Faith as doxastic venture

Against accounts that reduce faith to something merely passive and receptive (e.g. faith as a matter solely of belief or of affect), John Bishop (Reference Bishop2002, Reference Bishop2005, Reference Bishop2007) has plausibly proposed that faith contains an essentially volitional component. For Bishop, this amounts to understanding faith as involving a practical commitment to certain religious beliefs which one recognizes as going beyond the evidence, an endeavour he calls doxastic venture. ‘People make a doxastic venture’, he writes, ‘if and only if they take to be true in their practical reasoning a proposition, p, that they believe to be true, while recognizing that it is not the case that p's truth is adequately supported by their total available evidence’.Footnote ² Here, it is important to note the distinction Bishop makes between holding and taking a proposition to be true. Holding p to be true denotes a person's being ‘in a psychological state that counts as a belief that p’. Taking p to be true, on the other hand, refers to a person's wilfully employing p ‘as a true premise in reasoning’.Footnote ³ Over the former, Bishop claims, we have little to no direct control, though we may at times exercise indirect control over our belief-acquisition and maintenance. However, he argues that we do often have direct control over which propositions we choose to employ in our reasoning – especially in our practical reasoning. That is, we have direct control over those propositions we take to be true. Of course, it is natural and habitual that the propositions we take to be true in our reasoning are those we actually believe, but these may come apart, as when one resists the workings of a prejudice or bias of which one is aware, or when a person with deep underlying trust issues nevertheless decides to entrust a friend with a secret, despite being unable to shake off the feeling that no one can really be trusted. In such cases, Bishop maintains, the subject does not allow a particular belief she holds to do the work in her reasoning that it would normally do. The same may be said when we are required to bracket or downplay certain beliefs we may hold e.g. when serving on a jury or performing a scientific experiment or enjoying a science-fiction movie. Here, allowing our beliefs about reality to play their normal role in our reasoning might mean undermining the rules, objectivity, or even the very possibility of the activities in question.

Thus, there appears to be something voluntary about the taking-to-be-true relation that does not obtain of the holding-to-be-true relation. As Bishop puts it, ‘our wider capacity to decide what propositions to take to be true in our reasoning (and what weight to give their truth) can be deployed as a capacity for control over our beliefs – a locus of direct voluntary control over how beliefs are used in practical reasoning’.Footnote ⁴ However, faith as Bishop understands it differs from the examples cited above, since the latter represent cases in which the subject's voluntarily adopted reasoning process reflects something other than what she actually believes. To count as a fully doxastic venture,Footnote ⁵ he claims, the faith-proposition the subject takes to be true in her practical reasoning must match up with the belief she actually holds – and it must do so despite the subject's awareness that this requires going beyond what is supported by the evidence. Further, Bishop maintains that the faith-proposition in question must be affirmed ‘with full weight’ in the subject's practical reasoning, i.e. ‘with the kind of weight that naturally’ – though, as we shall see, not necessarily – ‘goes along with straightforwardly believing that it is true’.Footnote ⁶ Thus, a proposition only affirmed tentatively, hypothetically, or presumptively in one's practical reasoning will disqualify an exercise of the above capacity from counting as a fully doxastic venture, even if the proposition does correspond to a belief one actually holds.

According to Bishop, then, faith is doxastic in so far as it involves ‘a specific capacity for a [doxastic] control that … may be used to determine whether or not beliefs qua held attitudes get given their due weight in salient practical reasoning’.Footnote ⁷ And it is a venture in so far as it involves taking the epistemic risk of knowingly going beyond the evidence. Likewise, faith remains receptive in so far as one does not generally have direct control over what one believes, but it is active in so far as it involves one's wilfully allowing beliefs that go beyond the evidence to play a role in one's practical reasoning.

Despite the former, more passive aspect of faith, over which we have little control, Bishop maintains that faith is (or ‘should be’) ‘broadly reasonable in the sense that exercising the capacity for faith should be in harmony with the exercise of our rational capacities’.Footnote ⁸ (This rules out those fideist views on which it is a mark of faith that it be either irrational or arational.) Indeed, that religious faith may be both practically and epistemically rational turns out to be crucial for Bishop. He argues that since religious beliefs have a morally significant impact on our actions and ways of living, ‘the question of the justifiability of taking a religious belief to be true in one's practical reasoning is ultimately a moral question’.Footnote ⁹ But Bishop's ethics of belief lead him to tie the morality of faith to its rationality via his endorsement of what he calls the moral-epistemic link principle – namely that ‘people are morally entitled to take their beliefs to be true only if they are epistemically entitled to do so’.Footnote ¹⁰ So if the kind of venturing necessarily involved in faith turns out to be epistemically irrational,Footnote ¹¹ it will also thereby lack moral standing. And any theory that is forced to characterize faith as necessarily immoral (or at least as never morally justified) would appear to have a prima facie strike against it from the very beginning. In short, although the notion of faith as doxastic venture highlights the importance of the volitional element of faith, it does so at the risk of losing the rational element. But if the rational element is lost, by Bishop's standards so is the morality of faith. Thus, it will be important to look more closely at the way in which Bishop justifies the rationality of faith to see if the doxastic-venture model can be successful.

Is doxastic venture rational?

As we have just seen, since the account of faith Bishop proposes involves an ‘active venture in practical commitment’Footnote ¹² to certain theistic faith-beliefs, and given that these theistic faith-beliefs ‘pervasively influence how people live’,Footnote ¹³ such commitments are open to moral evaluation. Yet given the moral-epistemic link principle cited above, the burden is on Bishop to show that such doxastic ventures can be epistemically rational in a way that still allows them to be venturesome. To this end, Bishop makes two argumentative moves aimed at denying the central thesis of epistemic evidentialism, which claims that the rationality of a practical commitment to a belief (or, what is more or less the same: a person's entitlement in holding it and employing it in her practical reasoning) rests upon that belief's being evidentially justified. First, he argues that classical theism is ‘evidentially ambiguous’. Second, he employs a strategy borrowed from William James to argue that where the evidence is ambiguous, it is rationally permissible to believe on a ‘passional’ basis. I shall discuss each of these moves in turn.

According to Bishop, subjects are evidentially justified in holding that p ‘if and only if they hold p to be true on the basis of adequate evidential support for p's truth’.Footnote ¹⁴ Further, Bishop maintains, epistemic evidentialism claims that evidential justification (and only evidential justification), understood in this way, can confer epistemic entitlement. Of course, what it means to ‘hold p to be true on the basis of adequate evidential support for p's truth’ is debatable, but Bishop focuses primarily on ‘rational empiricist evidential practice’,Footnote ¹⁵ since this is the framework within which many philosophers have assumed the evidential support for the truth of faith-beliefs should be evaluated.Footnote ¹⁶ There are many reasons to question the plausibility of the thesis regarding rational empiricist evidential justification and thus of any version of epistemic evidentialism that rests on it.Footnote ¹⁷ However, Bishop departs from typical externalist and Reformed epistemological approaches to denying or modifying this kind of evidentialism, since he is largely concerned with the rationality of faithful believers, not of the per se worth of the beliefs held. Here, Bishop is concerned (I think, rightly) with the more ‘agency-focused’ notion of entitlement, as opposed to externalist, ‘propositional-attitude-focused’ theories about justification.Footnote ¹⁸ Moreover, even in so far as evidentialist accounts themselves attach an ‘evidentialist imperative’ to justification, he notes that most discussions understand it as ‘a principle about the proper use of our indirect control over the formation, retention, and revision of our beliefs’ – that is, about the aetiology and maintenance of our beliefs.Footnote ¹⁹ Bishop, however, claims that ‘the evidentialist imperative should be construed as applying also – and, indeed, primarily – to our direct control … over what we take to be true (and with what weight) in our practical reasoning’.Footnote ²⁰

For our concerns here, it is sufficient to note that Bishop maintains that there is good reason to suppose that classical theism is evidentially ambiguous, such that ‘the question of God's existence is left open – perhaps even necessarily – because our overall evidence is equally viably interpreted either from a theistic or an atheistic perspective’.Footnote ²¹ This is clearly not an uncontroversial claim, and there are parties of both theist and atheist persuasions that would vehemently reject it. However, Bishop counters that ‘the fact that, after centuries of debate, equally intelligent and well-informed thinkers continue to disagree about how to assess the evidence for and against God's existence does suggest … that the evidence on this question is indeed ambiguous'.Footnote ²² If this is right (and it seems plausible to think it at least might be), then any account of faith resting on a version of ‘rational empiricist epistemic evidentialism’ as described above would represent a kind of irrationalist fideism, since no reflective faith-believer would be justified in holding a belief in the existence of the God of classical theism and thus would not be entitled to take the proposition ‘God exists’ to be true in her practical reasoning. Further, given the moral-epistemic link principle, such a taking-to-be-true would also represent a moral failure (or, at the very least, would lack moral justification). Thus, Bishop must show that there are rationally legitimate ways of believing (or practically committing oneself to beliefs) that go beyond what the evidence supports.

Bishop's suggestion for saving the rationality of this ‘venture’-component of faith is to take a page from William James's playbook. He suggests that, in forced situations of genuine import in which the evidence is recognized to be ambiguous, one may legitimately believe in non-evidentially caused ways – what Bishop, following James, calls passionally caused believing. Passional causes may include such phenomena as emotions, wishes, desires, evaluative beliefs, affections, affiliations, and so on.Footnote ²³ This understanding of the doxastic venture, however, places two main constraints on the passional believer. First, the situation must present the believer with a genuine option, understood here in the Jamesian sense. That is, it must represent a living, forced, and momentous option for belief.Footnote ²⁴ If the relevant option is of no significant personal or existential import to the agent, or if there is a way to ‘slip between the horns’ of the dilemma non-passionally, there is no legitimate opportunity for doxastic venture. Second, Bishop notes that ‘doxastic venture can be defended … only against the background of a general acceptance of evidentialism’.Footnote ²⁵ He maintains that ‘options that can be decided by rational assessment of one's evidence fall under the moral evidentialist imperative’Footnote ²⁶ and are thus not candidates for legitimate doxastic venture. Indeed, Bishop goes so far as to claim that – at least as far as faith-ventures are concerned – the Jamesian doxastic-venture model of faith requires that the faith-believer must correctly recognize that the proposition in question is evidentially ambiguous.Footnote ²⁷

This ‘recognition-criterion’ is of no small import to Bishop's account, as it rules out certain candidates for faith on the doxastic-venture model. First, it excludes ambivalent believers. Bishop maintains that he is only concerned with ‘reflective’ faith-believers,Footnote ²⁸ so those subjects who simply do not care about the evidential status of the propositions in question, or those who have simply never asked such questions, are not candidates for doxastic venture in the context of faith: ‘the venturing involved in doxastic venture is conscious venturing’.Footnote ²⁹ Yet not only must such faith-believers reflectively judge the proposition in question to be evidentially ambiguous, they must do so correctly. ‘So’, Bishop writes,

These caveats may appear surprising at first, and I do not think they are unproblematic, as I discuss below. But first we must understand just why Bishop thinks these qualifications are important for his account. Since, for Bishop, the moral justifiability of a faith-belief rests on the agency-focused notion of epistemic entitlement, agents who are not epistemically reflective and just ‘happen’ to believe passionally without any views on the nature of the evidence do not ‘do’ anything for which they could be considered rational or irrational, and thus epistemic entitlement does not obviously appear to apply. In other words, the unreflective believer doesn't venture anything, since there is no awareness on his part of the risk he might be taking.Footnote ³¹ Interestingly, the same will be true of the reflective faith-believer who judges incorrectly that he has adequate evidential support for his faith-beliefs. He, too, fails to venture anything, since there is no perceived risk involved in his belief.Footnote ³² Of course, his belief itself is in fact risky, since unbeknownst to him it goes beyond what the evidence actually supports, but his believing it (or practically committing himself to it) is not.

What about the (potentially hyper-reflective) faith-believer who incorrectly judges that her belief lacks evidential support and yet nevertheless practically commits herself to it? She does seem to take a conscious risk, just as the faith-believer who gets it right does. My suspicion here is that Bishop does not want to count such endeavours as doxastic ventures, since in reality nothing is risked. Although the believer sees herself as venturing doxastically, she doesn't actually venture anything – like a trapeze artist who doesn't realize there is a safety net below her. Such an individual might turn out to be a wishful believer or self-deceiver or other type of doxastic ‘adventurer’ (since she does, in fact believe passionally), but she does not engage in doxastic venture, in so far as there is nothing really at stake.

