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c h a p t e r 6 On Religious Faith (II) The central idea of this chapter is that of religious faith without propositional religious belief. Let it be emphasized immediately that in supporting this idea I am not arguing that someone could have religious faith without any beliefs whatever, or that there are no particular beliefs (concerning value, say) that are necessarily possessed by one who has faith, but only that it is possible to have such faith without religious belief. Even so, the claim is a strong one and may seem radical. To see why, we need only recall my comments at the beginning of the previous chapter concerning the sort of career that “faith” has had in philosophy. Most philosophers assume that religious faith is religious belief—or, at the very least, that it entails such belief. But this assumption, as we are about to see, is mistaken. (Having to some extent prepared the ground for this claim in previous chapters, I am now prepared to plant it firmly in the minds of my readers.) Religious belief is indeed commonly a part of religious operational faith, as actually exemplified, and where this is so, philosophical assessments of faith which assume that it entails belief are at least relevant. But that this is so is a contingent fact: neither the operational faith you need to get going on a religious way nor even the ideal form of such faith entails belief. Now it is true that some sort of positive propositional attitude is entailed, but when this notion and its relation to faith are more carefully scrutinized , it turns out that belief is not the only thing that can fill the bill. The “something else” that can fill the bill, far from being or entailing belief, is incompatible with it and, unlike belief, capable of being voluntarily adopted. When it occurs as part of operational faith, one does not find a complex consisting of propositional belief plus trust. Rather one finds a 127 voluntary attitude of assent to a religious proposition or religious propositions , undertaken in certain special circumstances (propositional faith), and a commitment and consequent disposition to act on this assent in pursuit of a religious way (operational faith). Since the voluntary assent is—given the proper circumstances—a form of faith in its own right, those many philosophers across the centuries who have considered there to be a purely propositional form of faith not necessarily linked to operational faith turn out to be correct. But in the pet saying of a friend of mine, this is “more by luck than by good management,” since they have almost always confused propositional faith with propositional belief—seeing operational faith as actually exemplified in Christianity, say, and looking just long enough to observe what is of interest to them: namely, the curiously unquestioned belief that is so commonly a part of it. In my view, indeed, there has been a lot of confusion in philosophical discussions of faith, and it is time to seek a more adequate account. But how are these claims and my alternative construal of faith to be defended? Well, we can identify three plausible criteria against which interpretations of the nature of faith can be assessed—criteria that are satisfied by my account, and (so I will show) better satisfied by it than by any account suggesting that faith is or entails a species of belief. They are the following: (1) an account of the term “faith” should make sense of, fit with, or accommodate the broad patterns (and, where possible, the details) of that term’s ordinary usage; (2) an account of “faith” should preserve in as robust a form as possible the notion that faith is voluntary and potentially meritorious (this follows from the previous criterion, given what ordinary usage actually suggests, but as we will see, it is also independently warranted); (3) an account of “faith” should be religiously and philosophically illuminating and fruitful—that is, it should cohere with much else that we are inclined to say in philosophy of religion and help to clear up puzzling matters in this discipline, and it should also take our thinking about philosophy of religion further in interesting and important ways. Now the third criterion is one that could be fully applied to the account of faith I am developing only after (inter alia) proper discussion of the justification of faith and the implications of conclusions drawn with respect to that—and I...

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