Faith
In religion, faith is the "belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion".
Religious people often think of faith as confidence based on a perceived degree of warrant, or evidence, while others who are more skeptical of religion tend to think of faith as belief without evidence.
According to Thomas Aquinas, faith is "an act of the intellect assenting to the truth at the command of the will".
Religion has a long tradition, since the ancient world, of analyzing divine questions using common human experiences such as sensation, reason, science, and history that do not rely on revelation—called natural theology.
Etymology
The English word faith finds its roots in the Proto-Indo-European root *bheidh-, signifying concepts of trust, confidence, and persuasion. This root has given rise to various terms across different languages, such as Greek πίστις, meaning "faith", and Latin fidēs, meaning "trust", "faith", "confidence".Furthermore, the Proto-Indo-European root *were-o- adds another layer to the word's etymology, emphasizing the notions of truth and trustworthiness. This root is evident in English words like veracity, verity, and verify, as well as in Latin with verus, meaning "true".
The term faith in English emerged in the mid-13th century, evolving from Anglo-French and Old French forms like feid and feit, ultimately tracing back to the Latin fidēs. This Latin term, rooted in the PIE root *bheidh-, encompassed meanings such as trust, confidence, and belief.
More generally, "faith" is confidence or trust in a person, thing, or concept.
According to the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, faith has multiple definitions, including "something that is believed especially with strong conviction", "complete trust", "belief and trust in and loyalty to God", as well as "a firm belief in something for which there is no proof".
In the Roman world, 'faith' was understood without particular association with gods or beliefs. Instead, it was understood as a paradoxical set of reciprocal ideas: voluntary will and voluntary restraint in the sense of father over family or host over guest, whereby one party willfully surrenders to a party who could harm but chooses not to, thereby entrusting or confiding in them.
By religion
Referring to "religions", Pope Francis claims that "the majority of people living on our planet profess to be believers".Christianity
The word translated as "faith" in English-language editions of the New Testament, the Greek word πίστις, can also be translated as "belief", "faithfulness", or "trust". Faith can also be translated from the Greek verb πιστεύω, meaning "to trust, to have confidence, faithfulness, to be reliable, to assure". Christianity encompasses various views regarding the nature of faith. Some see faith as being persuaded or convinced that something is true. In this view, a person believes something when they are presented with adequate evidence that it is true. The 13th-century theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas did not hold that faith is mere opinion: on the contrary, he held that it represents a mean between excessive reliance on science and excessive reliance on opinion.According to Teresa Morgan, faith was understood by early Christians within the cultural milieu of the period as a relationship that created a community based on trust, instead of a set of mental beliefs or feelings of the heart.
Numerous commentators discuss the results of faith. Some believe that true faith results in good works, while others believe that while faith in Jesus brings eternal life, it does not necessarily result in good works.
Regardless of the approach taken to faith, all Christians agree that the Christian faith is aligned with the ideals and the example of the life of Jesus. The Christian contemplates the mystery of God and his grace and seeks to know and become obedient to God. To a Christian, the faith is not static, but causes one to learn more of God and to grow in faith; Christian faith has its origin in God.
In Christianity, faith causes change as it seeks a greater understanding of God. According to the author of the New Testament book of Hebrews, faith precedes understanding. Understanding comes after believing. Faith is not fideism or simple obedience to a set of rules or statements. Before Christians have faith, but they must also understand in whom and in what they have faith. Without understanding, there cannot be true faith, and that understanding is built on the foundation of the community of believers, the scriptures and traditions, and on the personal experiences of the believer.
Strength of faith
Christians may recognize different degrees of faith when they encourage each other to, and themselves strive to, develop, grow,or deepen their faith.
This may imply that one can measure faith. Willingness to undergo martyrdom indicates a proxy for the depth of faith but does not provide an everyday measurement for the average contemporary Christian. Within the Calvinist tradition, the degree of prosperity may serve as an analog of the level of faith.
Other Christian strands may rely on personal self-evaluation to measure the intensity of an individual's faith, with associated difficulties in calibrating to any scale. Solemn affirmations of a creed provide Various tribunals of the Inquisition, however, concerned themselves with precisely evaluating the orthodoxy of the faith of those it examined, to acquit or to punish in varying degrees.
The classification of different degrees of faith allows that faith and its expression may wax and wane in fervor, during the lifetime of a faithful individual or over the various historical centuries of a society with an embedded religious system. Thus, one can speak of an "Age of Faith"
or of the "decay" of a society's religiosity into corruption,
secularism,
or atheism,—interpretable as the ultimate loss of faith.
Christian apologetic views
In contrast to Richard Dawkins' view of faith as "blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence", Alister McGrath quotes the Oxford Anglican theologian W. H. Griffith Thomas, who states that faith is "not blind, but intelligent" and that it "commences with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence...", which McGrath sees as "a good and reliable definition, synthesizing the core elements of the characteristic Christian understanding of faith".American biblical scholar Archibald Thomas Robertson stated that the Greek word used for "faith" in the New Testament, and rendered "assurance" in, is "an old verb meaning 'to furnish', used regularly by Demosthenes for bringing forward evidence." Tom Price affirms that when the New Testament talks about faith positively it only uses words derived from the Greek root which means "to be persuaded".
British Christian apologist John Lennox argues that "faith conceived as a belief that lacks warrant is very different from faith conceived as a belief that has warrant". He states, "the use of the adjective 'blind' to describe 'faith' indicates that faith is not necessarily, or always, or indeed normally, blind". "The validity, or warrant, of faith or belief depends on the strength of the evidence on which the belief is based." "We all know how to distinguish between blind faith and evidence-based faith. We are well aware that faith is only justified if there is evidence to back it up." "Evidence-based faith is the normal concept on which we base our everyday lives."
Peter S. Williams holds that "the classic Christian tradition has always valued rationality and does not hold that faith involves the complete abandonment of reason while believing in the teeth of evidence". Quoting Moreland, faith is defined as "a trust in and commitment to what we have reason to believe is true".
Regarding doubting Thomas in, Williams points out that "Thomas wasn't asked to believe without evidence. He was asked to believe based on the other disciples' testimony. Thomas initially lacked the first-hand experience of the evidence that had convinced them... Moreover, the reason John gives for recounting these events is that what he saw is evidence... Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples... But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that believing ye might have life in his name.."
Concerning doubting Thomas, Michael R. Allen wrote: "Thomas's definition of faith implies adherence to conceptual propositions for the sake of personal knowledge, knowledge of and about a person qua person".
Kenneth Boa and Robert M. Bowman Jr. describe a classic understanding of faith that is referred to as evidentialism, and which is part of a larger epistemological tradition called classical foundationalism, which is accompanied by deontologism, which holds that humans must regulate their beliefs following evidentialist structures. They show how this can go too far, and Alvin Plantinga While Plantinga upholds that faith may be the result of evidence testifying to the reliability of the source, yet he sees having faith as being the result of hearing the truth of the gospel with the internal persuasion by the Holy Spirit moving and enabling him to believe. "Christian belief is produced in the believer by the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit, endorsing the teachings of Scripture, which is itself divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit. The result of the work of the Holy Spirit is faith."
Catholicism
The four-part Catechism of the Catholic Church devotes Part One to "The Profession of Faith". This section describes the content of faith. It elaborates and expands, particularly upon the Apostles' Creed. CCC 144 initiates a section on the "Obedience of Faith".In the theology of Pope John Paul II, faith is understood in personal terms as a trusting commitment of person to person and thus involves Christian commitment to the divine person of Jesus Christ.