Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-qxdb6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T15:11:54.464Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Believing God: an account of faith as personal trust

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2017

CYRILLE MICHON
CYRILLE MICHON*
Affiliation:
Département de Philosophie, Université de Nantes, B.P. 81227, F-44312 Nantes Cedex 3, France
*
e-mail: cyrille.michon@univ-nantes.fr
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The affective view of faith, as opposed to the doxastic or cognitive view, giving more importance to goodwill than to belief content, has received much support in recent philosophy of religion, including from Richard Swinburne. Swinburne's concept of faith is no less rational than his concept of religious belief, but its rationality is that of an action or of a practically oriented attitude, aiming at the goals of religion, compatible with religious disbelief (belief that the religious content one has faith in is probably false) and even with atheism. I argue that this paradoxical stance, which hardly squares with the Christian tradition, can be avoided, while keeping to an affective view of faith, if we give more weight to the idea that faith is first an answer given to a telling, on the basis of personal trust of the hearer in the authority of the teller – a personal account as opposed to a propositional account of faith.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 53 , Special Issue 3: In Honour of Richard Swinburne , September 2017 , pp. 387 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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

Adams, R. (1987) ‘The virtue of faith’, in Adams, R., The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1987), 9–24. (First published in Faith and Philosophy, 1 (1984), 3–15.)Google Scholar
Anscombe, E. (2008) ‘Faith’ and ‘What is it to believe someone’, in Faith in a Hard Ground (Exeter: Imprint Academic), 1–10 and 11–19.Google Scholar
Bishop, J. (2007) Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, J. (1992) An Essay on Belief and Acceptance (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Hinchman, E. (2005) ‘Telling as inviting to trust’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 70, 562–587.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holton, R. (1994) ‘Deciding to trust, coming to believe’, Australisian Journal of Philosophy, 72, 63–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howard-Snyder, D. (2013) ‘Propositional faith: what it is and what it is not’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 50, 357–372.Google Scholar
Kvanvig, J. (2016) ‘The idea of faith as trust: lessons in noncognitivist approaches to faith’, in Bergmann, M. & Brower, J. (eds) Reason and Faith: Themes from Richard Swinburne (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 4–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michon, C. (2012) ‘Aquinas and the will to believe’, in Lukasiewicz, D. & Pouivet, R. (eds) The Right to Believe, Perspectives in Religious Epistemology (Paris & Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag), 73–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moran, R. (2006) ‘Getting told and being believed’, in Lackey, J. & Sosa, E. (eds) The Epistemology of Testimony (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 272–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swinburne, R. (2005) Faith and Reason, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar