I recently wrote an article about my experience trying to connect with the divine, which you can find here. My friend David, who has a doctorate in theology, wrote me a rather compelling response. It's worth reading what I wrote to gain the most from his reading, but his words below are worth a read no matter what.
1) You should visit some Dominican friars.
2) Whatever faith is, for the Christian, it can't be some tacit inference from warm tingling sensations or communal experiences to full-fledged dogma, which you could then pick apart and reason your way into from a skeptical vantage point. Likewise, it's not something you can simply will yourself to have. Scripture insists that faith is a gift, not from ourselves.
3) One brilliant Franciscan helped me (through his writings) understand faith as an intellectual virtue in the Aristotelian sense, albeit an infused rather than acquired virtue. On the Aristotelian scheme, knowledge is produced when the active intellect abstracts intelligible forms from the particular things it sees onto the passive or receptive intellect. The difference in the case of faith is that the form in question is impressed by God onto the passive intellect, hence it is a supernatural gift.
It might be that the form impressed just is the knowledge in question, i.e., certain truths about God. But another way to think of it that I've been kicking around for a long time is this: the form that is impressed is the habit of recognizing and accepting truths about God. This would be analogous to the way that we come to trust other human beings or know truths about their inner lives. Through various forms of contact, a person makes an impression in our minds, so that we have something in our imagination about the inner lives, character, desires, etc., that lie behind what they see and say, and in virtue of that impression, when they do or say things that align with that character, or are reported to do so, we believe it. If the impression they form is of a trustworthy sort, then when they tell us things we believe them.
So anyway I guess I speculatively lean towards the view that what happens in the gift of faith is that God impresses in us a sort of familiarity, so that when we hear truths about God, we habitually believe them, recognize them as true, because of an inner familiarity through contact. Once it's given, our minds possess a faculty which really is ours, because by it we really can believe the truth about God in a reliable way, i.e., we can reliably discern true from false when it comes to God.
Faith would thus be the first step towards friendship with God, and like the formation of any friendship it requires that we gain a reliable cognitive impression of the character and inner life of the one who we will befriend. It's just that when it comes to God, we can't do this without God's gracious revelation of himself to our minds, and hence in this case it's a supernatural gift.
This picture is, of course, theologically committed from the start. It's not an argument to a skeptic that they should have faith. But that's really a feature and not a bug: the point is (among other things) a picture of what faith is from a Christian perspective that shows that *given God exists and infuses this kind of intellectual habit*, it would be a rational, reliable epistemic faculty precisely without supplying a proof to available to skeptics.
On Christian Faith a response by David Mahfood
1) You should visit some Dominican friars.
2) Whatever faith is, for the Christian, it can't be some tacit inference from warm tingling sensations or communal experiences to full-fledged dogma, which you could then pick apart and reason your way into from a skeptical vantage point. Likewise, it's not something you can simply will yourself to have. Scripture insists that faith is a gift, not from ourselves.
3) One brilliant Franciscan helped me (through his writings) understand faith as an intellectual virtue in the Aristotelian sense, albeit an infused rather than acquired virtue. On the Aristotelian scheme, knowledge is produced when the active intellect abstracts intelligible forms from the particular things it sees onto the passive or receptive intellect. The difference in the case of faith is that the form in question is impressed by God onto the passive intellect, hence it is a supernatural gift.
It might be that the form impressed just is the knowledge in question, i.e., certain truths about God. But another way to think of it that I've been kicking around for a long time is this: the form that is impressed is the habit of recognizing and accepting truths about God. This would be analogous to the way that we come to trust other human beings or know truths about their inner lives. Through various forms of contact, a person makes an impression in our minds, so that we have something in our imagination about the inner lives, character, desires, etc., that lie behind what they see and say, and in virtue of that impression, when they do or say things that align with that character, or are reported to do so, we believe it. If the impression they form is of a trustworthy sort, then when they tell us things we believe them.
So anyway I guess I speculatively lean towards the view that what happens in the gift of faith is that God impresses in us a sort of familiarity, so that when we hear truths about God, we habitually believe them, recognize them as true, because of an inner familiarity through contact. Once it's given, our minds possess a faculty which really is ours, because by it we really can believe the truth about God in a reliable way, i.e., we can reliably discern true from false when it comes to God.
Faith would thus be the first step towards friendship with God, and like the formation of any friendship it requires that we gain a reliable cognitive impression of the character and inner life of the one who we will befriend. It's just that when it comes to God, we can't do this without God's gracious revelation of himself to our minds, and hence in this case it's a supernatural gift.
This picture is, of course, theologically committed from the start. It's not an argument to a skeptic that they should have faith. But that's really a feature and not a bug: the point is (among other things) a picture of what faith is from a Christian perspective that shows that *given God exists and infuses this kind of intellectual habit*, it would be a rational, reliable epistemic faculty precisely without supplying a proof to available to skeptics.