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If faith is what bolsters the believers, could hope be a form of secular prayer? What is the difference between faith and hope, anyway? Philosophy professor Sam Newlands explains that while the two occupy the same categorical space, they are fundamentally different philosophical mindsets. Faith is fueled by a sense of certainty about an outcome, even if that conviction outstrips the evidence. Hope on the other hand can be cognitively inconsistent and still escape scrutiny: you can think something is highly improbable and still hope for it to be true. Here, Newlands discusses the intersection of hope and faith in a religious context: is religion without faith possible? Can hope manifest religious belief?

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SAM NEWLANDS:

Sam Newlands earned his Ph.D in philosophy at Yale University and is currently the William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Notre Dame.

His work to date has centered on three overlapping areas: early modern philosophy (especially Spinoza and Leibniz), metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. Newlands also serves as the co-director for the Center for Philosophy of Religion, and was the co-director of the Hope & Optimism initiative.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Sam Newlands: What’s interesting is that hope in particular seems to have a kind of really low barrier for cognitive consistency.

So as long as I don’t believe something to be impossible, it seems to be an object that’s at least possible for me to hope for. So I don’t think it’s impossible and I don’t think it’s certain; it seems to be a candidate for hope.

And insofar as then my desire for it kicks in and it engages my agency in the right sorts of ways, it seems like I can actually hope for it.

So in the religious tradition there’s a lot of work that’s been done on, of course, hope, and particularly the relation between hope and other so-called theological virtues: faith and love. And one of the things we were interested in has to do with the connection between faith and hope.

So a lot of people think of faith as having a kind of belief commitment that something is going to be certain, or that something is going to be probable that maybe outstrips the evidence. And the interesting thing about hope is that it seems to kind of float free from judgments about the evidence. So you can hope for something even though you really don’t believe it’s likely to come about. And so one of the things we were interested in with this project is, when it comes to the religious context, what sorts of religious practices does mere hoping cultivate?

So, for instance, suppose you were someone who had religious beliefs but for various reasons have come to believe other things. Maybe you’ve become agnostic about the existence of God, say. But nonetheless you still hope that God exists. And if you do hope that God exists, what sorts of practices does that kind of hoping inspire? Is it possible to hopefully pray even though you don’t actually believe that God exists? Can you still pray and hope? Can you participate in religious practices and communities even though you don’t actually endorse the beliefs necessarily anymore? But nonetheless you still hope for an afterlife or you hope for the unity of virtue and happiness in the end. So what sorts of distinctive beliefs and practices can we get if we have hope without faith?

With respect to the religious situation, as long as I don’t believe that the existence of God, say, is logically impossible—and few even adamant atheists would say it’s logically impossible that God exists or that they’re absolutely certain that God doesn’t exist, just like most theists would not say they’re absolutely certain that God exists—so here we are.

We’re between absolute impossibility and certainty. Well that’s the perfect space for hope to operate in. And so, in a way, hope in the religious context doesn’t necessarily involve assessment of the odds or the probability in the way that maybe faith would. And so as long as you can think yes, there’s a consistent narrative in some particular religious tradition, even if I’m not sure that it’s true or I don’t even think it’s likely that it’s true. Nonetheless you might engage in the kind of hope that say the Christian God exists, and in doing so that might actually motivate certain kinds of religious practices.

So I think it’s definitely the case that we...

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