Abstract
Faith, according to William James, involves believing beyond the evidence. The plan for this chapter is to first articulate a prima facie case for the philosophical viability of the Jamesian account of faith. To this end, we will engage with James’s account in three distinct ways. We will begin with an outline of the Jamesian account and then outline the various arguments marshalled in defence of this account. The main thrust of our initial engagement with James is to argue: (a) that there are conditions which justify a venture beyond the evidence, and (b) that the conditions which justify such a ‘faith venture’ can also be met in everyday circumstances. A defence of these two claims lends weight to view that the Jamesian account is philosophically viable.
To educate people to be more humanistic is to tell them to live with ambiguity and to like ambiguity- not only to live with it as an accident but to understand human nature as ambiguous.
— Elhanan Naeh
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Notes
John Bishop, ‘Faith as Doxastic Venture’, Religious Studies, 2002, 38(4): 474.
In addition, the works already cited, e.g., Bishop’s paper ‘Faith as Doxastic Venture,’ and his book Believing by Faith, there are two works that are relevant to assessing the viability of the Jamesian account of faith: the first is Anderi A. Buckareff, ‘Can Faith be a Doxastic Venture?’ Religious Studies, 2005, 41(4): 435–445
John Bishop, ‘On the Possibility of Doxastic Venture: A Reply to Buckareff’, Religious Studies, 2005, 41(4): 447–451.
John Hick, Faith and Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 35–46.
This argument is inspired by Hick, who suggests that, ‘Belief in reality of Allah, Vishnu, Shiva, and of the non-personal Brahman, Dharmakaya, Tao, seem to be experientially well based as belief in the Holy Trinity...if only one of the many belief-systems based upon religious experience can be true, it follows that religious experience generally produces false beliefs, and that it is thus a generally unreliable basis for belief formation...’. See John Hick, ‘The Epistemological Challenge of Religious Pluralism’, Faith and Philosophy, 1997, 14: 277–278.
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© 2013 Zain Ali
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Ali, Z. (2013). A Jamesian Account of Faith. In: Faith, Philosophy and the Reflective Muslim. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137286369_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137286369_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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