Daniel Howard-Snyder

This paper argues that the imagination plays an essential role in the (de)legitimization of power in two respects. First, the claim to power is legitimated by reciprocal belief in that claim, belief being a product of the imagination. I strengthen Paul Ricoeur’s argument that “ideology” creates reciprocal belief in the claim to power by substantiating his new theory of surplus-value and by situating ideological images within his general philosophy of imagination. Second, the formation and collapse of belief in legitimacy is explainable by reference to the dialectic between the reproductive (ideological) and productive (utopic) imagination. The productive imagination delegitimizes power by creating alternative realities in which the beliefs that legitimate power are undermined. In the course of defending these twin claims, I develop a theory of political legitimacy informed by the philosophy of imagination, one sub-branch of which is social imagination theory.

This chapter is a detailed study of William P. Alston’s view on the nature of Christian faith, which is assessed in the context of three problems: the problem of the skeptical Christian, the problem of faith and reason, and the problem of the trajectory. Although Alston intended a view that would solve these problems, the view he sets out does so only superficially. Fortunately, this view can be distinguished from Alston’s illustrations of it, and it is argued in this chapter that, although Alston’s view only superficially solves these problems, his illustrations of it suggest a substantive way to solve them, a way that is sketched briefly.

It is commonly said that Darwinian evolution conflicts with theistic religion. Those who say such things often have in mind claims that are peripheral to theistic religion, for example, the claim that God created the earth about 6,000 years ago or the claim that God directly created each species. No interest is shown in the thesis that Darwinian evolution conflicts with these peripheral claims. However, an interest is shown in the thesis that Darwinian evolution conflicts with claims that are central to theistic religion. Among those who say that Darwinian evolution conflicts with claims central to theistic religion, we find those who say that it is incompatible with them and those who say that, although there is no incompatibility, evolution nevertheless provides significant evidence against them. This essay focuses on the second group. More narrowly, the focus is on Paul Draper’s argument for this conclusion.

What is faith, and what role can it play in a well-lived life? Few questions are more enduring—or more contested. Across centuries and cultures, faith has inspired courageous and risky acts, been likened to an anchor amid life’s storms, regarded as a spiritual and a social virtue, and taken to be the central response God is said to desire of humans—often under widely varying assumptions and with a lack of clarity about what it is. It has also been treated with suspicion, criticized as a failure of reason, dismissed as a symptom of ignorance, or denounced as a tool of oppression. In recent years, an emerging interdisciplinary field—sometimes called pistology, the study of faith and faithfulness and closely related phenomena—has begun to bring fresh clarity to these debates. Drawing on philosophy, theology, psychology, religious studies, the social sciences, and whatever else might help, pistology investigates faith in its various manifestations and lived complexities. Thoughtful people have taken widely divergent views, for example, concerning faith’s relation to certainty and doubt, to communal identity and personal conviction, to inherited teaching and lived experience, and on whether and to what extent having faith might be under a person’s direct voluntary control. This volume is designed to support pistological inquiry by gathering influential and diverse sources into one accessible collection.

“I wonder what it is that makes one person push on in the face of difficulty and makes someone else crumble in helplessness.” – Fred Rogers In the movie Rocky IV (1985), heavyweight boxer Rocky Balboa reveals in a heart-to-heart talk with his son that sometimes in the ring he feels like giving up. But, he continues, “going that one more round when you don’t think you can—that’s what makes all the difference in your life.” Perseverance can be a difference-maker, for ill and for good, and when for good, it is widely prized and often the sine qua non of human survival and flourishing. However, understanding when and why perseverance is valuable requires an answer to Mr. Rogers’s question about what it is. In section 1, we briefly answer that question, and we sketch a neo-Aristotelian view of when perseverance is a virtue. In section 2, we exhibit how perseverance shows up in the religious life, in the Hebrew and Christian traditions. In section 3, we show how perseverance infuses faith and faithfulness in both the portrayal of pístis in the Christian New Testament, which was written in Greek, and ʾĕmûnāh in the Hebrew scriptures. We then articulate, in section 4, a theory of faith and faithfulness that accommodates this portrayal, before showing in section 5 how the theory handles other religious data related to the connection between faith and faithfulness, on the one hand, and perseverance, on the other.

