Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Belief

Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Belief. John Bishop. Abstract. Can it be justifiable to commit oneself 'by faith' to a.
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Civil War American History: Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. Bibliographic Information Print publication date: Authors Affiliations are at time of print publication. Print Save Cite Email Share. Subscriber Login Email Address. Towards an Acceptable Fideism. An Ultimately Moral Issue.

Believing by faith: an essay in the epistemology and ethics of religious belief

Bishop acknowledges that "putative post-mortem existence," might tip the balance in favor of fideism, thereby indicating his interest in religious experience as evidence. Some time ago I undertook research on contemporary visions or apparitions of Jesus, the results of which suggest some evidence for a link between Bishop's "taking some claim as true" and events that seemingly arise from, or at least follow, this act.

My study described the experiences of twenty-eight living people using eighteen phenomenological variables and other demographic ones. As one might expect, many of these percipients had experiences to which no others were privy. Joy Kinsey, for example, reported an experience that followed her decision during a church service "to kneel and pray and just really totally surrender [her] will to God for whatever purpose" Visions of Jesus , OUP , p.

A minister came over to pray with her, and upon doing so, Joy lost consciousness and did not regain it for about three hours.

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During this time she had a "vision" of Jesus, who not only spoke to her about impediments to holiness, but also offered her a renewed life, symbolized by a goblet of wine that she was instructed to drink. When she "drank the wine" in her unconscious state Jesus raised his hand in a parting gesture of blessing, and Joy regained consciousness.

She discovered that people around her were in a state of consternation because of the strong aroma of sweet wine coming from her mouth. This smell apparently permeated the church, and Joy felt so "drunk" that she needed two people to hold her up.

John Bishop

Although Joy did not explicitly describe her cognitive-affective state that preceded her request for prayer as an instance of "believing by faith" as Bishop understands it, this phrase might be applicable to her. Joy's possible "believing by faith" appears to have uncovered truths for her that might not be otherwise accessible, although the strange smell that came from Joy and her "drunkenness" suggests that its epistemic aspects might be more than subjective. In researching the link between "believing by faith" and events to which they ostensibly lead, we would need to ensure that subjects did not try to bring about the events that would uphold the conjectured causal relationship; we might do well to examine the experiences of subjects who report them in their own words and are unaware of the link under scrutiny.


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Several visionaries I interviewed reported experiences that allegedly penetrated the space-time-causal world. One was Barry Dyck, who was hospitalized because of three broken neck vertebrae from a skiing accident. Barry reported that eight days after his accident a luminous figure appeared at the end of his hospital bed that he identified as Jesus Christ. Barry impulsively -- he was only eighteen -- grasped the forearms of this being and begged to die, since his pain was unbearable. Barry was informed in wordless communication that this petition would not be granted, and he awoke the next morning to find that his pain and swelling were gone.

Instead of being in a neck-brace for the next eleven months, as doctors expected, Barry resumed his regimen of running within a week.

Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Belief

He was a student in Bible College at the time of this incident, so we might surmise that he had already "decided to take Christian theism as true," in order to see where that led. If fideists are led into the kind of truth that Barry reported, such experiences have more than subjective value for Christian theism, although arguably not of the omniGod whom Bishop mentions.

Experiences that penetrate the space-time-causal world also have the capacity, seemingly, to put comparable experiences that have no "objective" features into a different light -- perhaps they also are ones in which "beings belonging to another order" are encountered? Post-biblical including contemporary Christic apparitions are important in the advocacy of uniquely Christian theism as opposed to general theism , in my opinion, for the New Testament texts that describe the alleged post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus are so fraught with interpretive difficulties that one hardly knows what to make of them as evidence.

Moreover, the Resurrection is presented as an event that no one witnessed, and the reported failure to find the corpse of Jesus offers only weakly supporting evidence for his Resurrection. Evangelicals often know something about these difficulties, and, unknowing or uncaring about possible additional evidence, advance Evangelical Christianity as something one should "believe by faith" -- perhaps to Bishop's chagrin, Christian theism, unlike general theism, is marked by historical hence empirical claims, so advancing it as a position that one might "believe by faith" seems irresponsible about empirical evidence.

Claims about "the omniGod," on the other hand, are seemingly devoid of explicit empirical support, inasmuch as finite evidence cannot favor a being with infinite properties over one with very great but finite ones.

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John Bishop University of Auckland. Does our available evidence show that some particular religion is correct? Faith in Philosophy of Religion.

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