Nonbelievers may cast faith as the antithesis of reason and insist that beliefs are only worth holding when they grant certainty; believers, such as
fideists and rationalists, may insist that faith is the acceptance of propositions constructed either from the Bible (as in the case of the former), or from reason (as in the case of the latter).
The book "Fideism", a part of which is devoted to the Kierkegaard's thoughts, also claims that Kierkegaard's thoughts can be found among the Islamic
fideists who believe that intellect cannot lead us to the certainty [2].
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
fideists reinforced this shift by stressing doctrines and propositions.
Greenblatt's Jefferson protects America from those zealous
fideists who would seize the instruments of power for their purposes of destroying science, imposing a sadistic moral system on everyone, persecuting those not of the faith, and destroying our well-being by making us fear death.
As Frederick Beiser shows at considerable length in his magisterial work, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte, skeptics and
fideists advanced two related objections: first, that the logical conclusion to Kantian idealism was solipsism, the view that there is nothing beyond the circle of consciousness; and, second, that the path of Spinozistic naturalism leads of necessity to atheism.
For liberal modernists, the villains responsible for "decline" are typically "obscurantist," "anti-rationalist" currents: Sufis, Ashcaris, or Hanbali
fideists. For fundamentalists (Salafis), the villains are typically the mystics, theologians, and philosophers who adulterated the "pure" Islam of the pious earliest generations with Neoplatonism, Greek logic, unbridled speculation, and popular syncretistic practices.
There are, after all,
fideists and anti-evidentialists, who define themselves in opposition to reason and to belief proportioned to evidence.
Fortunately, the Christian trenches are filled not only with
fideists but also with people who know by temperament, spiritual insight, and intellectual training the importance of patience and humor in the process of contesting any fixed agnostic Weltanschauung-as opposed to mere preaching or easy lambasting against the newest crowd of unbelievers coming to town (or campus).
The more so "because the Modernizers readily say that the encyclical Pascendi does not touch them, that they are neither immanentists, nor agnostics, not
fideists or symbolists, or evolutionists--as if the encyclical Pascendi did not also speak of criticism, sociology, autonomism, etc.--and that consequently they alone are true Catholics, modern without Modernism." (18) What they do represent is accommodation, equivocation, conciliation, capitulation, a trafficking with adversaries of the Church.
First, Catholics are not opposed to reason or enemies of the mind, rightly used; they aren't
fideists. 'Catholicism is not afraid of intelligence' (16), he writes.
There are religious
fideists of various faiths who hold that moral truths cannot be known apart from God's special revelation.
This is not the language of an alien group of
fideists. It is the language of Catholic thinkers and activists who are deeply involved in the essential needs of all human beings.