Finally, the restriction on faith-ventures that the believer correctly identify the proposition in question as evidentially ambiguous is supposed to rule out the possibility that counter-evidential ventures such as self-deception (which would certainly be doxastically venturesome!) count as instances of faith. For Bishop, faith is a supra-evidential enterprise (in going beyond the evidence) but not a counter-evidential one.Footnote ³³ Thus, agents who correctly identify the evidence as indicating the falsity of a certain faith-proposition yet try to believe in the face of that evidence may venture doxastically, but not in the sense required for epistemically (and thus for morally) legitimate faith.

As we have seen, Bishop's claim is that practically committing oneself to certain faith-propositions that go beyond the evidence can be epistemically rational, provided they represent genuine options for the agent, who correctly assesses them as being evidentially undecidable. This, of course, opens the door for the possibility that supra-evidential faith ventures may also be morally justifiable. However, Bishop's account of faith is not without its problems. First, it is not so clear that doxastic venturers will always be as epistemically ‘in the clear’ as Bishop seems to think they are, for the threat of self-deception still looms large – and with it worries about the rationality (and thus, by Bishop's own account, the morality) of faith-believers. That is, Bishop's criteria for what counts as faith might allow for cases that might give us (or should at least give Bishop himself) pause. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Bishop's account appears to rule out certain candidates for religious faith that we might think quite naturally fall under this term. It is to these issues I now turn.

The doxastic venture model is too permissive: worries about self-deception

Before raising a few objections to Bishop's account, I think it important to note that the doxastic-venture model of faith has a distinct advantage over accounts that reduce religious faith to mere passive, affective responses to the divine, or to rational belief on religious matters in accordance with the evidence, since it observes that faith is also something active, something risky, something for which we are potentially responsible.Footnote ³⁴ That is, it rightly moves faith towards the realm of the practical. Nevertheless, Bishop appears to want to have his cake and eat it too by entrenching that move firmly in the realm of the doxastic. Indeed, he ultimately still understands faith as resting on epistemic rationality. Yet it is not clear that this really reflects what we take to be special and significant about religious faith. Further, it is precisely this requirement that might get the account into trouble on its own terms.

The nature and scope of self-deception is itself philosophically contested, but it is generally agreed that it represents a paradigm case of epistemic irrationality, in which subjects acquire or maintain a favoured belief in the face of strong evidence to the contrary.Footnote ³⁵ There are a few ways in which self-deception might appear to threaten Bishop's account. First, one might worry that, in a Pascalian-type manoeuvre, one could undertake a self-deceptive project for prudential (i.e. passional) reasons aimed at putting oneself in an emotional (or other passional state) that is likely to induce religious belief in oneself.Footnote ³⁶ However, Bishop explicitly claims that the doxastic venture he has in mind does not apply to cases in which subjects undertake self-deception as a means of passionally acquiring a belief:

Thus, Bishop adds in a footnote, Pascalian endeavours ‘are not themselves to be identified as doxastic ventures’, though they may ‘bring about the occasion for doxastic venture’ if Pascal's strategy works and a theistic belief has thereby been passionally induced.Footnote ³⁸

Of course, although Bishop may exclude Pascalian strategies aimed at acquiring passional beliefs from themselves counting as fully doxastic ventures, it is not so clear that he can rule them out as sub-doxastic ventures (which he also considers genuine faith-ventures), where subjects meet all the conditions required for fully doxastic venture, with the exception that they do not hold the relevant faith-proposition to be true.Footnote ³⁹ Thus if the Pascalian strategist aims for the passional acquisition of a religious belief, e.g. in the existence of God, and does so while correctly judging that the evidence cannot provide an answer on this question, then she will be venturing sub-doxastically. Of course, if we think (as we said above) that self-deception is a form of believing (or attempting to believe) in the face of evidence to the contrary, then this kind of Pascalian case might not even count as self-deception, and may even be admitted by Bishop's account as an epistemically rational undertaking which aspires to bring about the occasion for a fully doxastic venture.Footnote ⁴⁰

But the real problem for Bishop is not that some Pascalians may rationally come to hold passional beliefs which then become candidates for fully doxastic venture, but rather that some may irrationally do so. Indeed, given Bishop's epistemic criteria for fully doxastic faith-ventures, the aetiology of one's passional beliefs doesn't appear to matter at all to the determination of whether one's faith-venture is justified or not. All that matters is that I hold a particular faith-belief passionally, judge correctly that it is in principle evidentially undecidable, and then commit myself to its truth in my practical reasoning. If this were the whole view, then, it would seem that non-evidential beliefs, however they may be arrived at – e.g. via wishful thinking, self-deception, hypnosis, electroshock therapy, a bump on the head, and so on – may all be candidates for doxastic venturing, so long as they are held ‘passionally’ and paired with a correct judgement about their evidential ambiguity.

