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Is there any difference between faith and belief philosophically speaking?
I am trying to think of these two concepts as separate, but I am unable to unlink them.
Is there any answer or any texts that you would suggest to help clarify my thoughts about them?
Here I offer a scientist's view. If you are a philosopher, your mileage may vary:
"Belief" represents the acceptance of validity based on evidence, as in for example "I accept the validity of both special and general relativity. Even though I personally have not experimentally verified their validity, I believe them." This is what it means for a scientist to "believe in" things like the laws of statistical thermodynamics, Maxwell's equations, Kirchhoff's relations, and so on.
In contrast, "faith" means acceptance of validity without scientific evidence, with the prime example being faith in religion, the validity of which cannot be determined experimentally.
Eric Schwitzgebel describes belief as a propositional attitude:
Contemporary Anglophone philosophers of mind generally use the term “belief” to refer to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true. To believe something, in this sense, needn’t involve actively reflecting on it: Of the vast number of things ordinary adults believe, only a few can be at the fore of the mind at any single time. Nor does the term “belief”, in standard philosophical usage, imply any uncertainty or any extended reflection about the matter in question (as it sometimes does in ordinary English usage). Many of the things we believe, in the relevant sense, are quite mundane: that we have heads, that it’s the 21st century, that a coffee mug is on the desk.
Faith in a religious context likely implies both something more specific than whatever pops into our minds that we agree with and also more significant than the mundane beliefs Schwitzgebel refers to such as that we have heads.
Schwitzgebel continues:
Forming beliefs is thus one of the most basic and important features of the mind, and the concept of belief plays a crucial role in both philosophy of mind and epistemology.
Here one might get another distinction between faith and belief. Belief plays a role in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Faith plays a role in theology and religious practice.
Schwitzgebel, Eric, "Belief", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/belief/.
Belief is usually seen as an intellectual position: something we think is true, good, etc. Faith is what we trust and depend on.
There are many things which could be believed, but which it would be hard to meaningfully trust. For example:
There are some beliefs which we can trust:
In religion it is easy to see how they work together. Most religions both assert truths and promote some spiritual reality as a reliable foundation on which to build our lives. Many have scriptures which tell a history of their god or gods being trustworthy. Many teach an ethical system which they believe is shown repeatedly to lead to human flourishing. Many encourage their people to share with their communities how their god or gods have supported them through difficult times. Religious people have faith when what they believe, including their past experiences of the divine, leads them to trust that same divine for the future.
But it's also easy to see that many people with religious beliefs do not live faith-based lives. There are "Sunday" Christians, "Saturday" Jews, and "Friday" Muslims who attend their religious community's meeting but who live the rest of their week without their beliefs making much of a difference. And of course there are many people who might say they believe in God without ever attending a religious service. Many religious people do not trust their god or gods to help them in difficult times, and some may be convinced by certain apologetic arguments for the existence of the divine without having any personal experience of it. Some forms of Deism could be said to be purely a spiritual belief with no faith component.
Faith is the infant child that knows Mummy is the source of all good before it knows what is mother(hood) or even how to say Momma!
IOW faith is pre-emotional, pre-intellectual; vivid vivacious vivifying, close to the source of life itself.
Belief is the ossification of faith; a half live half dead thing which has its own peculiar not-so-pleasant smell.
At the deepest level, faith is inevitably faith towards the source of life itself. Theists may choose to represent this source as The Source – God – but it can be seen in non-theistic, non-religious contexts such as when someone puts up a heroic fight against a terrible disease or adversary. While it often is based on a theistic orientation or the adversity generates so called religious feeling this is not necessary; it could be something more elemental – Schopenhauer called it Will to Life. Where does that Will originate? The faith that life is good to live however seemingly locally bad
Children naturally have few beliefs and strong faith. That's the source of their vivacity
But any strong and successful person – say a rags-to-riches story – will invariably be seen to have a faith in their idea their wish, ultimately faith in themselves.
And as that faith hardens into fixed patterns - ossified beliefs - it loses its power.
Heck the very engagement of questioners and answerers here requires the faith that there are reasonable decent humans on the other side, – we are not failing some Turing-test with a bot! – asking/answering "in good faith".
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belief:
the feeling of being certain that something exists or is true;
a strong feeling that something is true or real;
Belief is a feeling of certainty that something exists, is true, or is good.
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faith:
great trust or confidence in something or someone;
strong belief in God or a particular religion;
If you have faith in someone or something, you feel confident about their ability or goodness.
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Since I have faith in dictionaries (not belief), from the definitions I got, my belief (not faith) is that when we consider certainty of IDEAS we use belief and when something is mainly related to CONFIDENCE in SOMETHING or SOMEONE we use faith.
The idea transacted by 'belief in God' must be the certainty in its existence + faith. And the idea transacted by 'faith in God' must be the confidence in God. 'Belief in Buddhism' implies the certainty in its truth or goodness + faith.
"My family still believes in God; but after this pandemic I lost faith in Him." Without any explanation if this statement conveys the same idea as intended, the second part of the sentence is to filter out faith (confidence) from belief. That means, in some occasions belief can contain faith (confidence in something) also [without any scientific evidence].
Often neither of these words can be replaced by the other. So we can say, one is not a subdivision of the other.
