“What Is Faith?” is the question that heads the introduction of Finley Malcolm and Michael Scott’s latest book A Philosophy of Faith: Belief, Truth and Varieties of Commitment. The authors set out to present us with a comprehensive theory of what faith in general is. They are looking for a theory that covers all kinds of commitment that use the concept of faith, both religious and nonreligious. They cover a wide variety of contexts in which the concept of faith is used, without restricting themselves to either epistemology—faith as a lesser form of knowledge—or linguistics— the analysis of how people use the word “faith.” The latter would only inform us about ordinary people’s intuitions and folk psychologies, Malcolm and Scott contend, and so they are instead concerned with faith in itself. Analyzing faith in a variety of contexts, the authors switch easily from deep examples of religious faith to examples taken from popular culture, like M’s faith in James Bond.
In the first three chapters Malcolm and Scott argue against the contemporary trend in analytic philosophy toward “nondoxasticism,” which suggests that “to have propositional faith one need only accept rather than believe the proposition in question” (6). Malcolm and Scott hold on to what they consider to be the “orthodox theory,” that “to have faith that p one must believe that p” (17). They defend “doxasticism,” which claims that “to have faith in a proposition one must believe it to be true” (6). Belief and truth are of central importance to the concept of faith, according to the authors, and they wish to expand the classical doxastic theories of faith from the previous century by incorporating insights from contemporary theories of faith, highlighting the importance and independent quality of objectual faith as they do from chapter 4 onwards.
Malcolm and Scott are doxasticists with respect to propositional faith, but they consider objectual faith to be something else, independent of propositional faith. In recent years, there has been a shift in emphasis from propositional faith to objectual faith: the focus is no longer on the belief that God exists, but on belief in God. Faith is not first of all about holding propositions, but about the relationship with an object or person. The authors acknowledge the importance of this shift, indicating that they no longer place as much emphasis on propositional faith as they did in their prior work.
Within the analytic tradition, as Malcolm and Scott note, “propositional faith is often treated as if it has priority over objectual faith, with discussion of the latter often largely set aside” (98). And, in a footnote, they admit: “We, in our earlier work, are as guilty of this as anybody” (125). The line of thought used to be that to believe in somebody, you first need to believe that this somebody exists. Magnanimously, Malcolm and Scott let go of this position. Unfortunately, they do not explicitly reflect on what caused their change of heart and what are the consequences of it.
In chapters 5 and 6, the final two chapters, the authors add a psychological layer to their concept of faith. To have faith means to be motivated in a particular way. Interestingly, in certain cases, one can even have faith in something that does not exist—at least not yet, or not in its full form. Malcolm and Scott are doxasticists with respect to propositions, but not with respect to ideals, for example. Even if something like democracy or gender equality does not exist, one can still have faith in them. To believe something to be true, then, is not a necessary condition for faith with respect to objectual faith, but a particular kind of commitment is.
As these last remarks indicate, though, Malcolm and Scott’s argument seems to be rooted in the way people use the word “believe,” which they dismissed before as linguistics. Similar questions arise concerning Malcolm and Scott’s response to the rise of nondoxasticism. They remain firm doxasticists: to have faith in a statement you must believe that statement to be true. Here we are asked to imagine questioning people who believe in a particular statement: Do you believe this statement to be true? They might try to avoid answering your question, saying something like, “I hope so,” but if we force them to answer, they must say that they believe the statement to be true rather than false. This would seem to rely on how people use words.
Yet, when Malcolm and Scott do divert from how ordinary people speak of “faith,” their stipulations often sound arbitrary, like when they claim that people of faith do not necessarily have faith, even though they themselves claim to have faith; or that being in a crisis of faith means to be temporarily without faith, whereas one could also argue that doubt is an inherent part of faith.
More importantly, however, Malcolm and Scott never seem to ask themselves where the move towards objectual faith and nondoxasticism comes from. What is the point that their colleagues are trying to make? What intuition about faith guides them? What concern do they have about the focus on propositional faith and doxasticism that used to dominate analytic philosophy of religion? Might they be on to something?
The fact that Malcolm and Scott do not ask themselves such questions shows something important about their own approach and the limitations of the kind of analytic philosophy of religion they follow in their work in general, including this latest book. They are not exploring the question “What is faith?”, nor is there a point about faith that they wish to convey; instead, they are merely building a theory. Which schema fits most of the things people say about faith? This book builds a theory, rather than makes a point or offers a perspective.
The theory that Malcolm and Scott present in response to nondoxasticism and objectual faith is called “true grit”: a person has faith in something if he or she takes it to be true and is gritty in holding on to it. The examples they use to illuminate the several aspects of this theory are always very creative and sometimes funny, but the wide variety of examples used creates a lack of depth and the theory itself is too general to be persuasive. In general, the book shows that it is possible to move beyond assessing the truth-value of propositions within the analytic tradition, but the psychological aspect of faith that Malcolm and Scott promise to present lacks depth.
Hermen Kroesbergen is a research associate in the Understanding Reality program at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Hermen Kroesbergen
Date Of Review:
August 1, 2023