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Recent work on the subject of faith has tended to focus on the epistemology of religious belief, considering such issues as whether beliefs held in faith are rational and how they may be justified. Richard Swinburne, for example, has developed an intricate explanation of the relationship between the propositions of faith and the evidence for them. Alvin Plantinga, on the other hand, has maintained that belief in God may be properly basic, that is, that a belief that God exists can be part of the foundation of a rational noetic structure. This sort of work has been useful in drawing attention to significant issues in the epistemology of religion, but these approaches to faith seem to me also to deepen some long-standing perplexities about traditional Christian views of faith.
1 Swinburne, Richard, Faith and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).Google Scholar
2 See, for example, Plantinga, Alvin, ‘Reason and Belief in God’, in Plantinga, Alvin and Wolterstorff, Nicholas (eds), Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame University Press, 1983), 16–93.Google Scholar
3 As an answer to this sort of question, it is sometimes suggested that if it were indubitable to all of us that God exists, we would be overwhelmed by him, and our capacity to use our free will to make significant choices would be undermined. (See, for example, Swinburne, Richard, The Existence of God, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 211–212.)Google Scholar But this answer cannot adequately serve as a defence of Christian views of faith. According to traditional Christian doctrine angels who stood in the presence of God were nonetheless able to make the significant free choice of rebelling against him.
4 For an interesting answer to these question, different from the one I will pursue in this paper, see Adams, Robert, ‘The Virtue of Faith’, reprinted in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology, (Oxford University Press, 1987), 9–24Google Scholar. Adams answers the questions I raise here by arguing that some involuntary cognitive failures are none the less blameworthy and that sometimes the rightness of beliefs is the feature of them which occasions praise.
5 Those who are uncomfortable with the apparent hypostatization of medieval terminology here may recast the discussion in the more fashionable terms of either programs or modules. For example, talk about the will in this context can be recast in terms of the module responsible for what neuropsychologists sometimes call ‘the executive function’. The particular claim of Aquinas's at issue here can then be understood in this way. The module which is responsible for the executive function is organized in such a way as to be activated by the recognition of goodness, but some other module, some component unit of what Aquinas calls intellect, is responsible for processing the recognition of goodness and passing it on to the module which corresponds to what he calls will.
6 See ST IaIIae q.6 a.4 ad 1; la q.82 a.l, q.83 a.l, and q.82 a.4.
7 ST la q.82 a. 1 and a.2. To those who suppose that cases of suicide are an obvious counterexample to Aquinas's account here, Aquinas might reply that the action of a suicide, and the despair in which it is done, can be explained precisely by assuming that in the view of the suicide, the closest he can get to happiness is the oblivion of death. He chooses the evasion of unhappiness as his nearest approach to happiness.
8 Cf. ST IaIIae q.17 a.l. Of course, on Aquinas's theory, the will does so only in case the intellect represents doing so at that time, under some description, as good. Every act of willing is preceded by some apprehension on the part of the intellect, but not every apprehension on the part of the intellect need be preceded by an act of will, (See ST la q.82 a.4.)
9 ST IaIIae q.9 a.2.
10 Cf. ST Ia q.81 a. 3 and ST IaIIae q.10 a.3.
11 I discuss Aquinas's theory of the will and his account of the will's freedom more fully in ‘Intellect, Will and the Principles of Alternate Possibilities’, in Michael Beaty (ed.), Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, forthcoming).
12 See ST Ilallae q.2 a.l; De veritate q.14 a.1.
13 ST IIaIIae q.1 a.4.
14 See, for example, ST IIaIIae q.5 a.2; cf. also De veritate q.14 a.l. Aquinas's example illustrating the role of the will in intellectual acts involves belief based on the testimony of another, as in the case of someone who sees a prophet raise a person from the dead and consequently comes to believe the prophet's prediction about the future. This example, however, does not make clear just how the will is supposed to contribute to the act of the intellect.
15 We might suppose that this is just a case in which Dorothea is weighing evidence, the evidence of what she has seen against the evidence of her knowledge of Ladislaw's character, and coming down on the side of the evidence based on her knowledge of his character. If this were a correct analysis of the case, then it would not constitute an example of will's effecting assent to a belief. But, in fact, I think this analysis is not true to the phenomena in more than one way. In the first place, Dorothea does not deliberate or weigh evidence. Although she reflects on what she has seen, her tendency from the outset is to exonerate Ladislaw. Futhermore, this analysis by itself cannot account for Dorothea's standing by Ladislaw. A dispassionate weighing of the evidence cannot yield the conclusion that Ladislaw was not acting the part of the scoundrel, no matter how virtuous his past behaviour was. Sad experience teaches us that no one, however splendid his character has been, is immune from a moral fall.
