For many people, religion (usually meaning Christianity) involves beliefs and faith. Language, like religion, changes through time. At one point in time, belief was used to mean “trust in God” and faith meant “loyalty to a person based on promise or duty.” Faith did not imply any notion of a deity. By the thirteenth century, belief had begun to acquire a religious sense with the meaning of “things held to be true as a matter of religious doctrine” and by the sixteenth century belief was being used to mean “mental acceptance of something as true.” Faith had begun to acquire a religious meaning by the fourteenth century.
Belief
Belief is one of those concepts that is a bit nebulous. In an article in the British publication NewScientist, Graham Lawton writes:
“Knowing something is true is different from believing it to be true; knowledge is objective, but belief is subjective.”
Graham Lawton also writes:
“Belief comes easily; doubt takes effort. While this doesn’t seem like a smart strategy for navigating the world, it makes sense in the light of evolution. If the sophisticated cognitive systems that underpin belief evolved from more primitive perceptual ones, they would retain many of the basic features of these simpler systems. One of these is the uncritical acceptance of incoming information.”
With regard to etymology, the Old English word geleafa meant “belief, faith” and came from the Proto West Germanic *ga-laubon meaning “to hold dear, esteem, trust.” The intensive prefix *ga became bi or be, which is an unusual prefix. In the late twelfth century, the world bileave replaced geleafa and evolved into the present-day belief. The final consonant f was developed in the fifteenth century.
The emphasis on belief in Christianity and the change in the meaning of the English word belief came about in part because of the Reformation. With the Reformation, there was a new emphasis on the importance of belief and the word belief came to mean the intellectual acceptance of religious doctrine. In her book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Karen Armstrong writes:
“As the Reformation progressed, it became important to explain the differences between the new and the old religion, as well as between the different Protestant sects—hence the list of obligatory ‘beliefs’ in the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Lambeth Articles, and the Westminster Confession.”
Faith
American Christians often use the word faith as synonymous with religion and by religion, of course, they often mean Christianity. They seem to assume that belief and faith are defining concepts for all religions, which is, of course, not true. Mark Rubenstein, in his textbook An Introduction to Human Geography: The Cultural Landscape, writes:
“Faith came into its own with the invention of Christianity. The word faith (in its sense of ‘having faith’) essentially does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, but appears, on average once per page of the New Testament (254 times).”
Mark Rubenstein also writes:
“Doctrines justified by religious faith are qualitatively different. Crucial aspects of faith claims take place where we can’t see them (God, heaven, hell, the soul, the irrecoverable past, or the uncharted future).”
In The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, A.C. Grayling writes:
“What centrally constitutes the standard examples of religion—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—is faith in the existence of a supernatural, transcendent, divine being (or beings, if one includes angels, saints, demons or other personae of the given deity), and they further involve espousal of values and practices taken to be required in response to the existence of these beings, including worship and praise of it or them, submission and obedience to the commands taken to emanate from it or them, and so on.”
Turning from philosophy to etymology, the word faith began to appear in English in the mid-thirteenth century (it was also spelled feith at this time). It originated in the Old French feid which is from the Latin fides, meaning “trust, faith, confidence, reliance, credence, belief) and which came from the Proto-Indo-Europan root *bheidh- meaning “to trust.”
In the early fourteenth century, faith acquired the meaning “assent of the mind to the truth of a statement for which there is incomplete evidence.” In the mid-fourteenth century, faith was used in reference to Christianity and by the end of the century it was being used in reference to any religion.
It should be pointed out that in Middle English, faith was also used to mean “a sword oath.”
Faith Healer
Religion and healing have been closely intertwined for nearly as long as there has been religion. The term faith healer came into English in 1874.
Even as science has advanced knowledge of the nature of many diseases and has produced many effective treatments, faith healers have continued to prosper in the twenty-first century. Due to the high cost of healthcare and the lack of knowledge about science, people seek out faith healers to cure them and to help them avoid diseases. In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins writes:
“There is a little evidence that religious belief protects people from stress-related diseases. The evidence is not strong, but it would not be surprising if it were true, for the same kind of reason as faith-healing might turn out to work in a few cases.”