Faith

Faith (Armani), by Mino da Fiesole

Faith is confidence or trust in a person, thing, or concept.[1] In the context of religion, faith is "belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion".[2] According to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, faith has multiple definitions, including "something that is believed especially with strong conviction," "complete trust", "belief and trust in and loyalty to God", as well as "a firm belief in something for which there is no proof".[3]

Religious people often think of faith as confidence based on a perceived degree of warrant, or evidence,[4][5] while others who are more skeptical of religion tend to think of faith as simply belief without evidence.[6][7]

In the Roman world, 'faith' (Latin: fides) was understood without particular association with gods or beliefs. Instead, it was understood as a paradoxical set of reciprocal ideas: voluntary will and voluntary restraint in the sense of father over family or host over guest, whereby one party willfully surrenders to a party who could harm but chooses not to, thereby entrusting or confiding in them.[8]

Accordingly to Thomas Aquinas, faith is "an act of the intellect assenting to the truth at the command of the will".[9]

Religion has a long tradition, since the ancient world, of analyzing divine questions using common human experiences such as sensation, reason, science, and history that do not rely on revelation—called Natural theology.[10]

  1. ^ "Meaning of faith in English". Cambridge Dictionary. Cambridge University Press. Archived from the original on March 2, 2019. Retrieved March 1, 2019.
  2. ^ "Definition of faith". Dictionary.com. Archived from the original on 2023-03-09. Retrieved 2023-03-03.
  3. ^ "faith". Webster's Dictionary. Archived from the original on 2023-03-03. Retrieved 2023-03-03.
  4. ^ Plantinga, Alvin (January 27, 2000). Warranted Christian Belief. USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 169–199. ISBN 978-0-19-513192-5. Retrieved November 27, 2019.
  5. ^ Boa, Kenneth D.; Bowman, Robert M. Jr. (March 1, 2006). "Warranted Christian Belief". Faith Has Its Reasons: Integrative Approaches to Defending the Christian Faith. USA: IVP Books. pp. 251–255. ISBN 978-0-8308-5648-0.
  6. ^ Russell, Bertrand. "Will Religious Faith Cure Our Troubles?". Human Society in Ethics and Politics. Archived from the original on 2020-11-12. Retrieved 16 August 2009.
  7. ^ Kaufmann, Walter Arnold (1961). The Faith of a Heretic. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-16548-6. Faith means intense, usually confident, a belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person
  8. ^ Barton, Carlin; Boyarin, Daniel (2016). Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities. Fordham University Press. pp. 115, 242. ISBN 978-0-8232-7120-7.
  9. ^ "Faith and Reason". Encyclopedia Britannica. Archived from the original on 2023-05-07. Retrieved 2023-05-07. As unforced belief, faith is 'an act of the intellect assenting to the truth at the command of the will' (Summa theologiae, II/II, Q. 4, art. 5); and it is because this is a free and responsible act that faith is one of the virtues... Aquinas thus supported the general (though not universal) Christian view that revelation supplements, rather than cancels or replaces, the findings of sound philosophy.
  10. ^ "Natural Theology". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. University of Tennessee. Archived from the original on 2021-05-08. Retrieved 2023-05-07. For purposes of studying natural theology, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others will bracket and set aside for the moment their commitment to the sacred writings or traditions they believe to be God's word. Doing so enables them to proceed together to engage in the perennial questions about God using the sources of evidence that they share by virtue of their common humanity, for example, sensation, reason, science, and history. Agnostics and atheists, too, can engage in natural theology. For them, it is simply that they have no revelation-based views to bracket and set aside in the first place.