No Faith Without Belief

Abstract

According to a long tradition, one of the fundamental components of religious faith is religious belief. Recently, this tradition has been challenged by some scholars who have argued that faith does not require belief. In particular, William Alston and Daniel Howard-Snyder have introduced notions such as acceptance and assuming , which they claim are required by faith instead of belief. In this paper, we will demonstrate that the critiques of Alston and Howard-Snyder are based on a particularly strong notion of belief. However, if one considers that belief can exist in degrees and that weaker notions of belief are therefore possible, there is no reason to deny that belief is a fundamental component of faith.