Normative appraisals of faith in God

Abstract

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. In his contribution, ‘Reasonable Faith and Reasonable Fideism’, John Bishop approaches the question ‘What is faith in God?’ by taking what he calls ‘Christian faith in God’ as a paradigm case of the phenomenon of interest. He aims to specify its ‘nature’, what’s ‘essential’ to it. The official formulation of his theory goes as follows: