philosophy of religion is just such an inadequate conception (Bishop
2007b). An understanding of what faith is, then, may motivate radical
explorations into the concept of God as held in the theistic
traditions (Bishop 1998; Johnston 2009; Bishop and Perszyk 2014,
2023).



Can there be faith of the same general kind as found in theistic
religious faith yet without adherence to any theistic tradition? Those
who agree with F. R. Tennant that 'faith is an outcome of the
inborn propensity to self-conservation and self-betterment which is a
part of human nature, and is no more a miraculously superadded
endowment than is sensation or understanding' (1943 [1989, 111])
will consider that this must be a possibility. Tennant himself
suggests that 'much of the belief which underlies
knowledge'--and he has scientific knowledge in
mind--'is the outcome of faith which ventures beyond the
apprehension and treatment of data to supposition, imagination and
creation of ideal objects, and justifies its audacity and
irrationality (in accounting them to be also real) by practical
actualization' (1943 [1989, 100]). Faith in this sense, however,
may not seem quite on a par with faith of the religious kind. True,
scientists must act *as if* their 'ideal objects'
are real in putting their theories to the empirical test; but they
will 'account them to be also real' only when these tests
do provide confirmation in accordance with the applicable
inter-subjective norms.



If faith is understood as commitment beyond independent
inter-subjective evidential support 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. Some have
argued that faith is a human universal: Cantwell Smith, for example,
describes it as 'a planetary human characteristic [involving
the] capacity to perceive, to symbolize, and live loyally and richly
in terms of, a transcendent dimension to [human] life' (1979,
140-141). There may also, arguably, be non-religious faith: for
example, 'scientific atheists' or
'naturalists' may be making a faith-venture when they take
there to be no more to reality than is in principle discoverable by
the natural sciences. The suggestion that atheism rests on a
faith-venture will, however, be resisted by those who maintain
'the presumption of atheism' (Flew, 1976): if atheism is
rationally the default position, then adopting it requires no
venture.



An atheist's faith-venture may, in any case, seem oddly so
described on the grounds that it provides no basis for practical hope
or trust. 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. (Note James's requirement
that faith-commitment is permissible only for resolving a
'genuine option', where a genuine option has *inter
alia* to be 'momentous', that is, existentially
significant and pressing (James 1896 [1956, 3-4]).) Truth-claims
accepted by faith of the religious kind seem essentially to be
'saving' truths--solutions to deep problems about the
human situation. And there may thus be arguments as to which religious
tradition offers the best solutions to human problems (see, for
example, Yandell 1990, 1999). J. L. Schellenberg (2009) argues that
the only kind of religious faith that could be justified (if any is)
is a sceptical 'ultimism', in which one
'assents' to and treats as real an imaginatively grasped
conception of a metaphysically, axiologically and soteriologically
ultimate reality.



Some may nevertheless argue that an existentially vital faith that
grounds hope can belong within a wholly secular context--that is,
without counting in any recognisable sense as 'religious'.
Cantwell Smith claims, for example, that 'the Graeco-Roman
heritage ... and its fecundating role in Western life [can] be
seen as one of the major spiritual traditions of our world'
(1979, 139). Annette Baier suggests that 'the secular equivalent
of faith in God, which we need in morality as well as in science or
knowledge acquisition, is faith in the human community and its
evolving procedures - in the prospects for many-handed cognitive
ambitions and moral hopes' (Baier 1980, 133). 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. For example, Robert Solomon takes
spirituality to mean 'the grand and thoughtful passions of
life', and holds that 'a life lived in accordance with
those passions' entails choosing to see the world as
'benign and life [as] meaningful', with the tragic not to
be denied but accepted (Solomon 2002, 6 & 51). (For further
discussion of faith in secular contexts, see Preston-Roedder 2018,
Tsai 2017, and Ichikawa 2020; for special journal issues addressing a
variety of issues in the philosophy of faith in both religious and
secular contexts, see Rice et al. 2017; Malcolm 2023; McKaughan and
Howard-Snyder 2023b.)