Is evil evidence against the existence of God? Even if God and evil are compatible, it remains hotly contested whether evil renders belief in God unreasonable. The Evidential Argument from Evil presents five classic statements on this issue by eminent philosophers and theologians and places them in dialogue with eleven original essays reflecting new thinking by these and other scholars. The volume focuses on two versions of the argument. The first affirms that there is no reason for God to permit either certain specific horrors or the variety and profusion of undeserved suffering. The second asserts that pleasure and pain, given their biological role, are better explained by hypotheses other than theism. Contributors include William P. Alston, Paul Draper, Richard M. Gale, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Alvin Plantinga, William L. Rowe, Bruce Russell, Eleonore Stump, Richard G. Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen, and Stephen John Wykstra.

Preprinted in God and the Problem of Evil(Blackwell 2001), ed. William Rowe. Many people deny that evil makes belief in atheism more reasonable for us than belief in theism. After all, they say, the grounds for belief in God are much better than the evidence for atheism, including the evidence provided by evil. We will not join their ranks on this occasion. Rather, we wish to consider the proposition that, setting aside grounds for belief in God and relying only on the background knowledge shared in common by nontheists and theists, evil makes belief in atheism more reasonable for us than belief in theism. Our aim is to argue against this proposition. We recognize that in doing so, we face a formidable challenge. It’s one thing to say that evil presents a reason for atheism that is, ultimately, overridden by arguments for theism. It’s another to say that it doesn’t so much as provide us with a reason for atheism in the first place. In order to make this latter claim seem initially more plausible, consider the apparent design of the mammalian eye or the apparent fine-tuning of the universe to support life. These are often proposed as reasons to believe in theism. Critics commonly argue not merely that these supposed reasons for theism are overridden by arguments for atheism but rather that they aren’t good reasons for theism in the first place. Our parallel proposal with respect to evil and atheism is, initially at least, no less plausible than this proposal with respect to apparent design and theism.

Many theistic religions place a high value on faith in God and some traditions regard it as a virtue. However, philosophers commonly assign either very little value to faith in God or significant negative value, or even view it as a vice. Progress in assessing whether and when faith in God can be valuable or disvaluable, virtuous or vicious, rational or irrational, or otherwise apt or inapt requires understanding what faith in God is. This Special Issue on the normative appraisal of faith in God for Religious Studies includes nine articles, from a diverse range of perspectives, which explore issues related to the core questions ‘What is faith in God?’ and ‘What normative questions about faith in God need to be addressed?’ In this Introduction, we briefly introduce each article.

According to many accounts of faith—where faith is thought of as something psychological, e.g., an attitude, state, or trait—one cannot have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. According to other accounts of faith, one can have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. Call the first sort of account doxasticism since it insists that faith requires belief; call the second nondoxasticism since it allows faith without belief. The New Testament may seem to favor doxasticism over nondoxasticism. For it may seem that, according to the NT authors, one can have faith in God, as providential, or faith that Jesus is the Messiah, or be a person of Christian faith, and the like only if one believes the relevant propositions. In this essay, I propose to assess this tension, as it pertains to the Gospel of Mark. The upshot of my assessment is that, while it may well appear that, according to Mark, one can have faith only if one believes the relevant propositions, appearances are deceiving. Mark said no such thing. Rather, what Mark said—by way of story—about faith fits nondoxasticism at least as well as doxasticism, arguably better. More importantly, the account of faith that emerges from Mark is that faith consists in resilience in the face of challenges to living in light of the overall positive stance to the object of faith, where that stance consists in certain conative, cognitive, and behavioral-dispositional elements.

We assess John Bishop’s theory of the nature of Christian faith in God, as most recently expressed in ‘Reasonable Faith and Reasonable Fideism’, although we dip into other writings as well. We explain several concerns we have about it. However, in the end, our reflections lead us to propose a modified theory, one that avoids our concerns while remaining consonant with some of his guiding thoughts about the nature of Christian faith in God. We also briefly examine three normative issues Bishop’s views present.

