Having looked at the two meanings of belief, let us now consider the word faith. Unlike belief, whose meaning changed drastically during the seventeenth century, the word faith has retained much of its original meaning in modern English. Yet, the two words are often used inaccurately as synonyms, thereby adding to the confusion and giving rise…
In the previous post, I briefly discussed the contemporary meaning of the word belief. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith notes, the modern sense of believing essentially involves “the holding of certain ideas” in one’s mind. Furthermore, Smith shows that the modern usage of the word believing assumes and implies that it is some thing very different…
In his book Faith and Belief (1979), the Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith analyzes these two terms from a variety of angles, including the history of their usage. Smith notes that many people use the words faith and belief in a more or less interchangeable manner, as if they were synonyms; yet, the two words…