Jonathan Routlege is presenting "Affective Faith and Epistemic Existentialism" at Princeton Project in Philosophy & Religion 2023 Conference: "Philosophy, Religion and Existential Commitment" on Thursday, March 30th.
Abstract:
There has been a recent turn in the nature of faith literature according to which faith ought to be understood as an orientation and commitment of one’s life around a person or goal. Some theorists claim that an understanding of faith as fundamentally affective or behavioral in this way renders the classic tension between faith and reason misconceived. For if faith is not fundamentally a cognitive pursuit, then declarations that it “goes against/beyond one’s evidence” or that it is otherwise epistemically irrational seem to lose their bite. That is, if faith is not fundamentally cognitive, then cognitivist objections to it are targeting the wrong dimension of faith.1This paper argues that construing faith as fundamentally affective does not, strictly speaking, render cognitivist objections to it beside the point. First, such a claim assumes a separation between epistemic rationality and practical rationality that, on close inspection, is suspect. Second, this claim fails to attend to the fact that commitments create, for the agent making the commitment, reasons for action and belief. In other words, it is not that a person of faith avoids irrationality due to faith’s fundamentally affective nature, for that would shield people of faith from any criticism of irrationality for their commitments whatsoever. Instead, people of faith gain resources for resisting charges of irrationality in the making of faith commitments: namely, they gain reasons to form beliefs and perform actions that fit into the life of faith that they have chosen. This does not guarantee the rationality of faith, but it does make proving faith’s irrationality more difficult when one takes a suitably broad perspective on the nature of rationality.
