A Comparison Between the Effect of Reason and the Effect of Volition on Faith in God From the Viewpoint of the Holy Qur’ān

In the history of Philosophy, there have been three general approaches to relation between faith in God and faith in other religious facts on the one hand, and reasoning on the other hand, including strong rationalism, Fideism, and a combination of these two approaches such as Agustin’s opinion. This paper has been written to show that based on the Holy Qur’ān, people indeed establish their faith based on volition, not inference. The Holy Qur’ān says that a minimal level of rationality is enough to have faith in God and after that, there is not any other way for people rather than choosing faith. According to the Holy Qur’ān, volition is so determinative for faith that God has planned some experiments to put people in voluntary situations. This approach shows that the Holy Qur’ān’s point of view rejects the philosophical idea of Strong Rationalism for faith in God. In the Holy Qur’ān (the Muslims’ Holy Book), there are several ways to approve God’s existence. On the one hand, some of them are arguments and some are evidences used in special ways that are not similar to the arguments. On the other hand, some different factors are mentioned as factors effective on people’s faith in God. These factors include cases not classified in rational categories such as arguments and evidences. Moreover, some situations are described in this Holy Book that show people choose their faith voluntarily. It will be important to find that how much is the contribution of each mentioned factor in having faith in God. Overall, it should be mentioned that analyzing the nature of faith is not the main task of this paper, but it is just a study about the comparison between the effect of reason on faith and the effect of volition according to the Holy Qur’ān.

Keywords:

Faith , Holy Quran , Strong Rationalism , Volition , Divine experiment