Rational Faith and Justified Belief

Abstract

This chapter presents a general account of the attitude of faith in proposition P (both religious and non-religious), on which it consists in stopping one’s search for evidence for P and committing to act on it without further evidence. The chapter’s aim is two-fold: first, to identify the conditions under which instances of faith may be rational, as seen through the lens of decision-theoretic accounts of epistemic and instrumental rationality; second, to examine the relationship of rational faith to justified belief. It argues that understanding the latter relationship turns on an unresolved question concerning how justified belief simpliciter is a function of rational degrees of belief (the operative notion in decision theory). But it sketches how the relationship between rational faith and justified belief will depend on which of the four main accounts of the rational credence-justified belief connection one accepts.