Faith and Knowledge

283 Pages·1988·3.248 MB·English

by  John Hick

Faith and Knowledge
By the same author
EVIL AND THE GOD OF LOVE
ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
GOD AND THE UNIVERSE OF FAITHS
DEATH AND ETERNAL LIFE
GOD HAS MANY NAMES
FAITH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS (editor)
THE MANY-FACED ARGUMENT (editor with A. C. McGill)
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
THE SECOND CHRISTIANITY
WHY BELIEVE IN GOD? (with Michael Goulder)
THE EXISTENCE OF GOD (editor)
CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY READINGS IN THE PHILOSOPHY
OF RELIGION (editor)
TRUTH AND DIALOGUE (editor)
THE MYTH OF GOD INCARNATE (editor)
CHRISTIANITY AND OTHER RELIGIONS
(editor with Brian Hebblethwaite)
PROBLEMS OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
Faith and Knowledge
John Hick
Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion
The Claremont Graduate School, California
SECOND EDITION REISSUED
WITH A NEW PREFACE
M
MACMILLAN
PRESS
©John Hick 1957, 1966, 1988
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission
of this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied
or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance
with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to
this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and
civil claims for damages.
First edition (Cornell University Press) 1957
Second edition (Cornell University Press) 1966
First published in the United Kingdom (Macmillan) 1967
Reissued with a new preface (Macmillan) 1988
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
Printed in Hong Kong
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Hick,John
Faith and knowledge.—2nd ed. reissued
1. Faith and reason
I. Title
200'. 1 BT50
ISBN 0-333-41782-8 {hardcover)
ISBN 0-333-41783-6 paperback)
Contents
Preface to the 1988 Reissue of the Second Edition vii
Preface to the Second Edition xi
Preface to the First Edition xiii
Introduction 1
Part I
Faith as Propositional Belief
1 The Thomist-Catholic View of Faith . . . . 11
2 Modern Voluntarist Views of Faith . . .. 32
3 Faith and Moral Judgment 57
4 Faith and the Illative Sense 69
Part II
Faith as the Interpretative Element within
Religious Experience
5 The Nature of Faith 95
6 Faith and Freedom 120
Part III
The Logic of Faith
7 Faith and Fact 151
8 Faith and Verification 169
9 Faith as Knowledge 200
CONTENTS
Part IV
Christian Faith
10 Christian Faith 215
11 Faith and Works 237
Acknowledgments 264
Index of Names 265
Index of Subjects 267
Preface to the 1988 Reissue
of the Second Edition
A brief account of the genesis of a book is sometimes of
interest to readers. This one began in the filling of a
notebook with philosophical jottings when I was serving in
the Friends' Ambulance Unit in Italy during the winter of
1944, between working in Egypt and proceeding to Greece.
It then lay fallow until four years later it became an
academic thesis, written at Oxford under the benign but
penetrating philosophical eye of my doctoral supervisor,
H. H. Price. It then lay fallow again until, during three
years as the minister of a rural congregation, I fashioned it
into a book for publication. It was dedicated, as an
expression of gratitude, to the office-bearers and members
of Belford Presbyterian (now United Reformed) Church,
Northumberland, whose constant kindness to their minister
and his family is linked in my memory with the writing of
the book. I took the complete typescript with me to my first
teaching position, as assistant professor of philosophy at
Cornell University, and it was published in 1957 by the
Cornell University Press. Nine years later a considerably
revised second edition appeared. It is this that is now
reissued, in company with later books, to which Faith and
Knowledge remains foundational.
This epistemology of religion has been formed within the
broad stream of Immanuel Kant's philosophical influence.
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE
It was he who introduced into modern western thought the
fundamental insight that the mind is active in all awareness
of its environment, continually selecting, organizing and
interpreting. He developed this seminal insight in relation
to sense perception. But the insight has much wider
implications, which have since been worked out in cog
nitive psychology, the philosophy of science and the
sociology of knowledge. They remain however to be fully
applied to the epistemology of religion. Kant himself
approached this area from a different angle. But the
realization of the interpretive element in religious as well as
in sensory experience enables us to do justice to the
important element of truth in the projection theories of
Feuerbach and, more recently, of Freud and many others.
The balanced understanding of religion that all this jointly
makes possible is only now in the process of being
developed and the present book is a contribution to that
work.
As such it begins with the focussing of attention,
decisively begun in the nineteenth century by Schleier-
macher, upon religious experience. This has often been
treated as sui generis, differing fundamentally from other
forms of putatively cognitive experience. But in fact all
conscious cognition involves interpretation. All experience
is experiencing-as. In ordinary sense perception the inter
pretive process is habitual and unconscious; for nature
compels us to construe our physical environment in the way
that is appropriate for the particular kind of animal that we
are. Religious experience is similar and yet different in that
it involves interpreting the same environment on another
level of meaning, as mediating the divine. At this level the
forms of interpretation are not compelled-for they are not
required for our physical survival but represent a free
cognitive choice made possible by the basic structure of our
minds. Faith is the religious name for this free interpretive
PREFACE
moment within distinctively religious experience. An im
portant pioneer in the exploration of this kind of approach
was the early twentieth century Scottish philosopher of
religion referred to in the Introduction, John Oman.
From this point of view faith is not to be identified, as it
was in both Catholic and Reformed scholastic theology,
with the believing of revealed propositions. Theological
propositions are human creations designed to make public
sense of a community's religious experience. Nor is faith a
desperate 'leap in the dark', although it does entail the risk
of cognitive choice involving our whole being. (Here, I
think, I might well have been more appreciative of William
James' contribution than I was in Chapter 2.) Rather, faith
is the element of uncompelled interpretation within the
experience of divine presence, or of our dependent creature-
liness, or of the religious meaning of personal and historical
events and of the world as a whole.
Whilst my own subsequent writings in the philosophy of
religion have proceeded in a natural trajectory from the
epistemology of Faith and Knowledge, the purely theological
part of the book reflects a more traditional position than
now seems to me sustainable. This is the case, in particular,
with the Christology assumed in Chapter 10. Some readers
may prefer the older view expressed there whilst others will
prefer the newer view expressed in, for example, The Myth of
God Incarnate. But the theology, whether old or new, does
not affect the basic epistemological argument. This is
applied here exclusively to the Christian awareness of the
divine in a way which shares the restricted vision that had
been characteristic of nearly all western philosophies of
religion until very recently. I have however tried to
contribute to the general rethinking that becomes necessary
in the light of a greater awareness of the total religious life
of the world in God and the Universe of Faiths, God Has Many
Names, and Problems of Religious Pluralism.