Can faith be based on hope rather than belief or intellectual assent?

I've been reflecting on the interplay between faith and hope, especially when hope entails some degree of uncertainty and lack of intellectual assent but a strong desire for something to be true. Consider a scenario where an individual, exposed to the preaching of the Gospel, the promises of Christianity, and arguments and evidence for its core tenets, might express, "Though I don't know if Christianity is true, and I'm not highly or overwhelmingly confident, in light of the evidence I certainly believe it has potential to be true (i.e., it makes sense and I can't rule it out), and sincerely *wish* and *hope* it is true." Is it possible to redefine faith, traditionally rooted in strong beliefs, to encompass the prospect of being grounded in hope? Can individuals anchor their faith in hope rather than belief or intellectual assent, acknowledging uncertainty yet finding enough motivation rooted in hope in order to act "as if" a belief were true, with the aspiration that their hope-based faith may eventually, at some point in the future, evolve into a more solid belief? I'm interested in exploring whether this nuanced perspective has been discussed in philosophical or theological contexts, and how it might reshape our understanding of *faith* and its relationship to *hope*, *belief*, and *intellectual assent*. --- **Additional food for thought**: The application of [Pascal's wager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager) might be considered as an example of this, where an individual, faced with the uncertainty of the existence of a higher power, may choose to embrace a hopeful faith. In acknowledging the inability to decisively prove or disprove the divine, a fence-sitter on the question might opt for a faith-driven approach, investing in the potential benefits of belief (by acting "as if" the belief were true) while recognizing the inherent uncertainty. **Another related and important question** is whether we can choose to believe something based only (or mostly) on our desire for it to be true and in spite of our prior uncertainty. See [To what extent do we choose our beliefs?](https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/q/849/66156) --- **Definition of belief** Someone in the comments asked for a definition of *belief*. I will quote the first paragraph of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [article](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/) on belief: > Anglophone philosophers of mind generally use the term “belief” to refer to **the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true**. To believe something, in this sense, needn’t involve actively reflecting on it: Of the vast number of things ordinary adults believe, only a few can be at the fore of the mind at any single time. Nor does the term “belief”, in standard philosophical usage, imply any uncertainty or any extended reflection about the matter in question (as it sometimes does in ordinary English usage). Many of the things we believe, in the relevant sense, are quite mundane: that we have heads, that it’s the 21st century, that a coffee mug is on the desk. Forming beliefs is thus one of the most basic and important features of the mind, and the concept of belief plays a crucial role in both philosophy of mind and epistemology. The “mind-body problem”, for example, so central to philosophy of mind, is in part the question of whether and how a purely physical organism can have beliefs. Much of epistemology revolves around questions about when and how our beliefs are justified or qualify as knowledge. --- **Definition of hope** To clarify, I'm using hope in the following sense: > **Faith as hopeful affirmation** > > Now consider hope. James Muyskens (1979), Louis Pojman (1986a; 1986b; 1991), and William Lad Sessions (1994) have each proposed **accounts of faith that take hope as the central cognitive attitude**. Pojman claims that: >> If belief-in, or trusting, can be analyzed in terms of commitment to a course of action or a disposition to act, then it seems that we do not need to believe-that x exists in order to believe-in **or deeply hope in the existence of x**. (Pojman (1986b), 224) > > But what is hope and is this claim plausible? > > **Hope is a complex attitude that involves both evaluation and opinion or, at least, some relatively weak constraints on opinion**. If I hope for sunny weather on my sister’s wedding day, ordinarily this will involve both a desire that the weather be sunny and a belief, say, that this is at least possible. Notice that I can hope for sunny weather even if I believe that alternatives like rain or even snow are more likely. While there are differences of opinion concerning just how hope is to be analysed, quite generally, it seems that, **for any subject S and proposition p, to say that S hopes that p involves at least that (1) S desires that p and (2) S does not believe that p is impossible. Clearly hope is also an attitude one can have towards the existence of an object, entity, or person x (e.g. God) or the obtaining of some state of affairs. These conditions are arguably necessary minima for hope**. It would make little sense to say Dave hopes that his wound will heal quickly and not become infected but has no desire that this be the case or that he believes that this is impossible. But perhaps a religiously significant sense of hope requires a bit more. As stated, the first condition leaves the nature of the desires quite unspecified (e.g. are these emotions, considered value judgments, or what?); ‘impossible’ in the second condition might mean only logically incoherent. **A plausible case could be made, for example, that the second condition for religiously significant hope should be that p is a live option for S or that S believes that the probability that p is true is not so small as to be negligible or that S does not believe not-p**. > > [...] > > Although hopes can be misplaced, the minimal epistemic opinion involved in hope is a very weak one. Indeed, hope is most nakedly apparent in cases where something is hoped for despite its improbability. Moreover, and for this reason, the hope that p requires less, often far less, in the way of evidence to be rational than the belief in that same content p. It can be reasonable to hope that p in cases where belief with the same content would not be. Clearly, I can hope to win the lottery jackpot without believing that I will and indeed while believing that it is extremely unlikely that I will; that the odds of winning are about one in two hundred million. Lying blind and paralysed in a ditch, I might hope to see and walk again. Devastated by the kidnapping of her child, years later, a tearful mother might still hope to be reunited with her son. Enslaved, I might hope one day to be set free. **Similarly, one can hope that God exists without believing that God exists**. > > Source: [Authentic faith and acknowledged risk: dissolving the problem of faith and reason](https://philpapers.org/archive/MCKAFA.pdf) , DANIEL J. MCKAUGHAN. Religious Studies / Volume 49 / Issue 01 / March 2013, pp 101 ­- 124 DOI: 10.1017/S0034412512000200, Published online: 15 June 2012