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Audi initially sets out his position in ‘Faith, Belief, and Rationality’, inPhilosophical Perspectives, vol. 5,Philosophy of Religion, ed. James E. Tomberlin (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1991), pp. 213–239. ‘Rationality and Religious Commitment’, inFaith, Reason, and Skepticism, ed. Marcus Hester (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 50–97, written at the same time, incorporates the main points made in the previous essay and significantly expands upon them. ‘The Dimensions of Faith and the Demands of Reason’, inReasoned Faith, ed. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 70–89, builds on the earlier discussions. Page-references to the essays in the Hester and Stump volumes will appear in the text, the page-numbers preceded (respectively) by ‘H’ and ‘S’.
That one can have religious faith in the absence of religious beliefs has also been defended by James L. Muyskens inThe Sufficiency of Hope (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), pp. 52–53, 129–130, and by Louis Pojman in ‘Faith Without Belief’,Faith and Philosophy 3 (1986), pp. 167, 170–171. For Muyskens, faith is capable of being justified because it is closely analogous to hope, which (unlike belief) can be a sufficient rational basis for a truly religious life. The nondoxastic faith described by Pojman, however,is a type of justified hope, whereby one lives — and has reason to live —as if particular religious propositions were true. Although Audi grants that a religiously devout lifemight be sufficiently based on hope, he nevertheless distinguishes nondoxastic faith from hope and suggests that ‘even passionate religious hope may be too thin to serve as the foundation of a cognitive outlook appropriate to religious commitment⋯. Other things being equal, hope would provide a weaker and perhaps religiously less significant foundation [than nondoxastic faith], but it still might provide something of genuine religious significance’ [H:63; see also 92n.11, 93–94n.16].
Cf. William P. Alston's treatment of faith as involving ‘beliefs that go beyond what is conclusively established by such objective indications as are available to us (or alternatively, ⋯ beliefs [held] more firmly than the available objective evidence warrants)’ [Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 277].
I am not suggesting here that having faith entails having a relationship with God, since, in that case, the existence of faith would entail the existence of God. By using the qualifier, ‘putatively’, I mean to indicate that faith is seenby people who have it as relating them personally to God. When an atheist describes a Christian as ‘having faith’ and uses the biblical concept, he implies, not thathe believes the other in fact has a relationship with God, but that theChristian has that belief. For evidence that the personal relationship aspect is essential to biblical faith, see Rudolf Bultmann and Artur Weiser, ‘Faith’, inBible Key Words, vol. 3, trans. Dorothea M. Barton and ed. P. R. Ackroyd (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), especially pp. 1, 11–12, 14–15, 31–33, 62, 68–71, 75–76, 86–88, 91–94.
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Radcliffe, D.M. Nondoxastic faith: Audi on religious commitment. Int J Philos Relig 37, 73–86 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01565779
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01565779