However, Bishop is concerned that the epistemic conditions he places on doxastic venturing do not, by themselves, go far enough to allow for moral justifiability. He thus adds two moral conditions, in order to rule out cases in which one practically commits oneself via doxastic venture to, e.g., the existence of Nazi gods. First, one's ‘non-evidential motivation for taking p to be true [must be] of a morally acceptable type’, and second, p itself must ‘conform with correct morality’.Footnote ⁴¹ Concerning the current worry regarding the aetiology of our passional beliefs, it will be the first of these two conditions that most explicitly interests us here. Bishop does not give specific examples of what he takes to be ‘morally unacceptable’ motivations, claiming only that ‘we do clearly recognize that some non-evidential motivations are morally honourable, and others dishonourable’ and assuming that some general theory of virtuous non-evidential motivations is feasible.Footnote ⁴² Nevertheless, perhaps we can venture an answer on Bishop's behalf. It is unlikely that the general class to which a particular motivation belongs (e.g. wish, desire, evaluative belief, affection, affiliation, emotion, etc.) will determine a motivation's virtuousness or lack thereof, rather this will more likely have to do with the content or object of the motivation. For example, religious beliefs passionally motivated by Nietzschean ressentiment, a desire to dull the pain of existence, or an instinct to exclude a certain class of people might be considered vicious, whereas those motivated by the evaluative belief that ‘it would be good – supremely good, perhaps the only way the supreme good could be realized – if that faith-proposition were true’,Footnote ⁴³ or by a desire to open oneself up to experiences that contribute significantly to human flourishing, might be more virtuous. Yet these considerations do not directly respond to the aetiology worry above. It may rule out those passional beliefs acquired via wishful thinking or self-deception that are viciously motivated, but what about those that are virtuously (or at least non-viciously) motivated? Is the religious faith-believer entitled to practically committing herself to the truth of those beliefs?

Again, we might respond on Bishop's behalf by claiming that the agent is epistemically entitled to such faith-beliefs, so long as she correctly judges the truth of those beliefs to be evidentially ambiguous – and not before. An agent who (via a non-vicious motivation) acquired the passional belief that God exists via a self-deceptive project, which involved her coming to believe in the face of what she took to be strong counter-evidence, is not epistemically entitled to her belief or to any ventures that she should undertake with it, since this would be a counter-evidential venture, and as we have seen Bishop excludes counter-evidential ventures from faith-ventures. If, on the other hand, the agent changes her mind about the force of the evidence, concluding now that it is ambiguous, it would seem that, on Bishop's view, she is now (and only now) entitled to continue to take her passional beliefs to be true, since she is no longer believing counter to the evidence. Thus, what was once an irrationally (counter-evidentially) held passional belief might now be a rationally (supra-evidentially) held one.

However, this leaves room for a kind of self-deceptive project that – while not itself presuming to be a faith-venture – could be employed in the service of faith. Consider the case of a hyper-reflective epistemologist, call her Hildy. Hyper-reflective Hildy was raised in a Mennonite community by Mennonite parents. She went to Mennonite schools, attended (and still attends) Mennonite churches, and so on. Thus, Hildy's ‘default’ belief, so to speak, has always been a passional belief in the existence of God, one motivated by her upbringing in and her strong affiliation with the Mennonite culture. However, Hildy has always had an inquisitive nature, and when she goes off to university she decides to study philosophy. Hildy studies the major arguments for the existence of God, and to her surprise finds them relatively unconvincing (especially once she hears the objections to them). She also studies several of the ‘great atheists’, and finds their arguments significantly more persuasive. After years of study and careful consideration, she comes to the considered conclusion that the evidence points markedly against the existence of God. Yet she cannot shake the feeling that God exists – and in her private life, she still attends church and takes this belief to be true in her practical reasoning. Further, she reflectively believes that certain human goods could only be attained if God were to exist (but also that this fact does not itself provide sufficient evidence for God's existence). We can imagine Hildy running across Bishop's Believing by Faith – or perhaps, as bright as she is, gleaning the point directly from James himself. She realizes that were she able to conclude sincerely that the evidence for God's existence is essentially ambiguous, not only could she continue to commit herself to her passional belief with good conscience, she could even be said to exercise the virtue of faith, a trait any theist would think it good to have.Footnote ⁴⁴

