But if-as we are here assuming-one ventures beyond evidential support in taking it to be true in practical reasoning that God exists and may be trusted for salvation, this may be a venture that is not confined to initial commitment but rather persists in needing to be made. Whether the desire to grasp more truth about the real than science can supply is a noble aspiration or a dangerous delusion is at the heart of the debate about entitlement to faith on this moderate fideist doxastic venture model. Doxastic and non-doxastic venture models of faith can vindicate faith as a virtue, provided they provide robust entitlement conditions, to ensure that not just any ‘leap of faith’ is permissible. On the doxastic venture model, faith involves full practical commitment to a faith-proposition’s truth, despite the recognition that this is not ‘objectively’ justified on the evidence. If faith of the religious kind is to count as valuable and/or virtuous, it seems there must be a suitable degree of resilience in the commitment made (see Howard-Snyder and McKaughan 2022b for arguments that faith requires resilience; for discussion of the value and potential virtuousness or viciousness of resilient faith see McKaughan and Howard-Snyder 2023a; on the rationality of resilient faith see Buchak 2017, Jackson 2021, and McKaughan 2016). Persons of religious faith and faithfulness both put their faith in and are faithful to the object of their commitment, though the salient kind of faithfulness may be a matter of the continual renewal of faith rather than of maintaining it unchanged (Pace and McKaughan 2020). (See Audi 2014 for a discussion of faith and faithfulness in relation to virtue.

On some such assumptions, for example those made by Bayesians, the support provided by the evidence Aquinas adduces-or, by a suitable contemporary upgrading of that evidence such as that provided in the works of Richard Swinburne-may be considered enough to make reasonable a sufficiently high degree of belief (or credence) in the truth of theistic faith-propositions so that believers need not venture beyond the support of their evidence. Such a model then comes close to a non-doxastic venture model of faith, differing only in so far as acting from hope that God exists differs from taking this claim to be true (albeit without belief) in one’s practical reasoning, but this difference may be undetectable at the level of behavioral outcomes (see McKaughan 2013). A model of faith as acting in hope shares with the doxastic and non-doxastic venture models in rejecting the view that faith requires cognitive certainty. One suggestion is that faith is taking it to be true that there are grounds for the hope that love is supreme-not simply in the sense that love constitutes the ideal of the supreme good, but in the sense that living in accordance with this ideal constitutes an ultimate salvation, fulfilment or consummation that is, in reality, victorious over all that may undermine it (in a word, over evil).

They are based on reason and sound logic. On models of faith as a (special) kind of knowledge, or as firmly held belief, it may seem puzzling how faith could be a virtue-unless some implicit practical component emerges when such models are further explicated, or, alternatively, a case may be made for the claim that what is involuntary may nevertheless be praiseworthy, with theist faith as a case in point (Adams 1987). (For discussion of how faith might be voluntary, even if faith entails belief, or indeed is a type of belief, and belief is not under our direct voluntary control, see Rettler 2018.) Furthermore, as already suggested (Sections 4 & 5 above), models of faith as knowledge or belief fail to provide non-circular conditions sufficient for entitlement, unless the truth of faith-propositions is established by independent argument and evidence. If the domain of faith is, as Stephen Evans puts it, ‘the assumptions, convictions and attitudes which the believer brings to the evidence for and against religious truth’ (Evans 1985, 178), and faith’s cognitive component offers a ‘total interpretation’ of the world of our experience (Hick 1966, 154), then (foundational) faith-propositions function as ‘highest-order framing principles’ which necessarily cannot have their truth settled by appeal to the force of a body of independent evidence (Bishop 2007a, 139-44). Taking such a faith-proposition to be true, then, is not something that comes in degrees: either one ‘buys into’ the overall worldview (foundational) faith-propositions propose, or one does not.

But, in any case, non-realist models will be rejected by those who take faith to have a cognitive component that functions as a grasping-or would-be grasping-of how things really are. Bayesians might argue that there is no occasion for faith as doxastic venture since, once practical commitment to the truth of propositions is recognised as a matter of degree, whatever the state of the available evidence relating to a given proposition, there will always (given initial credences) be a rational credence properly associated with that evidence, and hence there are no possible circumstances where ‘the evidence does not decide’, so that an evidentialist requirement can indeed apply universally. But, if so, the question becomes pressing whether, and under what conditions, one may be entitled to such an evidence-transcending venture in practical commitment to a particular view of ultimate reality and its implications for how we should live. Practical commitment to a faith-proposition’s truth therefore could be a venture: there is no category error in allowing this possibility. James is thus able to explain the psychological possibility of doxastic venture: one already has a ‘passionally’ caused belief, which one then takes to be true in practical reasoning despite its lack of adequate evidential grounding (compare Creel 1994, who similarly describes ‘faith’ as a ‘non-evidential doxastic passion’).