In religion, faith is "belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion".[1] Religious people often think of faith as confidence based on a perceived degree of warrant, or evidence,[2][3] while others who are more skeptical of religion tend to think of faith as simply belief without evidence.[4][5]
According to Thomas Aquinas, faith is "an act of the intellect assenting to the truth at the command of the will".[6] Religion has a long tradition, since the ancient world, of analyzing divine questions using common human experiences such as sensation, reason, science, and history that do not rely on revelation—called Natural theology.[7]
Faith means intense, usually confident, a belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person
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As unforced belief, faith is 'an act of the intellect assenting to the truth at the command of the will' (Summa theologiae, II/II, Q. 4, art. 5); and it is because this is a free and responsible act that faith is one of the virtues... Aquinas thus supported the general (though not universal) Christian view that revelation supplements, rather than cancels or replaces, the findings of sound philosophy.
For purposes of studying natural theology, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others will bracket and set aside for the moment their commitment to the sacred writings or traditions they believe to be God's word. Doing so enables them to proceed together to engage in the perennial questions about God using the sources of evidence that they share by virtue of their common humanity, for example, sensation, reason, science, and history. Agnostics and atheists, too, can engage in natural theology. For them, it is simply that they have no revelation-based views to bracket and set aside in the first place.