Belief is the foundation for all of epistemology and any subsequent knowledge that is consequently derived; hence to know something, one must believe it to be true. To properly comprehend belief, one must accept a state-object view, and in doing so, a foundation for understanding saving faith is established, where belief ‘in’ is a necessary but not sufficient condition of grace and must be coupled with the gift of God’s divine election to come to fruition. Traditional realism based on propositional belief should be acknowledged, and one should dismiss dispositional-state or eliminativist notions, overly strong requirements for the sufficiency of belief, and voluntarism.
State-Object View and Propositional Beliefs
A belief, from a realist perspective, takes on a state-object view, in which, ‘Believing’ is a relation such that ‘S believes that p,’ where p is a proposition towards which an agent, S, exhibits an attitude of acceptance. ... Propositions are the objects of belief and must be understood to be abstract, non-linguistic structures and not identical to the entity that may be used to express it. They transcend language, therefore a German and an Argentinean can have the same abstract proposition leading to the same belief, even if they don’t speak each other’s dialect. ... many people can have the same belief. This is a traditional view of belief, and can be further categorized as belief ‘that,’ as opposed to belief ‘in,’ which will later be shown to often relate to a type of belief called saving faith. ... The first type of belief is referred to as occurent, as in a belief that one is currently aware of and accepts or assents to it. At this moment, as I’m typing this paper in the late afternoon, I’m starting to feel hot, and thus I continue on to have an occurent belief that if I turn on my fan, it will cool the room. ... A belief may also occur as a standing belief, in which, the belief is in one’s mind, but not in one’s current consciousness. ... It’s safe to say that at any given moment, most of the beliefs that we hold are of the standing sort, but when something transpires to bring a standing belief into our stream of consciousness, then it transitions into an occurent belief.
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