ABSTRACT
Religious faith is at its core an acceptance of the diagnosis and cureproposed by some religious tradition accompanied by an attempt tolive in the light of that tradition’s teachings. In monotheistic traditions, it includes personal trust – trust in God as loving and faithful. In nonmonotheistic contexts, it includes acceptance of the efficacy of particular esoteric experiences achievable by prescribed efforts. There is thus a close connection between a faith – the doctrinal content of a religious tradition as embedded in its rites, institutions, practices, and its oral or written texts – and faith or acceptance, and life in accord with acceptance, of that tradition. Having faith involves having some understanding, very limited in some cases and quite rich in others, of the tradition within which the faith is had. Whether having faith involves some sort of conflict with reason – believing against evidence, accepting on authority an alternative no more favored by evidence than many others, or the like – depends on what tradition one accepts, and what the evidence is. Our focus here will be on the completion of the overall argument, which requires facing the general question: how, besides appeal to religious experiences and the sorts of arguments already considered, can one rationally assess religious traditions. In terms of the issue we put off until later in discussing the argument from design, how can competing large-scale explanations be evaluated?
