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Philosophy of Religion: the relationship between faith and doubt

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Unless I See, I Will Not Believe: The Relationship between Faith and Doubt

The words faith and doubt are easy to define, but they are much more difficult to live with. Faith is the belief in what is unseen or unsubstantiated in the physical sense as if it were in fact reality. Doubt is a particularly difficult concept for organized religions to handle—the doubts of a handful of believers, or even a single believer, can lead to a major change in a religion. Thus, as humans are we destined to doubt by human nature?

Discuss the relationship between doubt and faith.

• What do the terms faith and doubt mean to religious philosophers?
• How do you define faith and doubt in the context of your life?
• What is the difference between saying, "I believe that," and "I believe in"?
• Is faith, in the religious sense, a matter of opinion or of trust?
• Are faith and doubt incompatible? Are they opposite or complementary?
• Discuss the religious tradition (of the five options) where faith is most prevalent. Where doubt is the most prevalent. Do these religions offer insight into your own faith/doubt equation?

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Solution Summary

This note discusses the history of the relationship between faith and reason, looking at important figures including Greek philosophers and Christian and Islamic theologians.

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Within the tradition of Abrahamic faiths, there have been debates about the relationship between faith and reason since classical antiquity. One could, in fact, trace the debate back even earlier, looking at the way Mesopotamian dialectic contributed quasi-syllogistic form to certain areas of religious hermeneutics, particularly the ways in which medical texts interpreted different symptoms of disease as divine signs. However, in this paper, you should focus on faith and doubt in Graeco-Roman context. I should note here that BrainMass experts are not allowed to write your papers for you; instead, what I shall supply are materials that will help you creating your own paper.

One key issue to keep in mind in thinking about ancient religion is the distinction between "belief in" and "belief that". In modern Abrahamic religions the two are normally intertwined. In other words, if someone "believes that" God exists, that person will also "believe in" God in the sense of worshiping him. A twenty-first century atheist is one who neither believes in nor worships God. In antiquity, however, these two concepts were distinct. A Greek might accept that Egyptian gods existed without seeing any need to worship them, in much the same way as a Roman citizen would believe that the Persian king existed but not own ...

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