ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses John Locke’s view, as expressed in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the correspondence with Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, on the relation between faith and knowledge. The chapter focuses on Locke’s answers to two inter-connected questions: how to identify a proposition as a revealed truth, and how to decide what any such proposition means. The central thesis of the chapter is that Locke vacillates between two incompatible answers to this problem, the extrinsic thesis that p can be known with demonstrative certainty even though the grounds for p are only probable, and the intrinsic thesis that belief and knowledge are two ‘distinct acts’, that knowing p does not entail believing p. In the case of the extrinsic thesis Locke says that faith and knowledge are distinct, in that a person can never know any revealed proposition. In the case of the intrinsic thesis faith and knowledge are distinct in that what a person believes can never be touched by what he knows. The intrinsic thesis leaves unresolved the problems of identifying p as a revealed proposition. The extrinsic thesis makes faith a matter of probable opinion.
The chapter argues for a way in which these two theses may be made consistent. It is suggested that the argument of Book IV, chapters 18 and 19, of the Essay is about what Locke calls ‘articles of mere faith’, and that in the controversy with Bishop Stillingfleet Locke has in mind what he calls ‘articles of faith’. The difference is that it is impossible to know articles of mere faith, though the probability of them ‘may be so clear and strong, that assent as necessarily follows, as knowledge does demonstration’. Of articles of faith, on the other hand, Locke says that they ‘may be demonstrated . . . and so may certainly be known’. The chapter maintains that Locke’s view is that in the case of articles of mere faith, religious propositions that are not demonstrably true, reason must judge, but that articles of faith are demonstrably true, and so indubitable. On this suggestion Locke’s two theses are consistent, because they are about different sorts of religious propositions, the extrinsic thesis being about articles of mere faith, the intrinsic about articles of faith.
The chapter concludes by analysing Locke’s view that religious faith is synonymous with religious belief, and his distinction between faith and knowledge on the ground that knowledge is immediate, whereas faith is mediated by the testimony of another. Locke insists that faith is belief in what cannot be known.
