摘要：Faith, from Plato onward, has been considered a form of knowledge, usuallya lower and more unstable form. Faith is “belief,” adhering to certainpropositions that are taken to be true and valid but without having yetachieved full evidence when faith makes way for “sight” or proven knowledge.Philosophers of religion have often seen it as their primary task to show thecoherence and validity of faith, to attempt to prove some of its most centralclaims, such as the existence of God or the possibility of an afterlife. Some of themost well-known analytical philosophers of religion, most prominently RichardSwinburne, have been primarily focused on this task, trying to prove God’sexistence or at least show that it is more probable than not.1 Continentalphilosophy of religion, a much more recent endeavor, has generally eschewedsuch attempts at proving God’s existence, often dismissing this as a futile taskand instead has tried to examine religious experience in its various facets.2 Thetwo groups thus seem to approach the question of faith from quite differentphilosophical perspectives and to think of it in very different terms.3 Yet such ablack-and-white juxtaposition is too easy. In fact, there have been attempts torethink the relation between faith and knowledge on the analytical side anddespite its quite different style there are also desires to “prove” aspects of beliefor show the rational coherence of faith on the continental side. What I will try toshow in this paper is that when it comes to philosophical analysis of matters offaith the more fundamental distinction is not between analytical and continental,but between regarding faith as a “knowledge game,” namely as “rational” (orsemi-rational) belief, and treating faith as a practice, namely as a socialphenomenon of actions and practices that give meaning to people’s lives.Representatives of both positions can be found on both sides of the continental-analytical divide, even if the former is more dominant in analytical circles and the latter slightly more prevalent in continental ones.4 I will also suggest that the latter is a more productive and more inclusive way of thinking of religion, one that focuses on religion as a human phenomenon instead of attempting to prove claims about the divine. (Although I cannot show that in any detail here, the focus on faith as being fundamentally about knowledge rather than about practices is also a narrowly Christian approach that does not apply well to other religious traditions.)
