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Originally Posted by Original Position
If a Christian says they believe in the Christian God because of faith, would you say that they know that the Christian god exists, etc? By "know" here I don't mean psychologically certain, but rather in the epistemic sense of being epistemically justified or warranted in their belief.
I would say that it's hard for me to answer that question without inquiring further. One of the issues that comes up with "faith" is that it is interpreted to mean many different things depending on who you're talking to and differently for the same individual based on the context.
For example, some argue that faith itself is the "leap of" variety in which you have to be "trusting God" and not your own logic. These are also the same as the people who argue things like "how can it be faith if you already know?" This is part of a particular anti-intellectual strand of "faith" that puts "faith" and "knowledge" as opposite ends of a singular spectrum. If you have knowledge, then it's not faith, and if you have faith then it's not knowledge.
That point being made, I would say that many are not epistemically warranted. I suspect they are using "know" much more in the sense of a measure of confidence, which need not be associated with epistemological grounding.
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That is, does faith epistemically justify/warrant belief, or is the justification provided by faith a non-epistemic justification for belief, a la Kierkegaard or James?
My personal sense of faith is much more along the lines of the latter. For example, I do believe that "faith" contains some sort of "actionable component" that goes beyond mere intellectual assent of statements.
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Originally Posted by Kierkegaard Article
For Kierkegaard Christian faith is not a matter of regurgitating church dogma. It is a matter of individual subjective passion, which cannot be mediated by the clergy or by human artefacts.
I'm not completely sure in this quote what is meant by the phrasing after "individual subjective passion" but everything before that I'm in full agreement with.
I'm not at all familiar with James' "Will to Believe" argument, so my position is a little less firm (it will require more reading and reflecting to work through the position), but...
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Originally Posted by James Article
James’s argument, in its attack on the agnostic imperative (withhold belief whenever the evidence is insufficient), makes the general epistemological point that:
a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule. (James 1896, 28)
I have made the argument that the agnostic imperative is, at the minimum, not the way people "actually" live life. We quite often act on the absence of evidence. We may not know, or even believe, but we might "suspect" something is the case and then begin to act in a manner that opens the door to allow us to eventually believe it is true. And it's also the case that the failure to adopt such a position could make it *impossible* to believe something to be true, even if it is.
I've made this point several times with regards to the question of how one proposes "evidence" for God. We've seen versions of the "I prayed to God for a sign and didn't get one, so God must not exist" and the "Give me an experiment in which I can detect God" that I would simply reject as being unhelpful for determining God's existence. But if you come to the table with this idea that God's existence requires him to behave in these types of ways, then I would agree with you that "God" as such does not exist.
I can't remember the exact language I used to use when threads of that type were more common, but it's something like "What you believe is a function of what you assume." The purpose of that statement was to point out that it's entirely possible to assume yourself out of the argument because you've established a system of belief that makes it logically impossible for you to conclude God's existence.
An example of this is the "supernatural" argument, where "supernatural" means "not of nature" but you only allow for "natural universe" explanations. Within that framework, there's literally no way to believe that "supernatural" beings could exist even if supernatural beings existed in reality.
Our assumptions about the universe open and close doors to what we *can* believe about the universe around us. A type of actionable faith can put you in position to observe/experience things that might otherwise not been observed/experienced. Does such a faith then become justification of belief? Maybe, but it's dicey and dangerous. Such a system would allow for the beliefs in superstitions and homeopathy that require a little too little support for justification.
So I do think that there is a certain level of non-epistemic justification in what I might call the "living out of faith" in the sense that one acts from a position of incomplete knowledge. There is some form of an "individual subjective passion" that allows the pieces to fit together in a certain way. But I would be quick to point out that "faith" in its fullness is not devoid of or disjoint from other types of epistemic justification. Simply acting from a lack of knowledge does not make a faith "stronger" or "better." It's not that one is acting in the complete absence of knowledge, but rather acting within incomplete knowledge.