| dc.description.abstract | This paper is about religious faith, and how philosophy should approach the topic. As a starting point, I will assume that religious faith is a good thing, and that philosophy can help enlighten how religious faith ought to be practiced, and more important, what kind of action faith is. I shall be working with two main philosophers, though I will frequently quote other thinkers and works, where I judge that beneficial. The two philosophers and main characters in this text is Søren Kierkegaard and Richard Swinburne. The two of them share a strong Christian faith, which validity or invalidity is not the subject of this paper. Rather, it is the question of how philosophy ought to approach religious faith, they fundamentally disagree. Swinburne insist that religion, in his case primarily Christianity, can and should be subjected to rigorous scrutiny and critical analysis, the same way one would approach any other philosophical problem or even scientific discovery. In doing so, you will come to see that Christianity is objectively true. Swinburne aims to prove that Christianity as a religion is probably true. Kierkegaard firmly dismiss all talk about any objective standards in faith. Faith is, according to him, inherently a subjective undertaking of the most intimate and personal sort. Faith is not a scientific or logical compulsion, rather it is an ethical choice, made when freeing oneself from despair and in the face of terrible anxiety. I have gone through each of their defences for religious faith, tried to sum up the most crucial aspects and given a description of their reasoning. In the end, I have endeavoured to discuss and contemplate Swinburne and Kierkegaard alike, praising what I find praiseworthy, and criticising where I disagree, and of course, explain how I myself think. I have primarily criticised Swinburne for neglecting the importance of subjective devotion and passion in his apologetics. Kierkegaard I criticise for his refusal to seek God outside of the human psyche and I discuss how I think a changing context in time and environment creates further difficulties for his religious approach. In the end I have concluded that both Swinburne and Kierkegaard have important and valid points, though in the end it is my subjective opinion do think that Kierkegaard is the one that has best understood what religious faith is, or at least ought to be. | eng |