Volume 7, 2018
Christian Philosophy
William Sweet
Pages 75-80
Evidentialism, Fideism, and John Henry Newman
Many studies in the philosophy of religion have focussed on the (cognitive) character of religious faith and whether there is place for a rational demonstration of religious belief. These studies frequently pit ‘evidentialists’ (e.g., W. Paley, W. Clifford, and today both W.L. Craig and the ‘new atheists’) against ‘non-evidentialists’ (Pascal, and in the late 20th century D. Z. Phillips and, arguably, A. Plantinga). Interestingly, these issues were of central concern to the 19th century philosopher John Henry Newman - principally in his Grammar of Assent (1870) and his Oxford Sermons (31872) - where Newman attempts a ‘via media’ between these two extremes. In this paper, my focus is not so much on the adequacy of Newman’s via media, as on his analysis of religious belief, and on what he takes belief and the epistemic standards relevant to determining the meaning and truth of religious belief to be. I will argue that Newman’s account provides a novel understanding of the relation of grounds for belief to faith than provided by many of his (near) contemporaries (e.g., Paley, Whately, James), and that its attempt to be a via media has a surprisingly contemporary character.