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Questions
1. Can faith be distinguished from knowledge, or is it possible
to claim faith as a sort of knowing? See if you can find examples of what
you would call faith that might support either side.
2. How would you define knowledge? If there did turn out to be life on that
distant planet, could I be said to have known it?
3. A sceptic might argue that we can never be sure that our senses are not
deceiving us (think of Descartes' dreaming or demon arguments). Is there a
sense in which we have faith in them? Is it possible to have knowledge without
faith?
4. Is it necessary to have evidence for faith at all? What about from Aquinas's
point of view?
History
Besides Aquinas' view - that faith is propositional and comes mid-way between belief and opinion - there have been varying approaches to the problem. The following sections will look at three of them:
(a) Pascal's Wager - the French philosopher thought that evidence for God's existence and atheism was equal, and that the decision of whether or not to believe in God was so important as to represent a "wager" or "bet" which we must take.
(b) The Will to believe - The American philosopher William James considered the notion of faith to be more than a matter of evidence. Whether a person believes in God or not, he argued, was more a matter of whether the idea was a "live option" for them - regardless of how much evidence there was.
(c) Non-propositional Faith - the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard believed that no rational argument could decide the question of God's existence - and in fact that reason and faith were complete opposites.
Two further options will be discussed in their own sections later on. These are:
(d) Verification - A. J. Ayer believed that only language which could be "verified", or backed up by experience, was meaningful. Therefore, if religious language could not be verified - and he believed it couldn't - it was no better than nonsense.
(e) Language Games - Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had himself influenced Ayer's views, later came to change his mind about how language works. In his later philosophy he proposed an alternative view which was very influential in philosophy of religion, claiming that religious statements had meaning not in verifiability, but in the context they were intended to be used.
Summary
Central to the debate between belief-in and belief-that is the concept of faith. To have faith in something is to have trust in it: "I have faith that you will pass your exams", "The England Cricket captain put his faith in the weatherman and elected to bat", and so on. However, faith does not necessarily imply knowledge and has in fact often been held up as a contrasting thing to it.
So, what do we mean by religious faith? St Thomas Aquinas argued that it lay somewhere between knowledge and opinion. For Aquinas, knowledge was beyond doubt, whilst opinion was a matter of choice. From this point of view the most certain things are logically necessary propositions - such as that "A is A" or "2+2=4".
However, if I say, "There must be life on some planet somewhere in the universe", it is only a matter of opinion. For such a thing to be true I would have to wait for technology to develop to a level where it could test this theory - up until then it is only probable (to whatever degree).
Faith, then, comes midway between these two extremes.
I have no evidence for my opinion that there is life on some distant planet
somewhere, but I may still choose to believe it despite the lack of evidence.
If we view religious belief in this way we would define having faith as "choosing
to believe that something is the case despite a lack of evidence" - or,
"choosing to believe that the evidence for a thing being true is sufficient".