Faith

Commitment that goes beyond what the evidence establishes - held as a virtue by some traditions and as a failure by others.

Theme: Cosmos, the sacred and ultimate reality
Tradition: Cross-tradition
Term: πίστις · pistis
Term fixed: c. 1270

In plain terms

Faith is usually framed as believing things without enough evidence, which makes it look like a straightforward epistemic failing.

The traditions that use the word rarely mean that. Pistis and fides carry trust and loyalty at least as much as belief - closer to what you have in a person than to what you have about a proposition. Trusting a surgeon is not a lapse in reasoning; it is what you do when you cannot check for yourself and have to act.

Which reframes the question. Not whether it is rational to believe beyond the evidence, but whether it is ever reasonable to commit beyond it - and everyone does, constantly, about people, projects and futures.

The hard cases are where the commitment is held against the evidence rather than beyond it.

As a philosopher would put it

Aquinas locates faith between opinion and knowledge: it has the certainty of adherence without the evidence of vision, and the will is involved because the intellect is not compelled.

The evidentialist challenge is Clifford's: it is wrong always, everywhere and for anyone to believe on insufficient evidence. James's reply distinguishes options that are live, forced and momentous, and argues that in such cases the demand to wait is itself a decision with consequences.

Fideism goes further, holding that faith does not answer to reason at all. Kierkegaard's leap and his account of the teleological suspension of the ethical make the commitment precisely what cannot be justified from outside; Tertullian's remark about believing because it is absurd is the traditional slogan and misrepresents his argument.

Plantinga's reformed epistemology takes a different route: belief in God can be properly basic, warranted without inference, in the way that belief in other minds is - which shifts the question from evidence to warrant.

Where you meet it

In 2007 a collection of Mother Teresa's private letters to her confessors was published, covering roughly fifty years.

They record a sustained absence of felt religious experience. She writes repeatedly of emptiness, of prayer that brings nothing, of speaking to a God she cannot feel and sometimes cannot locate. The letters span the entire period of her public work in Calcutta, and she asked that they be destroyed.

What is philosophically striking is that the work continued without interruption, and that her own descriptions treat the absence as something to be lived with rather than as a refutation.

Whatever one concludes about her, the case separates two things that are usually run together. Faith as a felt state and faith as a sustained commitment came apart completely and for decades, and the second did not depend on the first. That is the trust sense of the word rather than the belief sense, and it is the sense the classical traditions actually used.

What is actually disputed

Whether faith is a virtue or a failing.

The evidentialist position is that proportioning belief to evidence is simply what rationality requires, and that exempting one class of beliefs is special pleading with a long history of bad consequences.

The reply is that the evidentialist principle is not itself established by evidence, that it cannot accommodate the ordinary commitments everyone makes about people and projects, and that a life run strictly on it would be unlivable.

A sharper internal disagreement is whether faith should be responsive to evidence at all. If it is, then it is a form of belief and answers to the usual standards, and contrary evidence should reduce it. If it is not, then no discovery could count against it - which is what its critics mean by calling it unfalsifiable and what its fideist defenders regard as the point.

The traditions themselves divide, and the ones with a strong natural-theology strand take the first view.

Commonly confused with

belief without evidence The classical terms mean trust and loyalty at least as much as propositional belief, and the narrowing is modern.
wishful thinking Wishful thinking believes what is pleasant. The letters case is a commitment sustained through decades of finding nothing pleasant in it at all.

Defined against

Doubt The pair is not a simple opposition: several traditions treat doubt as internal to faith rather than as its absence, and the letters case is exactly that

Philosophers

Thomas Aquinas Faith between opinion and knowledge
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard The leap, and the suspension of the ethical
Blaise Pascal The wager, and the reasons of the heart
William James The right to believe where the option is live and forced
Al-Ghazali Certainty sought and not found in demonstration
Augustine of Hippo Belief in order to understand

Works

Summa Theologiae Faith analysed as a virtue
Concluding Unscientific Postscript Subjectivity, and the leap
Pensées The wager and the hiddenness of God
Pragmatism The pragmatic defence of believing
Confessions Faith preceding understanding
The Incoherence of the Philosophers The limits of demonstration

Schools

Thomism Where faith and reason are distinguished and joined
Augustinianism Where belief precedes understanding
Existentialism Where the leap is central
Classical Pragmatism Where believing is defended by its consequences
Ash’arism Where revelation outranks demonstration
Maimonideanism Where reason is given the widest scope

Related concepts

Arguments for God 1078 · Hope c. 1270 · Belief c. 380 BC · Knowledge c. 369 BC · Mysticism 1902

The Greek pistis and Latin fides both carry trust and loyalty as much as belief; the modern framing of faith as believing propositions on insufficient evidence is a narrowing that both defenders and critics have adopted.