16 ST IIaIIae q.l a.2.
17 ST IIaIIae q.l a.4, q.2 a.l and a.2.
18 Some propositions of faith, such as the proposition that God is one substance but three persons, might seem to some people sufficient to move the will to dissent from them. For considerations of space I leave such propositions of faith and their problems to one side. But for an example of what can be done even in such cases to disarm the claim that some propositions of faith are repugnant to reason, see van Inwagen, Peter, ‘And Yet They are Not Three Gods But One God’, in Morris, Thomas (ed.), Philosophy and the Christian Faith (University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 241–278.Google Scholar
19 Cf. ST IIaIIae q.4 a.l; De veritate q.14 a.1 and a.2.
20 ST IIaIIae q.5 a.2.
21 ST IIaIIae q.4 a.1, a.4, a.5; q.7 a.1; De veritate q.14 a.2, a.5, and a.6.
22 Somewhat different analyses of Aquinas's account of faith are given in the following works: Penelhum, Terence, ‘The Analysis of Faith in St. Thomas Aquinas’, Religious Studies 13 (1977), 133–151CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pojman, Louis P., Religious Belief and the Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), esp. 32–40Google Scholar; Potts, Timothy, ‘Aquinas on Belief and Faith’, in Inquiries in Medieval Philosophy: A Collection in Honor of Francis P. Clarke (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing Co., 1971), 3–22Google Scholar; Ross, James, ‘Aquinas on Belief and Knowledge’, in Etzkorn, Girard (ed.), Essays Honoring Allan B. Wolter (St Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1985), 245–269Google Scholar; and Ross, James, ‘Believing for Profit’, in McCarthy, Gerald D. (ed.), The Ethics of Belief Debate (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1986), 221–235Google Scholar. My objections to the interpretations of Aquinas in the work of Penelhum and Potts are given in effect in my own analysis above; and the problems they raise for Aquinas's account in my view either are solved or do not arise in the first place on the interpretation of Aquinas presented here. Although there are some superficial differences between my interpretation of Aquinas and that argued for by Ross, my account is in many respects similar to his, and I am indebted to his papers for stimulating my interest in Aquinas's view of faith. Ross insists on rendering ‘cognitio’ as knowledge and thus making faith a species of knowledge for Aquinas. In my view, this insistence is more confusing than helpful. Aquinas's criteria for knowledge are much stricter than contemporary standards, which allow as knowledge much that Aquinas would have classified under dialectic rather than demonstration. To render both ‘cognitio’ and ‘scientia’ as knowledge is to blur what is a distinction for Aquinas and to make his epistemology sound more contemporary than it is.
23 ST Ia q.5 a. 1; De veritate q.21 a.1 and a.2. Aquinas's metaethics is discussed in detail in Stump, Eleonore and Kretzmann, Norman, ‘Being and Goodness’, in Morris, Thomas (ed.), Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 281–312Google Scholar; see also Aertsen, Jan, Nature and Creature. Thomas Aquinas's Way of Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988).Google Scholar For the medieval tradition before Aquinas, see MacDonald, Scott, The Metaphysics of Goodness in Medieval Philosophy Before Aquinas (unpublished PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1986).Google Scholar
24 See, e.g., SCG III 9.1 (n. 1928); ST IaIIae q.18 a.5.
25 SCG III 7.6 (n. 1915); ST IaIIae q.17 a.1.
26 ST IaIIae q.54 a.3.
27 ‘Being and Goodness’, op. cit.
28 See, e.g., ST la q.3 a.4: ‘Secundo, [in Deo est idem essentia et esse] quia esse est actualitas omnis formae vel naturae … Oportet igitur quod ipsum esse comparetur ad essentiam quae est aliud ab ipso, sicut actus ad potentiam. Cum igitur in Deo nihil sit potentiale, ut ostensum est supra, sequitur quod non sit aliud in eo essentia quam suum esse. Sua igitur essentia est suum esse.’ For a defence of Aquinas's account of divine simplicity, see Stump, Eleonore and Kretzmann, Norman, ‘Absolute Simplicity’, Faith and Philosophy 2 (1985), 353–382.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
29 See, for example, Alston, William, ‘Level Confusions in Epistemology’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5 (1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in his Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
30 ST IIaIIae q.4 a.8.
31 As everyone must recognize, a believer's adherence to the propositions of faith has a manifold basis, which includes religious experience, participation in a religious community such as a church, and so on. I certainly do not intend to ignore the importance of such elements in forming or sustaining adherence to faith. But what is of concern to me here is just that part of the explanation of a believer's adherence to the propositions of faith which is provided by Aquinas's account of goodness and being and his theory of the nature of the will, and so I will say nothing here about religious experience or Christian community. For an account of the importance of religious experience in forming and sustaining belief in God, see William Alston, Perceiving God, forthcoming.
32 The ultimate point of faith is, of course, salvation.
33 I discuss the doctrine of the atonement in ‘Atonement According to Aquinas’, in Philosophy and the Christian Faith, op. cit., 61–91; and I consider justification by faith in more detail in ‘Atonement and Justification’, in Ronald Feenstra and Cornelius Plantinga (eds), Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays (University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming).
34 For elaboration of this point, see my paper ‘Sanctification, Hardening of the Heart, and Frankfurt's Concept of Free Will’, Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988), 395–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
35 For some explanation and argument in support of this view, see my ‘Atonement and Justification’, op. cit.
36 For a discussion of the role of reason in the life of faith and a consideration between the different states of acquiring faith and reflecting on it, see Norman Kretzmann, ‘Evidence Against Anti-evidentialism’, forthcoming.
37 I am grateful to Norman Kretzmann for many helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.
