Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), John Henry Newman (1801-1890), and William James (1842-1910) all defended the right of persons to embrace religious beliefs that are not strictly warranted by empirical evidence and logical argumentation. Faith must not be hampered, they argued, by the demands of reason narrowly conceived. Paul Sands notes, however, important differences in the way each relates faith to reason. Kierkegaard emphasizes discontinuity: faith is a divine gift that opens a sphere of truth inaccessible to objectifying rationality. John Henry Newman stresses continuity: faith ventures beyond evidence, but only as the mind itself bridges the gap between proof and certitude by a subtle and flexible exercise of the "illative sense." William James also emphasizes continuity, but he goes much further than Newman in relativizing reason by exposing its passional nature. Sands examines the religious epistemologies of Kierkegaard, Newman, and James in the context of two "givens" characteristic of early twenty-first century culture, namely, the intellectual hegemony of probabilism and the pluralization of the Western mind. He probes the writings of each author in three key areas: the role of evidence in religious faith, the nature and legitimacy of the so-called "venture" of faith, and the question of how best to adjudicate disputed religious truth claims. In the end, Sands concludes that William James incorporates and transcends the best insights of Kierkegaard and Newman while offering a pragmatic method of verification that provides a modest, but workable approach to the rational adjudication of religious truth claims.

Paul F. Sands is Assistant Professor of Religion at Baylor University. Before joining Baylor, he taught philosophy of religion at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.