Here, we can imagine Hyper-reflective Hildy embarking on a kind of self-deceptive Pascalian enterprise, aimed at getting herself to believe that the evidence is ambiguous. Yet to do so requires her to commit a kind of ‘epistemic sabotage’ in order to bring about a change in her evidential standards (or at least in what she takes the evidence to show). In the service of this ‘irrational project’, then, there are several strategies she may adopt. She may selectively attend to pro-Jamesian-flavoured texts and ignore those likely to raise objections. She may filter through the literature, taking extensive notes on those arguments more likely to confirm her desired belief that the evidence is ambiguous and neglecting to write down any other arguments. She may be careful to try to attend anti-evidentialist conferences and thereby avoid opponents of her favoured view. She may even take on as her thesis adviser a known non-evidentialist. Now although this might require Hildy to be a little less hyper-reflective than she was in her earlier academic days, she may see this sacrifice as being well worth the reward.Footnote ⁴⁵ And by habituating herself to such unreflective ‘scholarly’ techniques, she may in fact successfully undermine her earlier epistemic standards, now characterizing the former as having been part of a ‘learning process’ and thereby coming to believe that God's existence is by its very nature evidentially undecidable.Footnote ⁴⁶

In such a case, Hildy will hold a passional belief that God exists, motivated by a perfectly virtuous affiliation with the Mennonite tradition (together with an evaluative belief in the value of faith), and will (assuming Bishop is right) correctly judge that this belief is undecidable on the evidence. She is, then, perfectly epistemically entitled by Bishop's standards to embark upon a doxastic venture and to count as believing by faith, despite her having arrived at her (correct) judgement about the status of the evidence in an epistemically irrational and irresponsible manner. Yet, in this case, it would seem odd to say that Hildy is entitled to her passional belief, since she arrived at this ‘entitlement’ via self-deceptive means.Footnote ⁴⁷

Now, the case of Hildy may (as with many philosophical examples) appear contrived, but it shows that there might be something missing in Bishop's account of faith. If the aetiology of one's passionally held beliefs doesn't matter, then it seems that self-deceived (or merely epistemically lucky) agents may be able to count as having faith, despite having arrived at their beliefs via epistemically suspect means. Thus, Bishop's account may seem too permissive on this point. If having faith has something to do with epistemic virtue (as it appears to on Bishop's account), then we should hope that it cannot be arrived at via epistemically vicious means.

The doxastic-venture model is too restrictive: unreflective and disagreeing believers

Whereas the above considerations point to the possibility that Bishop's doxastic-venture model of faith fails to rule out cases he himself might want to dismiss, I now want to consider the possibility that the account ends up being too restrictive. As we saw above, believers who have not reflected on the status of the evidence for their faith-beliefs appear to be excluded from the doxastic-venture model as elucidated by Bishop. Now Bishop himself admits that he is intentionally restricting his discussion to the realm of ‘reflective faith-believers, who are interested in the question of whether they are morally justified in taking, or continuing to take, the relevant faith-beliefs to be true in their practical reasoning’.Footnote ⁴⁸ He also notes that ‘[N]ot all faith-believers are “reflective”, of course’,Footnote ⁴⁹ and he even concedes that perhaps not every faith-believer ought to be (or become) reflective: ‘a life of “simple faith” may (under some conditions, anyway) be at least blameless and even fully virtuous’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet it is not clear here what ‘simple faith’ would look like on Bishop's view. From the outset, he has assumed that faith must essentially involve more than mere belief, since otherwise it would be merely passive and receptive. However, if faith does involve more than just believing certain propositions – if it involves a practical commitment to those propositions – then questions of moral justifiability would appear to apply to reflective and unreflective faith-believers alike, and Bishop basically admits as much.Footnote ⁵¹ But as we have seen above, given that Bishop endorses the moral-epistemic link principle, it is by no means clear that unreflective faith-believers believe with epistemic entitlement, even if it turns out their faith-beliefs themselves might be, e.g., the result of a reliable belief-forming process or otherwise have epistemic worth. So it is hard to see how such ‘simpletons’ could be said to have faith on Bishop's view, unless the kind of faith he has in mind is either (a) of a completely different kind from that of reflective faith-believers, or (b) of the same kind but somehow epistemically (and thus morally) less praiseworthy. If the former, then Bishop owes us an account of how ‘simple faith’ is also venturesome (and thus counts as genuine faith). If the latter, then it is unclear how the simpleton's faith exhibits true virtue.Footnote ⁵²

