ABSTRACT
According to the New Atheists, one of the primary ways that believers in God fall short is because of their faith. Richard Dawkins calls faith blind trust without evidence, and even against the evidence; Sam Harris says faith is unjustified belief concerning the most important questions; and Hitchens maintains that faith is grounded in wishful thinking. They seem to advance the following argument: (P1) everyone with faith is epistemically irrational; (P2) all theistic believers have faith; therefore, (C) all theistic believers are epistemically irrational. Jackson explores a number of potential candidates for what faith might be and argues that for each potential definition of “faith,” either (P1) is false and faith is not irrational, or (P2) is false and most theists do not have faith. Either way, the conclusion does not follow. At the end, Jackson provides two positive suggestions for what faith might be, with an aim to provide deeper insight into the nature of faith.
