Logic Matters 2008-04-02

Philosophy of Religion 6: Faith

Onwards! Chapter 4 of the Murray/Rea Introduction is entitled 'Faith and Rationality'. There's quite a bit in this chapter. I don't have faith in any of it. Let's start with faith itself.They are interested in faith in that sense in which it is, as they put it, "just a kind of belief" ("believing by faith" rather than "believing by reason"):To say that a person S has faith in a proposition p is to say that S believes p despite the fact that (a) there are alternatives to p which are compatible with whatever evidence supports S's belief that p, and (b) there is genuine and somewhat weighty evidence in favor of one or more of those alternatives.Murray and Rea say that, as a welcome consequence of this characterization, faith comes in degrees because the extent to which p is underdetermined ...

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