Take an example that Bishop himself discusses: the case of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham was surely not an analytic philosopher, let alone an epistemologist. It is doubtful whether he had any sophisticated philosophical views on the nature of the evidence.Footnote ⁵³ But perhaps this is not necessary for reflective doxastic venture. Perhaps all that is required is an ‘inkling’ or a ‘dim awareness’ that one is believing beyond (but, importantly, not counter to) one's evidence when one commits oneself practically to the truth of certain faith-propositions. Or perhaps it is enough that the evidence actually be essentially ambiguous, regardless of what Abraham believes about it, so long as he himself refrains from making a judgement one way or another regarding the evidence.Footnote ⁵⁴ But in either case, it is difficult to see how Abraham makes a willing, epistemically entitled venture on Bishop's model. If he is only ‘dimly aware’ that his commitment outstrips his evidence, it is not clear he is epistemically entitled to make this ‘leap’. If he makes no judgement regarding the evidence whatsoever, he is unreflective, and it is unclear how he ventures anything willingly.

Interestingly, it is not just unreflective believers who run into problems. Reflective believers who do not arrive at the same conclusions as Bishop about the essential evidential ambiguity regarding, e.g., the existence of God (or other ‘fundamental principles’ of religious doxastic frameworks) do not appear capable of faith either. Of course, if Bishop's view regarding the ambiguity of the evidence for religious belief is incorrect, then it appears that no one ever justifiably makes a supra-evidential doxastic venture in the realm of religious belief, and that we must be error theorists about faith. On the other hand, if Bishop's view is correct, and such fundamental framing principles are ‘essentially evidentially undecidable’,Footnote ⁵⁵ then a theist of the Reformed-epistemology persuasion who thinks (pace Bishop) that these fundamental theistic beliefs are properly basic, or a struggling intellectual theist like Hyper-reflective Hildy who concludes that the evidence against the existence of God outweighs the evidence for it, are incapable of having faith, since they have incorrect beliefs about the nature of the evidence. The former ventures without knowing it, and the latter ventures in the face of the supposed evidence – neither of which constitutes epistemically entitled belief for Bishop. Indeed, it would seem that many figures in the history of philosophyFootnote ⁵⁶ are excluded from counting amongst the faithful in this respect, including all those philosophers and natural theologians who have at some point claimed that there are persuasive demonstrative arguments for the existence of God, since they would be likely to deny that God's existence is evidentially ambiguous. The doxastic-venture model appears to rule out those figures like Abelard or Meister Eckhart, who thought that the teachings of Scripture and Christian doctrine were compatible with (or even, in the case of Meister Eckhart, equivalent to) the doctrines of the ancient philosophers, which can be arrived at through the exercise of reason and are thus rationally defensible.Footnote ⁵⁷ It would appear to exclude all those strands of Islam, which claims that the Signs of Allah are found everywhere in Creation,Footnote ⁵⁸ where failure to acknowledge these Signs as evidence of God's existence is understood as precisely what it is to reject faith.Footnote ⁵⁹ At any rate, to say that none of these individuals are persons of faith seems woefully unfair.Footnote ⁶⁰ Thus we might be inclined to think that Bishop's theory of reflective faith is not inclusive enough. To be sure, no one said faith should be easy, but neither should it be so restrictive as to make it more difficult for a reflective evidentialist to pass through the eye of a needle than to be counted amongst the faithful.