How does trust relate to faith? We do not know of a theory-neutral way to answer our question. So, we begin with what we regard as a plausible theory of faith according to which, in slogan form, faith is resilient reliance. Next, we turn to contemporary theories of trust. They are not of one voice. Still, we can use them to indicate ways in which trust and faith might both differ from and resemble each other. This is what we do. Along the way, we evaluate substantive issues related to these possible differences and similarities.

“Divine hiddenness”, as the phrase suggests, refers, most fundamentally, to the hiddenness of God, i.e., the alleged fact that God is hidden, absent, silent. In religious literature, there is a long history of expressions of annoyance, anxiety, and despair over divine hiddenness, so understood. For example, ancient Hebrew texts lament God’s failure to show up in experience or to show proper regard for God’s people or some particular person, and two Christian Gospels portray Jesus, in his cry of dereliction on the cross, as experiencing abandonment by God, whom he regarded as “Abba, Father”, an experience shared by many mystics, saints, and ordinary folk of all theistic traditions, described at its worst as “the dark night of the soul”. Understood in this way, divine hiddenness poses an existential problem for those who have such experiences. However, “divine hiddenness” refers to something else in recent philosophical literature, especially since the publication of J.L. Schellenberg’s landmark book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (1993). In this context, it refers to alleged facts about the absence of belief of God, on the basis of which one might think there is no God. For example, Schellenberg argues that, since there are nonbelievers who are capable of a personal relationship with God and who do not resist it, there is no perfectly loving God, while Stephen Maitzen argues that naturalism better explains the “demographics” of nonbelief than theism and Jason Marsh argues that naturalism better explains “natural nonbelief” than theism. Understood in this way, divine hiddenness constitutes putative evidence for atheism. Although some of the recent philosophical literature addresses the problem understood in the first way (e.g., DeWeese-Boyd 2016; Garcia 2002), this entry focuses on divine hiddenness understood in the second way. The first section discusses the relationships between nonbelief and another source of alleged evidence for atheism: evil. The second section states and defends the argument from nonresistant nonbelief. The third section sketches attempts to explain nonresistant nonbelief from a theistic perspective. The fourth section states other responses to the argument from nonresistant nonbelief. The fifth section discusses the argument from the demographics of nonbelief and the sixth section discusses the argument from natural nonbelief.

Faith in God conflicts with reason—or so we’re told. We focus on two arguments for this conclusion. After evaluating three criticisms of them, we identify an assumption they share, namely that faith in God requires belief that God exists. Whether the assumption is true depends on what faith is. We sketch a theory of faith that allows for both faith in God without belief that God exists, and faith in God while in belief-cancelling doubt God’s existence. We then argue that our theory, unlike the theory of Thomas Aquinas, makes sense of four central items of faith-data: (i) pístis in the Synoptics, (ii) ʾemunāh in the Hebrew scriptures, (iii) exemplars of faith in God, including Abraham, Jesus, and Mother Teresa, and (iv) the widespread experience of people of faith today. We close by assessing revisions of the two arguments we began with, revisions that align with our theory of faith, and find them dubious, at best.

Can faith be valuable and, if so, under what conditions? We know of no theory-neutral way to address this question. So, we offer a theory of relational faith, and we supplement it with a complementary theory of relational faithfulness. We then turn to relationships of mutual faith and faithfulness with an eye toward exhibiting some of the ways in which, on our theory, faith and faithfulness can be valuable and disvaluable. We then extend the theory to other manifestations of faith and faithfulness, propose a way to unify them under a theory of faith and faithfulness simpliciter, and explain how they can be neo-Aristotelian virtues and vices. We close with our solution to the value problem and avenues for further research.

Until recently, psychologists have conceptualised and studied trust in God (TIG) largely in isolation from contemporary work in theology, philosophy, history, and biblical studies that has examined the topic with increasing clarity. In this article, we first review the primary ways that psychologists have conceptualised and measured TIG. Then, we draw on conceptualizations of TIG outside the psychology of religion to provide a conceptual map for how TIG might be related to theorised predictors and outcomes. Finally, we provide a research agenda for future empirical work in this area, as well as practical applications for counsellors and religious leaders.