Faith and Belief

In contemporary literature, the terms "faith" and "belief" are often used interchangeably, and "faith" is sometimes taken for a synonym for "hope." Given this diversity of usage, a lexicographer would have difficulty in fixing a meaning. In the history of Western philosophical thought the term "belief" has been used to designate diverse mental states, and attitudes.

To consider just a few, Plato distinguished between the realm of opinion and the realm of knowledge; and, in the realm of opinion, he further distinguished between conjecture, and belief. Belief in this Platonic sense denotes the comparatively firm assent that the plain man gives to whatever he directly sees or hears or feels.

Aquinas also distinguished between belief and knowledge, but for Aquinas, belief (fides) cannot refer to something that one sees or to what can be proved; belief, in this sense, is the acceptance of an assertion as true on the testimony of someone else. John Locke employs this concept when he defines belief as "the assent to any proposition not . . . made out of the deductions of reason, but upon the credit of the proposer, as coming from God in some extraordinary way of communication. This way of discovering truths to men we call revelation." Hume defined belief as practical certainty about matters that cannot be justified theoretically. Kant looked upon belief as the subjectively adequate but objectively inadequate acceptance of something as true. In contemporary psychological literature, belief is often identified with emotional conviction.

So: something of the history of Western thought. The meaning of "belief" can vary dramatically from context to context and by author to author: paradoxically, there is evidently much room for ambiguity with the use of the term, but it nevertheless remains indispensable to clear thought.