Faith

Faith, derived from Latin fides and Old French feid, is confidence or trust in a person, thing, or concept. In the context of religion, faith is "belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion". According to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, faith has multiple definitions, including "something that is believed especially with strong conviction," "complete trust", "belief and trust in and loyalty to God", as well as "a firm belief in something for which there is no proof". Religious people often think of faith as confidence based on a perceived degree of warrant, or evidence, while others who are more skeptical of religion tend to think of faith as simply belief without evidence. The word "faith" derives from the Latin word fides, which, in the Roman world, was understood without particular association to gods or beliefs. Instead it was understood as a paradoxical set of reciprocal ideas: voluntary will and voluntary restraint in the sense of father over family or host over guest, whereby one party willfully surrenders to a party who could do harm but choses not to, thereby entrusting or confiding in them. According to Thomas Aquinas, faith is "an act of the intellect assenting to the truth at the command of the will". Religion has a long tradition, since the ancient world, of analyzing divine questions using common human experience such as sensation, reason, science, and history that do not rely on revelation—called Natural theology. The English word faith is thought to date from 1200 to 1250, from the Middle English feith, via Anglo-French fed, Old French feid, feit from Latin fidem, accusative of fidēs (trust), akin to fīdere (to trust). James W. Fowler#Stages of Faith James W. Fowler (1940–2015) proposes a series of stages of faith-development (or spiritual development) across the human lifespan. His stages relate closely to the work of Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg regarding aspects of psychological development in children and adults.