It is crucial for the young to be taught the ways of respect and understanding, so that they will not be led to misuse religion itself to promote or justify hatred and violence. In many situations, it will be practically rational, given one’s intentions, to trust another person only if one believes, or, at least, believes with high probability, that the person will prove trustworthy. On models that take faith of the theist kind to consist fundamentally in an act of trust, the analogy with interpersonal trust is suggestive. 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. Many dismiss the idea that one may venture in one’s very believing that God exists as committing a category error: ventures are voluntary, but propositional belief is not directly under voluntary control. But the venture of actually entrusting oneself to God seems to begin with the challenge of being able to believe or accept that, indeed, there is such a God. Trusting God will then not entail any commitment to reality’s being a certain way.

Being in established relationships of friendship with others, too, can also require commitment to continue to trust them even in the face of evidence that, otherwise, would make it reasonable to believe them unworthy of trust. Doxastic venturing-venturing in believing-is thus not a matter of willing oneself to believe without adequate evidential support; rather it is a matter of taking an already held belief to be true in one’s practical reasoning even though (as one may oneself recognise) its truth lacks such support. 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. 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.

Doxastic venture in relation to faith-propositions can be justifiable, of course, only if there are legitimate exceptions to the evidentialist requirement to take a proposition to be true just to the extent of its evidential support-and only if the legitimate exceptions include the kind of case involved in religious, theistic, faith-commitment. Aquinas’s model of faith, though widely thought of as conforming to an evidential requirement on belief, may arguably be open to interpretation as a doxastic venture model. A venture is an action that places the agent and outcomes of concern to the agent significantly beyond the agent’s own control. Conceptually fundamental to trust is the notion of a person (or persons)-the truster-trusting in some agent or agency-the trustee-for some (assumedly) favourable outcome (though what the trustee is trusted for is often only implicit in the context). In cases of interpersonal trust, a venture is often needed in initially taking the trustee to be trustworthy, but evidence will inevitably later emerge which will either confirm or disconfirm the truth of that claim, and trust may, and rationally should, be withdrawn if the news is bad. When one takes it to be true in practical reasoning that someone will prove trustworthy, that mental act may be more or less epistemically rational: it would break the evidentialist norm to employ in a decision-theoretic calculation a credence that does not match one’s available evidence.

It is one thing to be in the mental state of holding that the proposition that p is true; it is another to take it to be true that p in one’s practical reasoning (although these typically go together, since to hold that p is true is to be disposed to take it to be true that p in practical reasoning whenever the question whether p becomes salient). It is therefore worth considering what follows about the nature of faith of the sort exemplified in theistic faith from holding it to be a kind of active trust. Nevertheless, it can still be rational-practically rational, that is-to trust another when we don’t have adequate evidence that they will prove trustworthy. On this view, faith reveals its authenticity most clearly when it takes faith-propositions to be true contrary to the weight of the evidence. This view is widely described as ‘fideist’, but ought more fairly to be called arational fideism, or, where commitment contrary to the evidence is positively favoured, irrational or counter-rational fideism. Serious philosophical defence of a doxastic venture model of faith thus implies a moderate version of fideism, for which epistemic concern is not overridden and for which, therefore, it is a constraint on faith-commitment that it not accept what is known, or justifiably believed on the evidence, to be false.