ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that not science but prayer provides the key to understanding the nature of faith. Faith is not primarily a form of knowing but rather a way of coping meaningfully with life and experience in the world. Religious belief is not an explanatory theory analogous to theories in science and prayer and religious rituals are not techniques to get things done and gain control over the way things go in the world. Clearly, the meaning of religious faith becomes seriously distorted when it is thus forced into the mould of the Enlightenment project. In the mindset of modernity faith tends to be reduced to religious belief which in turn is measured by epistemic criteria which have become commonplace since the Enlightenment. In his book on Faith and Belief Wilfred Cantwell Smith analyses the tendency since the Enlightenment to reduce faith to propositional belief.
